I smiled. A real smile this time.
Dame CoCo. That was me. My alter ego. My new business. The thing I stumbled into after the surgery when I was lying in bed, angry at the world, scrolling the internet at 3 AM trying to figure out who I was now.
Turns out there were a LOT of powerful men in Washington, DC who wanted to be humiliated, controlled, and disciplined by a beautiful woman. Lawyers. Lobbyists. Politicians. Men who spent their whole lives dominating boardrooms and courtrooms, who craved the exact opposite behind closed doors.
And me? A woman who’d spent her whole life being dominated by men? Who’d been beaten by her husband, controlled by her father, manipulated by her lover?
I was the perfect person to flip that script.
I’d found my calling. Ahmad taught me what pain felt like. Thad taught me what betrayal felt like. And now I was using every lesson those men gave me to take money from men just like them.
The irony was delicious.
I confirmed the booking. Checked my schedule. I had a session tonight and another one tomorrow morning. Business was good. Business was VERY good.
I pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward my apartment, the DC skyline catching the last of the afternoon light.
Mehar Ali. Good girl. Obedient daughter. Beaten wife. Broken woman.
She was dead.
Dame CoCo drove a black Audi, owned a cage with a man inside it, and was booked solid through the end of the month.
And she was just getting started.
51
ZAINAB
“Prime, I have to get dressed.”
“Then get dressed.”
“I can’t get dressed with your hands on my ass.”
“That’s a you problem.” He squeezed. Both hands. Like he was testing fruit at the grocery store. “I’m just standing here.”
I swatted him away and turned back to the mirror, holding up the emerald wrap dress Mehar picked out for me. Essence Magazine. ESSENCE. The same magazine I used to steal from the store as a teenager, folding the pages with the prettiest Black women and hiding them under my mattress like contraband. And now they wanted ME on their pages.
The feature was about my story. All of it. The wrongful arrest. The five years living under my dead sister’s name. The nightmare of giving birth to twins in a jail cell with no medical help. And how I turned me and my sister’s cinnamon roll recipe and a dream into Sweet Zin, a commercial baking operation now supplying Zinnamon Rolls to grocery stores and specialty shops in twenty-three states.
Twenty-three states. Sometimes I said it out loud just to make sure it was real.
Dubz’s confession had been verified, corroborated, and accepted by the DA’s office. All charges against me, formally and permanently dropped. No conditions. No probation. No ankle monitor. Nothing. I was free. Actually, legally, completely free.
I cried for two hours. Prime held me for all of it.
I wrote LaLa and told her to call me. We cried together on the phone for a few minutes. I told her about the trust fund Prime and I set up for her. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, waiting for her when she got out in eighteen months. She delivered my babies, helping them make it into the world safely. There wasn’t enough money in the world to repay that. But we were damn sure gonna try.
She said, “Mami, you don’t owe me nothing.”
I said, “I owe you everything.”
She said, “Just name one of your cinnamon rolls after me. LaLa’s Dulce de Leche Roll.”
I laughed so hard I almost woke the twins.
It’s already on the menu.
