I hung up and stood there in the silence of the California morning.
Zainab was upstairs sleeping, our daughter growing inside her, innocent to all the bullshit swirling around us. Yusef was doing his schoolwork, still trapped in whatever hell Rashid had put him through. And here I was, the man who was supposed to protect them both, finding out that the biggest threat to my family wasn’t some street nigga or some old enemy.
It was my own blood.
Vivica Banks was about to learn a very important lesson.
You don’t come for the people I love and expect to walk away clean.
I learned from the best how to destroy a person from the inside out. How to be patient. How to find their weaknesses and exploit them until there was nothing left.
Rashid taught me that.
And now I was about to use everything he taught me against the woman who gave me life.
Poetic, when you think about it.
I went back to the kitchen and started cleaning up the breakfast dishes. Normal shit. Domestic shit. The kind of thing a family man does.
But in my mind, I was already planning.
Vivica’s downfall wouldn’t be quick. It wouldn’t be messy. It would be slow and methodical and absolutely devastating.
By the time I was done with her, she wouldn’t just lose her job.
She’d lose everything.
And she’d know exactly who took it from her.
21
FARAH
I couldn’t stop touching it.
My fingers traced the scarred hole where my ear used to be. The wound had healed—technically. No more bandages. No more bleeding. Just smooth, puckered skin where something used to exist. A permanent reminder of what Prime Banks had taken from me.
I couldn’t wear my hair up anymore. Couldn’t pull it back in the sleek ponytails I used to love. Every hairstyle now was strategic—designed to hide the deformity, to make me look normal from the right angles. But I knew the truth. Every time I caught my reflection, I saw it.
The absence.
The asymmetry.
The monster I’d become.
I sat on my bed in my father’s Virginia compound, curtains drawn, lights off. This room used to feel like a sanctuary. Now it felt like a tomb. I had quit my job as an event planner and my business as an interior decorator had stalled. I rarely left.
Prime had hurt me. He let his cousin rape me.
The worst part? I still loved him.
How sick was that? The man mutilated me. Cut off my ear like I was some enemy combatant in a war I didn’t even know I was fighting. And somewhere deep in my twisted heart, I still wanted him. Still remembered what it felt like when he used to look at me like I mattered.
Before her.
Zainab.
That bitch had ruined everything. Showed up out of nowhere with her ghetto-ass cinnamon rolls and her fake identity and her sob story, and suddenly I didn’t exist anymore. Suddenly I was just the annoying event planner who couldn’t take a hint. Suddenly I was the one getting my ear sliced off while she got the ring, the baby, and the happily ever after.
