It wasn’t fair.
I’d known Prime for years. YEARS. I’d been patient. I’d been available. I’d made myself into exactly what I thought he wanted. And for what? To be discarded like trash the moment some hood rat batted her eyelashes at him?
The rage was always there now. Simmering under my skin. Mixing with the grief and the shame and the phantom pain where my ear used to be. Some days it was all I could do not to scream until my throat bled.
Today was one of those days.
I pulled my knees to my chest and rocked. Back and forth. Back and forth. Like a child trying to self-soothe. The therapist my father hired said I had PTSD. Said I needed to process my trauma in healthy ways.
Fuck healthy.
I wanted revenge.
I wanted Prime to feel what I felt. The helplessness. The humiliation. The knowledge that someone you trusted could destroy you without a second thought. I wanted him to lose everything—his precious Zainab, his unborn baby, his brothers,his freedom. I wanted to burn his whole world down and dance in the ashes.
But I was stuck in this room. Hiding. Healing. Waiting for my father to figure out a plan that was never going to come because he was too busy dying.
A crash from downstairs made me jump.
Loud. Violent. The sound of something heavy hitting the floor.
“Baba?”
I was on my feet before I could think, my body moving on autopilot toward the door. My father was sick—everyone knew that now. The cancer that had been eating him alive for months had finally won. He could barely walk most days. Could barely keep food down. The doctors said it was only a matter of time.
Another crash.
I ran.
Down the hallway. Down the stairs. My bare feet slapping against the hardwood floors as I followed the sounds to my father’s study.
The door was open.
I stopped in the doorway, my breath catching in my throat.
The room was destroyed. One of the medical monitors had been knocked over, wires and tubes tangled across the floor. A lamp was shattered. Papers were scattered everywhere. And in the middle of it all, my father was on his knees, his fist bloody from punching something—the wall, the desk, I couldn’t tell.
“Baba!” I rushed to him, dropping down beside him, my hands fluttering over his frail body. “What happened? Are you okay? Should I call the nurse?”
“He’s dead.”
The words came out like gravel. Like broken glass scraping against concrete.
“Who? Who’s dead?”
My father looked at me. And for the first time in my life, I saw something I’d never seen in his eyes.
Defeat.
“Kasim.” His voice cracked. “They found him in his cell. They got to him.”
The world tilted.
Kasim. The one who was supposed to get out of that Panamanian prison and rebuild everything our family had lost. The one who was supposed to avenge us.
“No.” The word came out as a whisper. “No, that’s not—how? How is that possible?”
“Prentice.” My father spat the name like poison. “It had to be. He has connections everywhere. He reached into a prison in another country and killed my son like it was nothing.”
