CHAPTER 1
APRICOT
While my carsat idle at a red light, I snatched my tresses up into a high ponytail and secured my hair with the tie that I snatched off my wrist. My parents tried to keep it from me, but I knew when I was born, my father had an issue with my reddish-orange hair. No one in his family had hair that color, and as far as my mother knew, no one in her family did either. It took a paternity test and an explanation from the doctor that if both parents carried the recessive gene for red hair, they could pass the trait to their child and conceive a ginger baby even if neither of them had red hair, for my father to stop giving my mother the side eye. Not only was my hair reddish-orange, but it was super thick and curly. I was unique for sure, and most people referred to me as the girl with orange hair. Though my hair was odd indeed, it went perfectly with my cinnamon-brown complexion.
The fact that my mother looked at me and named me Apricot was funny in itself. Once my father learned the science behind my looks, he began to dote on me and brag about how different and special I was. I grew up spoiled rotten. The only child of a notorious kingpin. I hated being well-known because of who my father was. Too many people that I didn’t want to know knew me or knew of me rather. They loved to watch, judge, and assume.As I got older, I wanted to separate myself from my father’s lifestyle.
People could take one look at me and see that I didn’t look like either of my parents so when they saw me driving a Camry rather than a foreign car and saw me living in a regular house rather than some huge mansion it was whispered that my father found out I wasn’t his and cut me off financially.
No one could fathom that I simply didn’t desire to be a spoiled princess while running through my father’s drug money and having whatever I wanted at my disposal. I worked at a bank, and my side hustle consisted of braiding hair. With a college degree, I made decent money as a loan officer, but I was far from rich. My side hustle afforded me extra pocket money and was helping me to save for a home. The rent on my $1,100 a month home took a big portion of one of my paychecks and the other went to food, utilities, car note, insurance, cell phone, etc. With one simple request, I could have had the house of my dreams, but I chose not to go that route. The only reason that I ever second guessed my decision was because of my eight-year-old daughter, Kia, aka Kiwi.
Growing up, I had the best of everything. I went to private school. By the age of twelve, my passport donned an abundance of stamps. I had all the flyest clothes and shoes. I was that girl, and I chose to give it all up. I allowed my daughter to travel with my parents, and I let my father pay for her to go to private school. I often wondered if I was doing her a disservice by making her grow up close to the hood. But that was my motivation to work hard and stack my money, so I could get us to the suburbs on my own and not with my father’s money.
The fact that my father had requested to see me had me on edge. I loved my father. I just didn’t agree with the life that he lived. There was bloodshed. So much bloodshed. So many lives lost, so much beef, and violence. I wanted no parts of it. I’d seenhis friends and family members end up murdered or sent off to prison. I’d witnessed my father pacing, anxious, and worried that police would kick in our door. At a young age I had to learn to watch for jack boys and predators, and it was all too much. I made the decision when I left home for college that I didn’t want any parts of that life. When I got pregnant at nineteen, I vowed not to ever have my daughter in harm’s way. I would rather live a basic, simple life, than one filled with chaos, betrayal, and murder.
My father had friends turned foe. You name it, and he’d been through it. I saw my mother deal with my father staying away from home for days at a time, the constant traveling, keeping crazy hours. I could look in her eyes most days and tell she wasn’t happy, but she stayed. Yes, she loved my father for sure, but she also stayed for money and comfortability. I never wanted to be that attached to money that I remained where I was unhappy all for the love of a dollar. My father couldn’t understand why I chose to live how I did, and that caused some friction between us, but he was still my old man, and I loved him. He spoiled my daughter and sometimes, I had to put my foot down when he was being excessive. However, being that her father wasn’t in her life, I was glad that he was there for her. Kia was a grandaddy’s girl to the core.
Another reason that I was on edge was because my father asked me to meet him at a place that was unfamiliar to me. If he didn’t want to talk to me at his house or his office, that meant something was up, and I was nervous. You never knew what you might get with Devin Jennings. He was a powerful man that could be your best friend or your worst enemy. My brows snapped together the moment I pulled up in front of the desolate building. There was a light on inside the dirty white brick building with windows so filthy they appeared black. My father’s Rolls Royce looked extremely out of place parked on thebrown grass. Weeds surrounded the door of the building, and if my father was in a place like this, he was up to no good.
No matter what he had going on, he’d never willingly let harm come to me, so I wasn’t nervous for myself. Just anxious about what I could possibly be walking in on. The moment I got out of my car, the door opened, and my father’s colossal security guard, filled the space. He was dressed in all black wearing his infamous scowl. As I neared, he nodded his head at me and stepped aside. For as intimidating as Marlo looked, I’d known him most of my life and at times, he could be a teddy bear. When he was on the clock, however, no games were played. He refused to even relax his facial muscles let alone smile.
Curiously, I walked past him and ventured into the empty room. Slowly, I took small strides until I rounded a corner and stopped in my tracks with a gasp. My father stood in front of a man that I hadn’t seen in a few years. Lonzo. He used to be one of my father’s runners. Lonzo was seven years older than me and had been working for my father since I was about thirteen. One thing my father tried his best to do was to keep his business away from his personal life. But with the number of men he had underneath him and some of them filling positions that required them to work closely with my father, paths sometimes got crossed.
I had seen Lonzo enough times in passing to know that he worked for my father. And anyone that worked for my father had to know that I was off limits. But when Lonzo saw me out in the club one weekend, that didn’t stop him from buying me drinks. I was nineteen and not old enough to drink legally, but he kept them coming. He also passed me a blunt that tasted real funny and after I hit it twice, I decided I didn’t want anymore. But two tokes was all it took. I never found out what his blunt was laced with, but I ended up back at his place. The next day, I didn’t wake up until damn near three pm, and I could tell he’d beenpanicking. Lonzo couldn’t wake me up, and he didn’t know what to do.
When I woke up naked in his bed not remembering anything that happened and feeling the urge to throw up, I knew he’d done something to the weed, the drinks, or both. He took advantage of me and had I told my father, he would have been dead. He realized his mistake, and Lonzo begged me not to tell my father. He tried to say he thought I wanted it. The next day, I went to the STD clinic and got tested, and I also got a plan B pill but obviously, it was too late for the plan B to work because three weeks later, I missed my period. I was in denial until morning sickness started kicking my ass. There were many days that I tried to build the courage to get an abortion, but I never did and thus, Kia was born.
My father was disappointed in me when I got pregnant and when I refused to tell him who I was pregnant by, he probably assumed I’d been out on some hoe shit and didn’t know who the father was. Eventually, he let it go. But seeing Lonzo’s battered and bruised face while my father stood there breathing hard with balled fists, I was afraid to ask what was going on. When my dad turned to look over his shoulder and locked eyes with me, the darkness flickering in his orbs was terrifying.
“This fuck nigga is Kiwi’s father?” he asked me.
My breath hitched in my throat. “W-what?” I didn’t know how he knew. My gaze shifted over to Lonzo and the fear in his tear-filled eyes was intense.
“Yeah, that’s why you wouldn’t tell me who he was.” My father flicked the tip of his nose. “I noticed that there were times you came around and both of you acted all tense and funny acting and shit. I almost thought something was going on, but I said nah, he knows the fuck better than to touch mine. I saw him earlier, staring at Kiwi’s picture on my desk. Staring too muhfuckin’ hard, and when I looked at him and then her picture,man,” my father shook his head in disbelief. “She’s his fuckin’ twin. So, I had to ask him. I had to. And when the nigga went pale as if he’d seen a ghost, I knew what it was. But I need to hear the story from you.”
This. This was what I never wanted to be a part of. Lonzo purposely drugged and took advantage of me, but I still didn’t want him to die. One thing about my father though was if he asked you a question, nine times out of ten, he already knew the answer. No matter what I said, Lonzo’s fate was already sealed. With a shaky voice I recanted the details of what happened the night that Kiwi was conceived. And then I screamed at the top of my lungs as my father grabbed a machete and beheaded Kiwi’s father right in front of me.
“You have to stop all that screaming,” Marlo gently grabbed me and spoke in a calm tone. “Come on. Let me walk you out to your car.”
On wobbly legs I ambled to my vehicle trying my best not to throw up.
“Damn about time you woke up. Shit, I was getting worried.”
When I came to, my head was pounding. My mouth was super dry, and I felt the urge to throw up. With a frown, I looked around the room wondering where the hell I was. When I looked over at Lonzo staring at me with a panicked expression on his face, I knew I was at his house. My heart began to race as I looked down at my exposed legs. The aching in my vagina kicked in, and my head whipped up.
“What did you do to me?” my voice was shaky.
“No, no. Apricot, you wanted it. You told me you wanted it.”
Tears spilled over my eyelids as I remembered the day that I came to the realization that Lonzo had raped me. I hated him for what he did, but I never uttered a word to anyone except my cousin, Shereeka. The remembrance of his head hitting thefloor and rolling like a bowling ball made my stomach quake. I’d never be able to scrub what I’d witnessed from my mind. I knew it would haunt me for the rest of my life, but Devin didn’t care. He didn’t care what kind of trauma or scars he left a person with. All he knew was money, power, and respect. The perils of being a kingpin’s daughter.
I didn’t like the fact that I had to pay money for a suite when I only did hair part-time but because of who my father was, I refused to do hair at my home. People simply couldn’t be trusted, and I didn’t need anyone telling their boyfriends, brothers, cousins, etc. where the daughter of Devin Jennings lived. Even if I didn’t live all flashy, I didn’t doubt that someone would still run up in my house to see what they could get their hands on. Since I had to pay suite rent, I couldn’t undercharge myself too much, but I also had to compete with the other braiders in the area. I was good at what I did, so my clients didn’t mind paying $350 for small knotless braids. Especially when there were other braiders charging $600 for the same style. None of my prices were over $400 or under $150. So, I could typically braid four to six heads a week and see enough money to make a difference in my life. Braiding hair when I wasn’t working at the bank often cut into my time with Kiwi, and I hated that shit. Those were the times that I second guessed myself the most. If I just took my father’s money, I could work less and spend more time with my baby. But I also wanted her to see that despite how much money her grandfather had, her mother still worked hard and made a way for us.
Kiwi was out of school on break, so Nana, my father’s mother had taken Kiwi with her to visit her sister in MyrtleBeach, South Carolina which was two hours away from where we lived in Diamond Cove, North Carolina. Since my baby was gone, I was doing something I rarely did. I was braiding hair on a weeknight. The teen sitting in my chair, played on her high school’s basketball team, and she just wanted some straight back cornrows. That didn’t take me long at all, but I had gone to the shop right after getting off from the bank, so I was tired.
There was no way I was cooking, so I stopped and got something to eat on my way home. Glancing at the clock on my dashboard, I sighed when I realized that I had less than three hours before my bedtime, so I could wake up and do my workday all over again. The decision that I made not to freely spend my father’s blood money wasn’t an easy one. At least twice a week I thought about how much easier life would be if I let my father buy me a house and pay off my car. Then, I could quit my job at the bank, do hair full-time, and create my own schedule so I could spend more time with my child.
But as soon as the thought entered my mind, events of the past would begin to play in my mind like a movie. The most recent memory was of him beheading Lonzo. It had only been three days since my father murdered Kiwi’s father. Even though he wasn’t in my child’s life and I never planned on him being, the act that I witnessed still made me feel some kind of way. I couldn’t even begin to fathom how many people my father may have murdered during his reign in the streets. To take lives so callously and still walk around every day as normal and nonchalant as he did was scary. My father was a literal psychopath. After he chopped Lonzo’s head off, he probably went home and had dinner with my mother like nothing had happened.
