It wasn’t. This bitch was inside orchestrating a war, and holding my brother captive.
I could make out the guard at the front gate from twenty yards out. He was doing that thing bad security did when they felt safe, shifting his weight, checking his phone, not really watching or paying attention. I moved to the gate panel and pressed the bypass tool against the magnetic lock. The mechanism disarmed without a sound and the gate drifted open two inches.
Marco was already moving as soon as we were able to slide through the gate.
He came up behind the front guard fast and clean, one arm around the throat, the blade across it in one pull. He’d slashed this man neck with no warning. and lowered the body to the ground before it could make noise. I didn’t think the nigga would use a hunting knife. He was cold blooded, but however he needed to get the job done. I understood. Simultaneously, I heard the suppressed double tap from around back that told me the other two were handled. Our men had laid them down, quietly.
Thirty seconds.
We regrouped at the front entrance without a word exchanged.
Marco looked at me and gave one nod.
We went inside.
The house swallowed us. The muthafucka was huge, and I had been in big ass houses before. Dark hallways, high ceilings, old furniture that smelled like wood polish and something underneath it that felt like grief. I mean, a whole family had been executed here.The condition of this once beautiful home, it now told us that it had been unoccupied for a while. It was dusty, and unkept now.
We moved through the house like we were part of the shadow, clearing each room as we went further into the house. The guard at the base of the stairs went down before he registered what was going on. He was dead before he hit the ground. One near the kitchen didn’t even turn around before he was gone. Two more in the hallway dropped in sequence, silenced shots that barely disturbed the air. If these were the people she’d hired as help and her security, she did a piss poor ass job. They just let us kill them.
The further back we pushed into the house, the quieter it got, and the more I felt it. That specific pressure in your chest when you know the moment is right in front of you. I wanted revenge so damn bad that I could taste it.
The last door at the end of the first floor hallway had light coming from underneath it. I knew, that was the room.
One guard posted outside it, standing straight, actually paying attention unlike the rest of them. As soon as he spotted me walking in his direction, he pulled for his gun off his waist. I gave him a crooked smile as I shook my head. I pulled the triggerbefore he could fully lift his gun. I reached for him before he could fall forward, caught part of his weight on the way down and eased him against the wall.
I didn’t have a second more to waste. I’d already let her slide for years. I pushed the door to the room open and stepped inside.
Cherish was sitting behind a massive desk that had to have belonged to her father’s. Dark wood, heavy, the kind of desk that was meant for an important man. She was watching the clock on the wall across from her, one hand resting flat on the desk surface. She didn’t startle when the door opened. Didn’t even look up immediately. Seeing her made my heart drop. She was still as beautiful as the last day I had seen her, but now, she had a tiredness behind her eyes. She needed rest, and if things went as I thought they would, I would soon give it to her.
“What took you so long,” she said, like she was commenting on traffic.
I clocked everything in the room in the first two seconds. Her hand moving from the desk surface toward her lap, Grim in the far corner tied to a chair with tape across his mouth, already trying to say something through it.
“Put your hands where I can see them,” I said, and my voice came out with something underneath it that I didn’t try to manage. “Right now. You move them one more inch toward your lap and I blow your brains across your father’s desk.” I barked, and meant every word.
Her hands came up slowly. She finally looked at me.
And she smiled.
“Do you think this is a game?” I came around the side of the desk, gun level with her face, and stopped on the other side so there was nothing between us but air and whatever was left of what we had been.
“I know it’s not a game,” she said, completely unbothered, her voice steady in a way that told me she had rehearsed this version of the conversation. “This is revenge. That’s what this has always been.” She tilted her head slightly. “Did you really think I was stupid, Griz? You showed up as the hired gun and never once told me it was your brother who destroyed my family and sent the hit on me. You laid down with me, touched me, let me believe you cared about me, and the whole time you were connected to the man who killed everyone I loved.” She let that sit for a second. “There’s no version of this situation where I was ever going to love you for real. You have that same cold blood running through your veins. I saw it from the beginning. I just needed to use you!”
The words landed but I kept my face still.
“You were a scapegoat,” she continued. “My exit strategy. Nothing more.” She laughed, short and real, like it was actually funny to her. “You used me too so let’s not pretend you’re standing here with clean hands. You were easier than I thought, and moving forward, you shouldn’t be so quick to believe anything that a person tells you just because it’s coming out of their mouth. That makes you an easy target.” She said without a care in the world. This bitch was cold. Hell, even cruel. She just didn’t know that she was using the last time she had left on earth to further piss me off.
“I just killed all your men. And I mean every single one of them. Nobody is coming to save you. Talking reckless is only digging a deeper hole for me to bury you in.” I said. Her words, her truth,that shit really just crushed my soul. She said everything that I already knew, but hearing it out her mouth is what made it sting.
She reached slowly for her phone on the desk and turned the screen toward me. She showed me an outgoing call. Timestamp reading two minutes ago and change.
“I called the police when I watched you kill the guards out front on my cameras,” she said. “They’re on their way right now. So the joke has never been on me. It’s always been on you.”
I looked at the phone. Then I looked at her.
And I felt something move across my face that wasn’t anger. It was colder than that.
I smiled. She called the police on me, thinking she was about to fuck me and my life over. She wasn’t at all who I thought she was before.
