“And you ran. You did that shit then left us to clean it up and process it without you. That’s some pussy ass shit. You only thought about yourself that night! "Grim said. This nigga had to be playing. How the fuck could that be possible when I did that shit for him? I realized years ago that I wasn’t going to get a thank you. Ever.
“I ran because the second it happened you started screaming at me like I was the one who had done something wrong. Momma came in hysterical and Savage was pulling up outside and I was seventeen years old standing there with a smoking gun over our father’s body and not one person in that room was going to stand with me.” My voice didn’t break but I had to work to keep it even. “What was I supposed to do. Tell me. What was I supposed to do.”
Grim looked away. He was still angry and the flexing of his jaw told me that. He was more so mad because I left not because of what I had done. I’m just now understanding that sitting here with him now.
“I left because I thought my life was over if I stayed. I thought every single one of you would turn on me. And based on what happened in that room in the first thirty seconds, I wasn’t wrong.” I looked at the side of his face. “I saved your life and you let me run that night. Then you found me years later and used that night as leverage over my head like I had done somethingto be ashamed of. Like protecting you was something you could hold against me. Nigga, that’s fucked up.”
“You didn’t give me a chance to process the shit! Nigga, all we knew was what Mayhem had taught us. Yeah, he was fucked up, but he was present. Maybe I was brainwashed by him. And mad that you had done that, because my mind hadn’t processed any of my fucking trauma. You used to talk that brother shit, but when it came down to it, you said fuck us and you moved on with your life.”
“You had a chance,” I said. “Right there in that room you had a chance. You could have said something. Anything. You said nothing and I ran and you spent years hunting me down not to thank me but to blackmail me. I don’t know if you understand this, but if it wasn’t for me, you would have been dead that night. Regardless of if Mayhem was present or not, the shit that he did to us was not right. I would have rather his ass not been present at all.”
Grim was quiet for a long time after that. Long enough that I just let it sit and looked back out the windshield and waited.
When he finally spoke his voice was different. Lower. Something had come out of it that had been holding everything rigid before.
“I didn’t know how to process it,” he said. “I was sitting there and Pops was just— gone. He was still my father. Even with everything he did. He was still my father and you took him and then you were gone too and I didn’t know what to do with any of it.”
“So you made me pay for it.”
He didn’t deny it.
“I needed you to feel what I felt,” he said. “Losing something you couldn’t get back. I felt like I lost my brother that night too. I would have protected you, like I did anyway. Nobody even knows or cares that the nigga is dead til this day because I handled that for you! You my little brother man. I was angry because you didn’t even give a nigga a chance to show you that I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you. And you weren’t the only person who had to pay. I recked havoc on everything that I felt like threatened my livelihood. Momma even had to pay for the role she played in shit. She was really the start of our fucked up childhood, and that’s why I never cared after I laced her.” Grim said, admitting that he was the reason my mom had lost her mind. I didn’t know what to say to that. Was I angry, did I care at all? She was even more fucked up than my father was.
I looked at him then. Really looked at him, at his swollen face and his tired eyes and the version of my brother that was sitting in this car right now stripped of every layer he usually kept between himself and the world. And I felt something I hadn’t expected to feel sitting here. Not forgiveness, not yet, maybe not ever fully. But something adjacent to it. Something that recognized the damage in him as the same damage that had been done to both of us by the same man in the same house and had just come out differently.
“I wanted a brother,” I said quietly. “That’s all I ever wanted from you. Not loyalty to the business, not all the other shit. Just a brother. And you were too busy being what Pops wanted you to be. You couldn’t ever just be Grim.”
That hit him. I watched it land.
Neither one of us said anything for a while after that.
Then I straightened up in my seat. Because this conversation had a second half and it was less emotional and more direct andhe needed to hear it clearly. I now understood that my brothers felt abandoned by me. But that was not the case, I was just a scared kid. They hated me after that, so I felt like the only choice I had was to keep my distance. If I could go back, I damn sure would’ve done things differently on my end when it came to them. At a time where we needed one another, I went and started another life. Hell no, I didn’t regret wanting better for myself, but I did regret leaving them like that.
“Here’s where we are,” I said. “You’re alive because I chose to come get you. I didn’t have to. You blackmailed me, caused Savage to come at me, you have been nothing but a liability and a threat. I went into that house anyway because you are my blood and I am not built to leave my blood in a hole regardless of what they’ve done to me. But I need you to understand something.”
I turned and looked at him straight.
“This is the only pass you will ever get from me. You go back out there and you run your business and you stay out of mine. You don’t come at me sideways, you don’t send anybody at my people, you don’t so much as breathe in the direction of my people and what I’m building. We are not enemies and we are not partners. We are brothers who have an understanding. The moment you violate that understanding I will not send a team. I will come myself. And you know what I’m capable of better than anybody. I’m not that kid you used to beat up. I will kill you and sleep like nothing happened. You may be ruthless, but I’m worse than the worse nightmare you’ve ever had.
Grim held my eye.
“You talk big shit lil brother, but I can agree that I don’t want you as my enemy, so you have my word,” he said.
I nodded once. Then I reached across him and pushed his door open.
He looked at me.
“Get out my shit. You can walk,” I said.
“Griz we are in the middle of—”
“I know where we are. You got two feet and a direction. Find your way back.” I looked at him. “Consider it a head start on salvation.”
He looked at me for another second, then got out. I watched him in the rearview as I pulled off, standing on the side of that empty road in the dark, and I felt something release in my chest that had been locked up for so long I had forgotten it was there.
It wasn’t over between us. I wasn’t naive enough to believe one conversation in a parked car fixed what years had broken. But it was a start. Or it was as close to a start as two men like us were capable of.
I had been driving for about twenty minutes when my phone rang off an unknown number.
