The room reacted with gasps and murmurs. Someone said, “Mm-hmm!” like they’d been waiting on that.
My blood ran cold.
“What happens when we allow people who made their fortunes off drugs in our neighborhoods, off bodies in ourstreets, to come back with shovels promising they are legit? We are supposed to forget the funerals because they hired an architect?!”
“Hell no!” somebody shouted.
“No!” others echoed.
“I am calling for a temporary moratorium on this project!” Kai shouted. “There will be no permits or shovels in the ground until we have a full, transparent review of who is behind this deal, where the money is coming from, and how this community will actually benefit. Not just ten years from now, but right damn now!”
Claps turned into stomps. Some folks in the front row stood and started a chant. “NO CARTEL CONDOS! NO CARTEL CONDOS!”
My heart pounded in my ears. We had done everything right on paper. The ownership entity on that building wasn’t tied directly to their last name. That was the whole point: to build something real without this exact bullshit.
“How the fuck they know?” Saint asked under his breath.
I didn’t answer because I had no clue. I ran through the list in my head of the select few in-house who knew the whole structure. Someone had talked, or someone had dug deeper than I thought they could.
Kai raised his hands like he was calming the room. “Now, I’m not here to point fingers without proof. I’m not saying I know every detail.” A slick, practiced smile spread across his face. “I’m just saying when there’s smoke, we have a right to ask where the fire is coming from.” Then he finally looked directly at us.
The moderator took the mic back and opened the floor for comments. People lined up at the side aisle. One after another, they spoke about rising rent, about fear of being pushed out, about not trusting “mysterious investors.”
A younger dude stood up near the aisle. He had a phone in his hand, already recording us. Before I could fully process it, he walked straight down the aisle toward the back of the room.
Legend shifted so he was slightly in front of me, but none of us moved away. Running would look like guilt, and posturing would look like threat. We needed neither.
The dude stopped a few feet from us with his camera pointed right at our faces.
“Look who in here,” he spat loudly. “The Cartier’s don’ showed their faces!”
Heads turned, and chairs squeaked.
He stepped closer, with his phone damn near touching my nose.
“Who’s really paying for this, huh?!” he demanded. “Who’s funding these condos? Your drug money?!” He shifted the camera from me to Legend to Icon to Saint and back. “Your rich asses are padding your pockets while our people are about to get pushed out. Answer me!”
Somebody had fed them just enough truth to cause some potentially dangerous problems.
That was all it took to turn my biggest project into a loaded gun pointed at us.
RHYTHM BROOKS
I was sitting three rows from the back when the meeting turned into a movie.
A protester had his phone up in the faces of the men standing along the back wall. “Your rich asses are padding your pockets while our people are about to get pushed out. Answer me!”
These meetings were usually boring. I did not expect to be this entertained.
I also did not expect the men to be so fucking fine. They were tall, with builds that looked like they could throw a BBW around a room. They looked like trouble wrapped in sex appeal. They looked like potential danger, like a storm that is choosing to be polite.
My eyes landed on one of them and stayed there. Though he was wearing glasses, he wasn’t awkward or the schoolboy type. The frames made him look expensive and sophisticated, like he knew how to ruin somebody’s life with words and his dick. The tattoos creeping from under his clothes gave him an edge that didn’t match the clean, composed way he carried himself.
The contrast was sexy as hell.
I tried to focus on the drama that was going down, but my eyes kept sliding back to the man with the glasses. He was keeping his composure while the camera hovered inches from him.
It made him even sexier.
