“I’m not gonna hurt her.”
“I’m serious, Quest. She ain’t Lyric. She ain’t Camille. You can’t run your poly playboy shit with her and then bounce when it gets real. She won’t recover from that.” He paused. “And honestly? You don’t want to find out what she does to men who cross her.”
Justice snorted. “Yeah she got that…—”
“…Cage? Yeah.” Prime cut his eyes at me. “Don’t end up in a cage, bro.”
“I’m not worried about a cage.”
“You should be. That woman is creative with her anger.”
“Aight, enough.” I held up my hands. “I hear you. She don’t gotta worry about me. Now can we focus on why we’re actually here before Serenity shows up?”
The room shifted. The lightness left and the weight of what we were about to do settled over the table. We’d done this before—made decisions about Serenity’s life without her permission. Julius and the finger. The fallout from that had pushed her away from us for months and into the arms of a man who was ten times worse than the one we’d tried to protect her from.
“Mehar told me about the bruises,” I said. “And the drugs. And Mega blowing up her phone every thirty seconds tracking her location. She saw it at dinner and confronted Serenity about it and Serenity stormed out.”
Prime’s jaw went tight. Justice looked at the table.
“I should’ve handled this months ago,” Prime said quietly. “I knew something was off but she kept pushing me away and I let her.”
“We all let her,” Justice said. “Because the last time we didn’t let her, she stopped talking to us for half a year.”
“Well this time is different,” I said. “This time a man is putting his hands on our sister and feeding her cocaine. So we’re not asking permission. We’re not having a conversation. We’re handling it.”
“What’s the plan?” Prime asked.
“She thinks something’s wrong with Rita. She’s on her way here now. When she walks in, we talk to her. We tell her what we know. We give her the option to go to rehab voluntarily.”
“And if she says no?” Justice asked.
“She’s going anyway.”
The room was quiet. Rita sipped her tea and didn’t say a word because Rita had already given her blessing when I’d called her this morning. She’d said “Do what you have to do. Just bring her back to me whole.”
Twenty minutes later we heard tires screech into the driveway. A car door slammed. Then footsteps—fast, frantic, damn near running—up the front walkway and through the door.
“GRANDMA?!” Serenity burst into the kitchen with tears already on her face and panic in her eyes and she looked at Rita sitting at the table sipping tea and alive and her whole body sagged with relief. “Oh thank God. Oh my God, I thought—Quest said it was important and I thought something happened to you?—”
“I’m fine, baby,” Rita said calmly. “Sit down.”
Serenity looked at Rita. Then at me. Then at Prime. Then at Justice. Three brothers sitting at a kitchen table with serious faces and their grandmother at the head. The relief on her face dissolved into something else as the realization hit.
“No.” She took a step back. “No, you’re not doing this.”
“Sit down, Ren,” I said.
“This is an intervention? Are you serious right now? You tricked me into coming here by making me think Grandma was—” She pointed at me, hand shaking. “That’s fucked up, Quest. That is so fucked up.”
“What’s fucked up is the bruise under your right eye,” Prime said. His voice was low and steady and it cut through her anger like a blade. “What’s fucked up is the bruises on your neck that you’re hiding under that scarf. What’s fucked up is that you’re snorting coke with a man who beats you and you’re calling it love.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about?—”
“Take the scarf off,” Justice said.
“What?”
“Take the scarf off, Serenity. Right now. Show us your neck.”
