She stood there with her hand on the Hermes silk, fingers trembling, eyes darting between the three of us. Rita was still and silent at the head of the table, her cloudy eyes pointed in Serenity’s direction, seeing more than any of us even without her sight.
“I’m not taking off my scarf.”
“Then I’ll take it off for you,” Prime said, standing up.
“Don’t touch me!” She backed into the counter, arms crossed over her chest. “This is exactly what you always do! You don’t ask, you don’t listen, you just decide what’s best for me and force it! I’m a grown woman!”
“You’re a grown woman with finger marks on her throat,” I said. “And a coke habit. And a boyfriend who works for a criminal organization. So yeah, Ren. We’re deciding. Because your decisions are gonna get you killed.”
That landed. I saw it hit her like a physical thing, the flinch, the way her eyes filled, the way her shoulders dropped from defensive to defeated in the span of a breath.”We have a bed waiting for you at a facility in Virginia,” I continued. “Private. Discreet. Thirty-day program. You go today. Right now.”
“I’m not going to rehab. Y’all are out of your fuckin’ minds.” She grabbed her keys off the counter and headed for the door. “I’m leaving.”
I looked at Prime. He nodded.
Justice was already at the door before she got there, blocking it with his body and his arms crossed. She tried to push past him and he didn’t move. She hit his chest with both hands and he still didn’t move.
“Get out of my way, Justice!”
“I can’t do that, sis.”
She spun around toward the back door and Prime was there. She was boxed in, three brothers and a kitchen and nowhere to go. She looked at Rita, who was still sitting at the table with her tea, her cloudy eyes pointed straight ahead.
“Grandma, tell them to stop! Tell them they can’t do this to me!”
Rita sipped her tea. “Baby, I told them to do it.”
Serenity’s face collapsed. The last person she thought would be on her side had just confirmed she was alone in this room.She started crying deep, broken tears that came from a place you can’t fake.
“Please don’t do this,” she whispered. “Please.”
“I’m sorry, Ren.” I walked toward her and she swung on me. Caught me in the chest with a fist that had more grief than force behind it. I let her hit me twice more because she needed to and because I could take it. Then I scooped her up. She kicked and screamed and clawed at my arms and called me every name in the book and a few that hadn’t been invented yet.
“PRIME! JUSTICE! SOMEBODY HELP ME! HE CAN’T DO THIS! GET OFF ME!”
Prime opened the front door. Justice popped the trunk of the Maybach. I carried my baby sister down the front steps of our grandmother’s house while she thrashed and screamed and I put her in the trunk as gently as I could while she fought me with everything she had.
“I HATE YOU! I HATE ALL OF YOU!”
“I know.” I looked at her in the trunk, mascara running, scarf pulled loose, the bruises on her neck visible now for all of us to see. Dark marks in the shape of fingers that made Prime turn away and Justice’s fists clench at his sides.
I closed the trunk.
Prime went home to his family, but Justice followed me in his Range Rover. And I drove to Virginia with my sister screaming and banging in the trunk and my hands steady on the steering wheel because somebody in this family had to be steady and it was always going to be me.
By the time we got to the facility, which was a private estate tucked into the Virginia countryside with manicured grounds and a main house that looked more like a hotel than a treatment center, the trunk had gone quiet. I didn’t know if she’d cried herself out or fallen asleep or was just lying there in the darkhating me. Any of those was fine. She was alive and she was here and that was all that mattered.
I opened the trunk. She looked up at me with swollen eyes and a face that had gone from furious to empty somewhere along I-66. The bruises on her neck were dark against her skin in the afternoon sunlight and I had to look away for a second because the rage that went through me was not productive right now.
“We’re here,” I said. “Get out.”
She climbed out slowly and looked at the building and the grounds and the woman in scrubs waiting at the entrance with a clipboard.
“Here are your options,” I said. “Option one: you stay here for thirty days. You get clean. You break up with Mega. And when you come out, you come home to your family. Option two: you walk away right now and I put a bullet in Mega’s head before the sun comes up tomorrow. That’s not a threat. That’s a schedule.”
“You can’t just?—”
“Pick one, Serenity.”
