Lyric wasn’t just one of my old girlfriends.
She was a piece of my life from before the crown got heavy.
She knew Lil Ghost.
Not the version the blogs talked about.
Not the billionaire they put on covers.
Not the man who had a French mother.
She knew the boy who used to come out of Compton trap houses with blood on his hands and no guilt on his face. She knew me when Malik was still alive. When we were all too young and too angry and too stupid to believe death moved that close to our block.
When Malik died, she didn’t lose just a brother.
I lost the only friend, next to Zay, who knew me before I had to become something bigger.
And Lyric had looked at me after that like I was all she had left from that part of her life.
I never asked for that.
I still took it.
That was probably the first sin between us.
I made my way deeper into the room, shaking hands, accepting praise, taking a bourbon from a passing server. My eyes found her again without permission.
Still by the bar.
Still too still.
I took a sip of bourbon and turned away from her again.
Then a man stepped up beside her.
My whole body went cold before my face did.
My enemy,Marcus Vale.
Of all the men in Los Angeles, she chose him.
I stood still for half a second, long enough to confirm it wasn’t some polite gala interaction. He leaned in too close. She didn’t move away. His hand brushed the bare part of her back as he kissed her neck.
My nostrils flared once.
That was all.
Nobody around me noticed.
I made sure of it.
Marcus was everything I hated in a room like this. The type of nigga who thought that because he never got blood on his hands, it meant he was smarter than men like me.
He wasn’t.
He just hid differently.
He came up in the same city. Moved through some of the same doors. Built his name around the same time I did. But where I built mine with instinct, force, and presence, he built his with backroom numbers and quiet manipulation.
