“I won’t. Fuck him,” Lyric said as she walked toward the back with her bags. “Anyways, I’m moving to Atlanta this weekend. I found a place,” she called out from around the corner.
I watched Camille’s shoulders drop about three inches when she heard that. Whatever was going on between them, Camille was relieved that Lyric wouldn’t be around much longer. Less people, less risk. I understood that math.
“Can you trust her?” I asked.
“With my life.”
“Aight well I’m gonna head out. I got an errand to run.”
“Don’t get your ass killed.”
“Of course not.”
I grabbed my keys and walked out into the Bethesda air and sat in the car Camille had let me borrow, a Toyota that nobody would look twice at. My phone had seven missed calls from Serenity over the last few days. Seven voicemails I’d listened to but hadn’t responded to. Each one softer than the last. Each one saying she missed me and wanted to talk and could I please just call her back.
I didn’t trust it.
This woman ghosted me for an entire month. Didn’t answer a single call, didn’t respond to a single text, just vanished while her brothers were dismantling everything I’d built. And now suddenly she wanted to see me? After her brother Quest had personally kicked down doors looking for me? After Bryce had been snatched and was probably singing like a canary in somebody’s basement?
Nah. Serenity didn’t just wake up missing me. Her brothers put her up to this. They wanted her to lure me out and I wasn’t falling for it. Not directly anyway.
But I still needed her. She was my lifeline back into the Banks family whether she knew it or not. And more than that, she was mine. I didn’t care how long she’d been gone or what her brothers had filled her head with during that month of silence. We had something and I wasn’t done with it.
I just wasn’t gonna walk into a trap to get it back.
That’s where Dante came in. Vivica told me to go see him and Dante turned out to be exactly what I expected. He was a weak man, that even in divorce did whatever his ex-wife told him to do. He gave me a new burner and some extra cash. And would help give me any intel on the Banks family that he could. Heworked for a rival liquor company and lived in a split-level in Bowie, Maryland with manicured hedges and a two-car garage and the energy of a man who’d spent his whole life being told what to do by women stronger than him.
“Call your daughter,” I told him. “Tell her you want to see her. Tell her you miss her and you want to reconnect. Tell her whatever you gotta tell her to get her through your front door.”
“She hasn’t spoken to me in months.” Dante said. “She’s not going to just show up because I call.”
“She will if you sound sincere enough. You owe her that much anyway.”
He looked at me with those tired eyes and I could see him calculating whether this was worth the risk. Whether his daughter’s safety mattered more than Vivica’s orders. In the end, Vivica won. She always did. Dante picked up the phone and called Serenity and told her he’d been thinking about her and he wanted to sit down and talk and maybe start mending what had been broken between them. His voice shook a little but it worked because the vulnerability made it sound real.
She said she’d come. Tomorrow afternoon.
I drove to Dante’s house the next day and told him to leave. Told him to go run errands, go to the store, go sit in a parking lot for two hours, I didn’t care. Just don’t be here when she arrives. He left without arguing because that’s what Dante did. He left rooms when stronger people told him to.
I sat in the living room with the lights low and waited. The house was still and warm. He’d done decently after the divorce. I suppose his job made good money.
I’d done a line in the car before I came in because I needed to be sharp. The coke was barely doing its job anymore but it was better than nothing.
I heard the car pull up around 2:30. The engine cut off. A door opened and closed. Footsteps on the walkway, then up the front steps. The door opened because I’d left it unlocked.
“Daddy?” Serenity’s voice echoed through the foyer. Soft, cautious, hopeful. “Daddy, you here?”
I stepped out from the hallway into the living room.
She saw me and every drop of color left her face. Her hand was still on the doorknob and her body locked up and I could see the exact moment her brain caught up to what her eyes were showing her. The hope on her face collapsed into something cold and terrified and she spun toward the door.
I was faster. I crossed the room in three steps and slammed the door shut with one hand over her shoulder and grabbed her by the throat with the other and pushed her back against the wall. Not hard enough to hurt her. Just hard enough to keep her still.
“You ain’t even gonna say hi?” I said.
“Let go of me.” Her voice was shaking but her eyes were sharp. Sharper than I remembered. Something had changed in her while she was gone. She looked clearer. Healthier. Like somebody had washed the fog off of her and what was underneath was stronger than what I’d left behind.
“You ghosted me, Serenity. A whole month. No call, no text, no nothing. Your brothers dragged you off somewhere and you just let them? You didn’t fight for us?”
