I laughed because she was right. Serenity wasn’t just the baby sister anymore. She was a woman who had survived abuse, kidnapping, forced drug use, and came out the other side with a baby in her belly and a body count. If anybody understood why this mattered, it was her.
“What about you, Zai?” I asked.
Zainab was quiet for a second. “Y’all are crazy.” She laughed but it was the nervous laugh of a woman who loved her sisters enough to hear them out but wasn’t built for what they were describing. “I support you. A thousand percent. The shelter, the resources, the lawyers, all of it. I’ll bake for your fundraisers and help with the operational side. But the other stuff…” She shook her head. “That’s y’all’s department. I got twins and a bakery and a husband who would lose his mind if he found out I was out here catching bodies.”
“Prime would probably want to join,” Serenity said.
“Which is exactly why he can’t know,” Zainab said firmly, and we all laughed because she was absolutely right about that.
We teased Zainab for being the soft one but honestly I was glad she was who she was. Every operation needs somebody who holds the light while the rest of us work in the dark. Zainab was that light. She always had been. After everything she’d been through with Zahara and Thad and the arrest and being separated from her kids, she still chose softness. That wasn’t weakness. That was a choice that took more strength than anything Serenity or I would ever do with a gun.
“So what’s next for you, Ren?” I asked as the massage therapists came in and started working on our shoulders.
“I told Quest I’m coming back to work. He needs me on the books. I know those accounts better than anyone and with the casino reopening there’s a lot to manage. I’m going to work until I can’t anymore and then I’ll take my leave and have this baby and figure out the rest from there.”
“Look at us,” Zainab said. “A baker, a vigilante, and an accountant.”
We laughed and the massage therapists probably thought we were insane because we were cracking up face-down on tables while they tried to work knots out of our backs. But that was us. Three women who had survived things that should’ve destroyed them, lying on spa tables in plush robes, planning a future that was equal parts philanthropy and violence. The world wasn’t ready for what we were about to build.
But it needed it. Badly.
39
Vivica
Every single one of them had turned their backs on me. Every last one. The children I birthed, raised, sacrificed for, bled for. The children who would have nothing if it weren’t for me and the choices I made to build the life they inherited. Ungrateful. All of them.
Quest likes to talk about how cold I was. How I never showed affection. How I manipulated him and pushed him away. But if I hadn’t been hard on that boy, he would’ve been soft. He would’ve been one of those weak men who inherits a company and runs it into the ground because nobody ever taught him how to survive. I made him tough. I made him strategic. I made him ruthless. And when his father’s debts were drowning Banks Reserve, who do you think pushed the business permits through city council so the liquor licenses could expand? Who do you think made the phone calls to get the distribution contracts approved? Me. From the mayor’s office. Using my power to build his empire while he was still a teenager learning how to tie a Windsor knot.
And I helped get Alexander killed. I’ll own that. The man was cheating on me with everything that moved and I was tired of it.Had I not removed him from the equation, Quest would never have taken over the company. He would’ve spent his twenties watching his father drink away the profits and chase secretaries while the debt piled up. I gave Quest the throne by clearing the man who was sitting on it. He should be thanking me.
Then there’s Prime. My second-born. The one who loves to tell people I threw him away. I sent him to Rashid because Rashid could teach him things I couldn’t. How to fight. How to kill. How to survive in a world that eats soft men alive. Was it hard? Yes. Did it break something in him? Probably. But look at what he became. A weapon. A protector. A man that nobody in their right mind would cross. I did that. I made sure that he wasn’t a pussy.
And Justice. My quiet one. The one who watched everything and said nothing and buried his feelings so deep that even I couldn’t find them. I withheld my love from that boy on purpose. Made it so the only way he could earn my attention was through excellence. Straight As weren’t enough. Top of his class wasn’t enough. He had to be extraordinary because ordinary was unacceptable in my house. He got into Wharton, the best business school in the country, and I skipped his graduation. I did that deliberately. Because he needed to understand that achievement is expected, not celebrated. You don’t get a trophy for doing what you’re supposed to do.
My mother taught me that. When I would come home with good grades she’d look at my report card and set it on the table without smiling and say “well, that’s what you’re supposed to do. It ain’t like you have anything else to do around here but go to school. I gotta work twelve-hour days at the dry cleaners. You don’t congratulate me when I put dinner on the table.”
And she was right. Those were our obligations. My mother couldn’t read. My father worked construction until his back gave out and then he worked construction some more becausethat’s what men with no education and three children did. They worked until their bodies quit and then they died. Both of them were gone before they turned sixty. Never met their grandchildren. Never saw me become mayor. Never saw the house I bought or the life I built or the empire their daughter created from nothing but ambition and the refusal to be ordinary.
I wonder sometimes if my children would have made them proud. If my mother would have softened when she held Quest for the first time. If my father would have smiled watching Prime throw a football in the backyard. If either of them would have looked at what I built and said “we’re proud of you, Vivica. You did good.”
They wouldn’t have. Because that’s not who they were. And that’s not who I became. The cycle doesn’t break just because you want it to. It breaks when someone is brave enough to admit it exists. And I was never brave in that way. I was brave in every other way. Brave enough to run a city. Brave enough to bury bodies. Brave enough to make decisions that would have paralyzed lesser women. But I was never brave enough to hold my children and tell them I loved them without attaching conditions.
That’s my sin. Not the scheming, not the manipulation, not the bodies. My sin is that I had four children and I turned every single one of them into a project instead of a person. And now they’ve turned their backs on me and I’m sitting in a prison cell talking to a lawyer about a murder I didn’t commit while the family I built continues to function without me.
That last part is what burns the most. They don’t need me. They never needed me. They just needed me gone.
Serenity. My baby girl. The one who looked just like me. Same almond-shaped eyes, same high cheekbones, same soft mahogany skin. When she was little, people would stop us onthe street and say “she’s your twin.” And I loved that because Serenity was proof that Vivica Banks could create something beautiful. She was smart and sassy and ambitious and I saw myself in her so clearly that sometimes it scared me.
But I sent her away. I sent her to Ashford because I needed Alexander’s full attention and Serenity was stealing it. She was daddy’s girl and every time he looked at her with that softness in his eyes, I felt it being taken from me. So I packed her bags and shipped her to Connecticut and told myself it was for the best. Only the best for my children.
And what did she do up there? Got seduced by a teacher. Let some thirty-two-year-old man read her poetry and whisper in her ear until she spread her legs and got pregnant at fifteen. Like a fool. I flew up there and handled it. I arranged the adoption. I called Dante. And when she killed that man in that cabin with a kitchen knife and called me crying, I drove through the night and cleaned up the mess because that’s what mothers do. They protect their children even when their children make catastrophic decisions.
I buried a body for that girl. Dante and I wrapped a dead man in plastic and put him in a trunk and made him disappear. I forged documents. I paid people off. I erased an entire human being from existence so that my daughter could go back to school and pretend nothing happened. And now she sits across from me in a visitation room and calls me Vivica like I’m a stranger. Like I didn’t save her life. Like I didn’t carry her secret for twelve years without ever once using it against her.
But I know where that body is. I know the cabin. I know the timeline. I know which knife she used and where Dante drove afterward and which jurisdiction the body ended up in. I have receipts that trace every step of the cleanup. I kept them for insurance and protection. Leverage for a rainy day.
It’s pouring now.
