“So, that’s what this is? You’re protecting yourself.”
“I am protecting what matters.”
“What matters to me is already gone, motherfucker!” I answered.
“Roderick, enough of this shit! I will not bring in a new judge. Let it go.”
“Alright,” I said, feeling rage build in me.
He watched me closely. “Roderick?—”
I didn’t let him finish. I reached behind me and pulled the gun from my waistband, bringing it forward before he could adjust to what was happening.
His expression changed instantly when he saw the gun. “Don’t do this.”
I looked at him, and there was nothing left in me that needed convincing.
“You already made your decision,” I replied.
And then I pulled the trigger…
The sound cut across the water, sharp and final, and his body dropped forward before going still, the weight of him collapsing in a way that made everything that followed feel inevitable.
I sat there for a second, watching blood pool from the center of his forehead. What struck me wasn’t what I felt, but what Ididn’t. There was no panic or regret, and no second thoughts waiting to surface. It was just a clear understanding that whatever we had been to each other ended the moment he chose to stand against me.
With my adrenaline still surging through me, I grabbed him and dragged his body across the deck, his weight heavy and uncooperative as blood smeared beneath us and soaked into my hands. It ran from his face and streaked down the side of my neck, hot and thick, and I didn’t bother wiping it away as I pulled him closer to the edge.
By the time I reached the lake, my arms burned and my grip had tightened without me realizing it, but I kept going until there was nothing left between him and the water. Then, I pushed him over, watching as his body disappeared beneath the surface and the lake swallowed him without hesitation.
I had just killed a man I had known for many years. This was a man I once trusted, but standing here with everything that had been taken from me, none of that held any weight.
I turned, walked back through the house, and made my way out without looking back, because there was nothing left here that mattered.
By the time I reached my car, one thing was clear in a way it had not been before…
I had crossed a line that wasn’t meant to be stepped over, and there was no version of this where I could ever go back.
Eboni Keep in Nzuri Hall
I’d just received a call from my doctor that I needed to come into his office. Even though he kept his tone professional, there was something in the way he said it that stayed with me long after the call ended, because it did not feel routine and it did not feel like something that could be postponed the way I had been postponing everything else since the hospital confirmed there was a mass in my breast.
I stood in front of the mirror in my dressing room with my robe hanging loosely from my shoulders while my eyes held my own reflection. For a moment, I allowed myself to really look at my body in a way I had not done since that day on the jet, because until now, I had been moving forward as if ignoring it would somehow keep it from becoming real.
My fingers came up slowly and pressed against the place I already knew was there. It was the place they had shown me on the screen as if it were nothing more than an image. Even now, I could still hear the doctor explaining it in a way that made sense medically while it made no sense at all in my life.
I was a woman who had built empires and ended lives when necessary, yet I was standing here with something growing inside my own body that I could not command or silence. It was something I could not remove with power or influence.
I exhaled slowly and forced my hand to fall back to my side because I refused to stand here and unravel before I even had confirmation of what I was truly dealing with.
I turned slightly to reach for the dress laid out for me. The fabric was smooth beneath my fingers, deep in color and cut in a way that fit me the way everything in my life was designed to fit. I stepped into it carefully, pulling it up along my body while my mind drifted in a direction I had not expected.
I thought about my grandchildren, about the way they ran through my home with laughter that carried through the halls, and about how easily they reached for me without understanding the weight I carried behind everything I did. I thought about Pressure and the way he still looked at me like he was still my baby boy. He would not take this well, and that was something I knew without having to imagine it too deeply. My son loved me in a way that was loud and protective and rooted in a bond that had survived things most people would not understand.
The thought of him seeing me weakened by something I couldn’t fight with my own hands made something inside me resist this entire situation even more, and I adjusted the dress along my hips as if control over something this simple could translate into control over everything else.
By the time I reached for my jewelry, I had already composed my face into something that resembled normalcy, because that was what I had always done. I fastened my earrings while my thoughts continued to circle the truth I had been avoiding.
I had survived wars that should have taken me out. I had stood in rooms where men twice my size folded under pressure that I applied without raising my voice, and I had carried my family through storms that would have destroyed lesser foundations. But none of that mattered when it came to this because there was no opponent to face and no strategy to execute. There was only the possibility that my own body had turned against me, and that was not something I could negotiate with.
