She bobs her head.
“Those were drug runs I was making with him.”
“I kind of suspected that.”
“My ma hated that shit, but he told her that he was teaching me the ways of the street so I would never get caught slipping. As much as he wanted me with him, he never wanted me to sell drugs. He always said I was gonna get an education and be better than him. He wanted me to see the ugliness to divert me away from the streets, but he also wanted me to know how to protect myself and my family if the time came.”
“He knew what we all knew. You were too smart for the streets.”
“Wasn’t my plan to get caught up. They say the thing that you do to try to prevent something is usually the same shit that causes it to happen. That was my case. I rolled with my pops that day, just spending some time together, but he had a stop to make to collect some money.
“I was sitting in the car, chilling and listening to this new song I’d been wanting to hear when I heard loud arguing. My pops always carried two guns, one on him and the other in his glove compartment. I grabbed it, jumped out to see what was going on, and rushed into the house.
“By the time I cleared the door, I saw the guy who owed my pops that money shoot my dad. He heard me make a noise, and he turned toward me with his gun raised. I shot him in the face, jumped in the car, and drove straight to Soul.”
“I remember him. He was a friend of your father’s.”
“And what most folks didn’t know back then was he was the leader of the Immortal Descendents. Soul came and got that shit cleaned up. Made it look like that dude and my dad had a shootout, got my prints cleared from the scene, made sure there were no witnesses to report my presence, and from there, he took me in.”
“I never knew that, Chaos. I just knew that you were hanging with him a lot back then, and afterward, you started hanging with the MC all the time. I missed you because you weren’t around as much.”
“No. I wasn’t. Not until that summer you came to stay with us. I hung around the house more that summer than I had in the last year because I wanted to protect you.”
She crinkles her nose and tilts her head. “Can I ask you a question, and you keep it a buck with me?”
“Anything.”
“My mom’s boyfriend who tried to assault me . . . did you have anything to do with what happened to him?”
I stare at her for a long time, and she presses her lips together. I look away, and when I feel her tug on the hem of my shirt, I turn back to her. “Yeah.”
“What did you do?”
“Made sure he would never do to another person what he tried to do to you.”
“You killed him?”
I nod.
She sighs. “They never found his body.”
“And they never will,” I reply, thinking about Keeper. Thank God for him. He had cleaned up so much of the MC’s mess through the years.
“My mama mourned that man so badly. She never believed me when I told her what happened. She said that I must have misunderstood his intentions and that he never would haveforced himself on me. Then she berated me for not giving him what he wanted and pointed out how much we both could have gotten out of him. I was sickened by her after that. She spent the next year chasing other men, but she mostly kept them away from home. Then I left for college.”
“I missed you. That’s when shit really changed. I had already been trying to find my way. Soul recalled how good of a shot I was, and he said I was a natural. He asked if I wanted to do a job for him, but if not, he understood. I asked what kind, and he said a hit. Told me that I was a natural at it, and if I did it, we could consider my debt cleared.”
“Your debt?”
“Yeah. Up until then, I didn’t realize I had one. I guess I kinda did, seeing as how he looked out for me when I killed that man and in the years to come.”
“It was easy for you?” she asks in disbelief.
I nod. “He told me to pretend it was the man that killed my pops when I went to do it.” I look up into Charisma’s sweet brown eyes, and I worry. I know that she probably sees a soulless man when she looks into my eyes. “But you know what? I didn’t have to imagine the nigga that killed my pops.
“I had already expunged his soul from the earth. That shit didn’t bother me at all to kill the next nigga. It was easy.”
She’s shocked, but she finally gathers her composure and asks several more questions. I answer them all as we finish cooking and then eat.
