“Well, too bad.”
“Reek!”
“I said what I said.”
Then I hung up before he could say anything else and stood there with the phone still in my hand, trying to swallow back a feeling I hated.
When I turned around, all three of them were watching me. Jamir, to his credit, had made himself scarce by stepping toward the entryway to get to work.
Zahra looked at me first. “This isn’t really about the cameras.”
“No. It’s not.” I pouted as I sat in the rocker, rubbing my stomach. “I hate feeling watched, and I hate a man deciding what would happen around me and expecting me to just accept it because he meant well. That’s what Mercer did. That man always had eyes on us, and it was never about love. It was about control. It was about ownership. It was about making sure we knew he could get to us wherever we were, know whatever you weredoing, and remind you that everything you had come through him.”
Zahra’s expression softened immediately because she understood before I even finished saying it.
I laughed bitterly and shook my head. “People hear a man is providing or protecting and think that automatically means something good. But that’s not what it always meant in our house. With Mercer, if he paid for something, it came with strings. If he gave you something, you owed him. If he protected you, it was because he wanted access to you, not because he respected you.”
Rhythm’s lips pressed into a tight line as she looked at me with sympathetic eyes.
“My father made it feel like him ‘caring’ came with so much. So, when a man starts deciding things for me and putting cameras in my house and saying it’s for my own good, my first thought is not, ‘Oh, he cares.’ My first thought is here we go.”
Zahra nodded slowly because she had lived the harsher version of Mercer in a way I never fully had. She walked over to the rocker and sat beside me on the floor. “I get it. But Reek’s protection is not the same thing as Mercer controlling his daughters.”
I wanted to believe that, but I had allowed my father to fool me too.
“Mercer watched us so he could control us. He wanted leverage,” Zahra explained. “Reek is trying to watch over you because he is scared something will happen to you and the baby.”
“That still doesn’t mean I have to like it,” I muttered.
“No,” she agreed. “It doesn’t.”
“You can understand the intention and still not like how it feels,” Rhythm told me.
I blew a heavy breath, staring out of the huge picture window. I couldn’t help that Reek had suddenly made me feel smothered. In my life, a man paying, giving, or protecting meant he expected the right to manage you after.
Zahra rubbed my arm, soothingly. “You don’t have to like the gesture. You just have to be honest with him about why you don’t like it.”
After the girls left, I sat in my apartment for all of five minutes before I couldn’t take it anymore. Something about not hearing from Kam still wasn’t sitting right with me.
I got up off the couch, rode the elevator to Kam’s floor, and headed down the hall. The closer I got to his unit, I saw that his door was cracked open. I cautiously approached the door, listening for his voice. When all I heard was silence and could smell the strong aroma of paint, I peeked inside.
The condo was empty. There was no furniture or signs of him. There were two men inside painting and a woman deep cleaning. One of the painters looked up at me from behind a face mask and roller, and the woman paused with a vacuum in her hand like they were trying to figure out why a pregnant woman in a hoodie was standing at the door looking shell-shocked.
“Sorry,” I spit as I stepped back, turned around, and felt my rage climbing.
Kam was gone, and I knew Reek had something to do with it. I started to hyperventilate, imagining that Kam’s dead body was floating in the Chicago River or decomposing in the woods somewhere.
I stormed down the hall, skipped the elevator, and took the stairs. By the time I hit the first floor, I was zipping my hoodieall the way up and pulling the hood over my head. I still had on leggings, my oversized hoodie, and house shoes because I hadn’t been planning to leave the building. But at that point, I didn’t care what I looked like.
I walked straight outside to Malik’s truck. He was parked where he always was. The second I got to his window, I slapped my hand against it hard enough to make him jump out of his skin.
“What did you do?!” I demanded. “Where is Kam?!”
Malik casually stared at me as he rolled his window down. “I don’t know.”
“Bullshit!”
He said nothing, and that only made me madder. “You expect me to believe that man just disappeared and his whole apartment got cleared out and painted over, and you don’t know anything about it?”
