She scowled. “Niggas shot up my baby shower! Next time, I’m shooting back. The fuck?”
That pulled a laugh out of me, the first real one in days.
“Alright,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll reach out to him.”
“Good,” she said as she leaned back against the headboard with a small smile. “‘Cause I can’t deal with you moping around while we got a whole newborn in the house.”
Another day had passed before I decided to finally pull up on Fontaine. Lani said he was at one of the stash houses on the East side updating the security systems. Jas’s mom was helping her with the baby when I left.
She didn’t ask where I was going—just kissed me and said, “Go make it right.”
So here I was.
Fontaine’s truck was parked out front, along with a few other cars I recognized. I frowned when I noticed the door was unlocked. The smell of weed greeted me when I walked in, and a few of the young dudes were scattered about. Some were on the couch playing COD and others were around the dining room table shooting the shit and counting money.
“‘Sup, Money?” Calvin said from the couch.
I nodded at him. He was one of the ones I’d brought in a few years back before I stepped down. He was a young dude from around the way aging out of the foster care system with no real direction. So we set him up here. Gave him a place to live, and as long as he worked and stayed solid, he had a roof over his head with steady paper.
“Why the hell the door unlocked?” I asked, glancing around.
“Fontaine said you were outside,” Darnell replied, not looking up as he fed another stack into the money counter. “He’s in the office.”
I grunted and headed upstairs. People automatically assume a stash house was a run-down bando in the middle of the hood. I made sure our shit was different. I didn’t care that we were moving drugs, that didn’t mean we had to be sitting in a funky-ass house doing it. I bought the bandos, gutted, and refurbished them. The neighborhood was still working class, but the folks here kept their houses looking nice. I wasn’t about to bring no raggedy shit when there were kids in the area.
The office door was cracked. Inside, Fontaine was behind his desk, typing away on his laptop.
He didn’t look up when I stepped inside. “‘Sup?”
I scoffed and took a few steps in. “You still mad?”
He finally looked up and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that? You swung onme, nigga.”
“Yeah,” I said as I eased into the chair across from him. “Guess I did.”
He shook his head, the faintest hint of a grin tugging at his mouth before he went back to the screen.
“I came to apologize,” I said. “Seeing Jas like that… shit took me to a dark place, bruh.”
Fontaine studied me for a second. “You were scared, I get it.”
“Fucking terrified. But I shouldn’t have hit you. Or said that shit to Nai, that was out of pocket.”
He didn’t respond right away—just let the apology hang there for a second.
“You know we’d never let anything happen to y’all, right?”
“I know,” I said, nodding slowly. “But I need to know whatwe’re dealing with. I wanna help—but I gotta protect my family too.”
Fontaine exhaled and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk. “I’ve been going through the files Bruno sent over. I found some shit I haven’t told Nai about yet.”
“Like what?”
“Sterling wasn’t just playing high-stakes poker,” he said. “He was doing business with the Order—I found a few properties in Japan tied to his name.”
“Japan? The fuck?”
“Yeah. And that’s not the craziest part.”
