Page 17 of Forced Matrimony With An Unhinged Menace 4

I hung up that phone fast and called Nisha. She didn’t answer. These muthafuckas were really playing a dirty ass game. If they harmed my unborn, I didn’t even want to think of what I’d do.

Next, I called Brit’s best friend, the one who kept Sonny whenever we needed her to. She called herself his godmother, and she had him right now.

She picked up on the second ring.

“You still got my son?” I asked, no greeting, straight to it.

“Yeah,” she said, her voice already picking up on the panic in mine. “You ready for him back? What’s going on, Demon?”

“I can’t get him right now,” I said, forcing myself to stay calm, to think straight even with everything crashing down around me. “Shit is sticky over here, and you the only person I can trust with him right now. Get up. Pack you and him a bag. I’m about to send you some bread, get him whatever he needs and what you need to get you the fuck up out of there. Get in your car and drive far as you can. I don’t care if you end up in Mexico. I’m sending you ten thousand right now, send me your Zelle, and I’ll keep sending more whenever you run low. Please. I need my son safe. That’s all I’m asking you.”

“Oh my God, Demon,” she said, her voice cracking. “Is Brit okay? What’s going on? You scaring me right now.”

“All I know is what I just told you,” I said. “I need you to focus on keeping yourself safe and looking out for my son. I owe you for this, real talk. Send me that info and I got you right now. Let me talk to my son real quick before you go.”

She put Sonny on the phone, and I made sure my boy heard his daddy’s voice, made sure he knew I loved him, made sure I promised him I’d be back to him soon. I ain’t never lied to my son a single day in his life, and I wasn’t about to start tonight, no matter what it took to make that promise true.

I ended that call and pulled over into an old abandoned apartment complex parking lot, my hands shaking on that wheel.

“Fuckkkkkk!” I screamed into that empty car, hitting the wheel again, harder this time.

These niggas wanted to play a foul game. I’d never done this much back and forth in my life. Now, everybody had to die! Straight up. That was cool. I could play dirty too.

I plugged that compound’s address into my GPS, an address I’d gotten a while back, before I ever had Darius killed, before any of this war really started. I was Thirty minutes away. I hit the gas.

Kaseem was married now, I remembered somebody telling me a while back. I decided right then, driving hard through them streets, that I was gonna find his wife and put a bullet in her head right in front of him. Make him watch what it felt like to lose everything he loved in one second, same way he was trying to make me feel losing Brit.

I prayed that Brit was still alive, but I knew what came with this street shit. Although we weren’t together, I never planned to stop fuckin with my baby momma. She was solid as they came over the years and her family took me in like their own. All I could do was hope she made it out this shit.

—

I’d never actually been to that compound before, only had the location secondhand. I made it there faster than the GPS even predicted, running lights, weaving through traffic like a man with nothing left to lose. But when I got close, that GPS took me down some dirt road that dead-ended into nothing. I circled back around, drove another ten minutes trying different angles, before I finally found the first entrance.

It was guarded heavy. Multiple niggas standing post with rifles, alert, watching every direction, clearly already braced for exactly the kind of visit I was planning on paying them.

I backed that car up fast and pulled off before anybody could clock me sitting there.

Once I got back on the highway, my mind still racing, I decided to try a different angle.

I pulled up their family’s social media instead. I prayed for some info that I could really use right now. I was scrolling through every profile I could find, looking for something, anything, I could use against them. Some weakness. Some crack in their fake ass lives.

Kaseem’s page ain’t have nothing worth taking note of. Neither did the younger one, Namier, or the nigga Zaire. Actually, his shit had been dead since 2020, he didn’t have recent post at all. But when I got to Zuri’s page, I found something.

A long post, dated a month back, congratulating her son on his union. A photo attached. It was professional looking, clearly taken the day of Kaseem’s wedding. The hoe ass nigga had some garden style wedding, but it looked like he’d spent a bag on it. Lame ass shit.

I couldn’t lie tho, the nigga was dressed up looking like old money.

What caught my eye was the woman standing next to him.

Her dress was beautiful, her hair and makeup was on point for the occasion, but her face is what stopped me dead.

I zoomed in on that picture, my fuckin chest got tight, and I had to pull that car over on the side of the highway right then. This shit couldn’t be real. I put my hazards on, hands shaking on the wheel all over again.

There was no way.

It couldn’t be.

I stared at that photo for a full minute, making sure my eyes weren’t tricking me, making sure this wasn’t some kind of sick ass joke.