Page 82 of Justice

Okay. Act fast.

41

JUSTICE

I saw Kira’s ass before the car even came to a full stop.

This sneaky bitch was coming around the side of my house like she was plotting something. I never pegged Kira to be a stalker and at that moment I regretted ever fucking her. She was a nuisance. We’d just talked a few days ago, when I banned her from coming around my kids.

Everything good the morning had put in me drained straight out through the floor of that car.

“Get Rita inside,” I told Skye, already opening my door. “I’ll be in in a minute.”

Skye read my face and didn’t ask a single question. She got Rita out the back and toward the kitchen door quick and quiet. Then I turned to deal with the woman standing in my motor court like she’d been invited.

“You lost?” I said.

“Justice.” She had the nerve to smile, soft, sad, like we were two people with something to work out. “I’m not here to fight. I just came to drop some things off. That’s all.”

“I told you what would happen if you came back here.”

“Storie called me.” She said it fast, playing it like a shield. “She asked me to bring her the stuff I had at my place. She said she wanted it back. What was I supposed to do, tell that baby no?”

And there it was.

Storie called her. That little girl had gone around me, reached out to the one woman I’d banned from this family, and pulled her right back at my house.

I would deal with her later.

“You should have called me.” My voice came out flat and cold. “Anything of hers you had, you call my phone, and I drive to you and I get it. You do not step one foot on my land. You do not come around my house. You do not walk up on my grandmother and my kids like everything’s fine. You had my number the whole time. Why did you choose this?”

“I was trying to do something nice⁠—”

“You were trying to get back in.” I took a step toward her, and watched her recalculate the situation in real time. “And you let a fifteen-year-old use you to do it. You know what that tells me? That tells me my daughter’s got you on a string. She calls, you come running, straight past a man who told you to your face to stay gone. That’s what you are to her now. An errand runner.”

That one landed. I saw it cut.

She should have left right then. If she’d had any sense left, she would’ve walked to her car and I’d have let her drive off my land in one piece.

But Kira never could leave a wound alone.

Through the kitchen window, over my shoulder, she caught sight of Skye at the sink, helping Rita with a glass of water. And I watched something ugly and jealous come up in her face and take the wheel.

“So that’s how it is.” Her voice changed, went sharp and mean. “You let me go out for that. The help.” She laughed, and there was no humor anywhere in it. “You’re really gonna stand here and act righteous with me while you got the nanny in Monica’s kitchen. In Monica’s house. How long, Justice? How long you been sleeping with her?”

“Watch yourself.”

“No, you watch yourself.” She jabbed a finger toward that window, toward the woman I’d woken up next to. “You don’t know one real thing about that woman. She showed up out of nowhere and you just handed her your whole family. Your kids. Your grandmother. Your bed, apparently. How much do you actually know about her, Justice? Where’s she from? Who is she? You run her all the way down before you let her sleep under the same roof as your daughters, or did the pretty face handle that for you?”

For one half of one second, standing in my own driveway, something cold moved through me that had nothing to do with Kira.

Because I’d asked myself a version of that once. The sister that didn’t show in any file. The scar. The tired eyes. The subject she closed every time it cracked open.

Then I looked at that woman through my kitchen window. Holding my grandmother’s water glass steady to her lips with two hands, patient, gentle, present for a family that wasn’t even hers. And I let every doubt Kira was trying to plant die right where it stood.

“Here’s what I know about her,” I said. “She showed up for my grandmother when nobody else could handle it. She loves my little girl like she made her. And she called me the second she saw Storie in trouble, when she could have looked the other way like everybody else in this child’s life has learned to do. That’s more than I can say for you. You who encouraged my underage daughter to have sex.”

Kira flinched.