Page 89 of Justice

“I’m home,” Justice called out. His voice was low and even, that settled quiet he gets when something’s been handled.

He came around the corner into the kitchen still pulling his jacket off, and he stopped cold.

Me on the floor with my back against the cabinets. Dream wrapped around me, face buried in my neck, her little body still hitching with sobs she couldn’t stop. Storie frozen in the doorway with her wet cheeks.

Whatever calm he’d walked in with was gone in an instant.

“What happened?” He was already crossing to us, already dropping to his knees, already reaching for his baby. “Skye. What’s wrong with her? What happened?”

45

JUSTICE

It was one crisis after another, I walked in my front door not two hours off of handling Tron, hands still raw, and there was Dream on the kitchen floor screaming her lungs out.

My blood was still running hot from the warehouse and I felt like it was boiling now. Whoever did something to my child was about to get it.

“What happened” I asked Skye.

“It’s Midnite… she’s dead.”

That pulled me up short. Out of everything I expected to hear walking through that door, it wasn’t that.

“Dead?” The fuck happened? I couldn’t believe my daughter’s precious gift was dead. It couldn’t have been of natural causes. That was a purebred healthy horse. I’d had her evaluated by multiple vets before purchasing. Did someone kill her? If so, who?

Was Kira that fuckin’ desperate? Was she that pissed that I cut her off.

I got down on that floor with my girls.

Dream crawled into my chest and sobbed until she couldn’t breathe. Her little body shook against mine, hiccupping, gasping, crying that comes up from somewhere a child shouldn’t even know about yet. I held her. Told her it wasn’t her fault. Told her Midnite knew she was loved. Told her I was here, I wasn’t going anywhere, I had her.

Storie came and sat on my other side. She hadn’t let me hold her in a long time, but tonight she pressed in close without me asking, and I pulled her to me without making a thing of it. She was hurting. She was still mine.

“It ain’t fair,” she said, voice cracking. “Midnite didn’t do anything nobody.” She wiped her face with her sleeve. “Who would even do this?”

“Nobody did nothing, baby. Animals get sick sometimes.”

She got quiet a second. Then, real small, like she didn’t want to say it out loud. “Kira was so mad at us, though. When you cut her off. You didn’t see her face, Daddy. She looked at me and Dream like she hated us.”

I didn’t say nothing back. I just held my girls and let that sit.

It sat. And it started to burn.

Took me about an hour to get them both down. Dream cried herself out in my arms, went limp against me like a rag doll with her face still wet. I carried her up the stairs, laid her in her bed, pulled the covers up to her chin. She grabbed my hand before I could pull away.

“Is Midnite in heaven?” she asked, half asleep.

“Yeah, baby. She’s in heaven. Running fast.”

Her eyes closed but I could feel her heartbreak. That damn horse didn’t die from natural causes.

I then went to Storie’s room. She was still on punishment with no phone, no tablet, and no laptop except for a few hours for school. I caught her writing in her journal and she had a book at her side. It made me feel proud that she learned how to entertain herself while on punishment. Reading and writing never got old.

“What are you reading?”

“Gone Girl,” she replied. I’d seen the movie. That blonde bitch was hella manipulative.

“That’s a little grown for you.”