and some apartments were missing windows and front doors.
“Where’s Tash?” The question was my greeting to the smug face Trench flashed in my direction. He stood straighter than the building behind him. His eyes ran up and down my body like a dirty hand.
He gestured his hand towards the building behind him, beckoning for someone. With a man-child on each side of her small body, Tash appeared with tears streaming down her face, some dried on her ashen cheeks.
Her normal brown glow was a dull gray-brown mix, a sign that her life had been being sucked from her. She had a slight limp, and her clothes where dirty and disheveled, unlike Tash, who was always neat and fresh. I pray for their sake they hadn’t forced themselves on her sexually. The bruises on her arms and the few visible around her neck, said otherwise.
Tash was a good girl when it came to men and boys, but she was petite and cute, so she often attracted unwanted attention. The Haitians were ruthless enough to take from her what didn’t belong to them. The thought alone had me plotting how many of them I wanted to kill.
“There’s your precious little gem,” Trench stated before groping his dick, answering the question that I prayed was speculation. The arrogance in his tone had my trigger finger itching. The notion that he had forced himself on her had just increased the number I had in my head.
“What the fuck do you want, Trench?” I spit my question through clenched teeth, fighting to contain my rage.
“In exchange for your little jewel, I’d like to expand our territory to Leven street, as well as you becoming our supplier.”
I failed to suppress my laugh, and the sound caused Trench to turn up his nose and bite into his weed-pinked ashy ass lips.
“Have you lost your weed-soaked mind?” I asked him. “There’s no way in an infinite number of fucks am I supplying you. It’s because of the treaty your uncle had with mine that you have the territory you already have.”
Pointing, I shook one of my manicured fingers in his direction. The nails were blood red, an accurate representation of the blood I wanted to spill.
“I’m an ass scratch away from taking what you already have, Trench. Don’t insult me by asking for more.”
“They said you were a bossy bitch. A mouthy one too.”
He turned to his men that had Tash. “String that little bitch up. Let’s see how much negotiating, Mrs. Boss Bitch is willing to do.”
At those words, his men put a fucking noose around Tash’s neck and led her to a nearby pipe fitted between two poles.
“Don’t do this shit, Trench. She has nothing to do with the decisions I make.”
A pair of old black tennis shoes swung from the rusted pipe above, showing me what they were planning to do to Tash. One of the men tossed the long end of the rope they had around Tash’s neck up, and across the pole and pulled it taut enough to lift her up onto the balls of her feet as she clawed at her neck.
How the fuck was I going to save Tash without killing half the hood?
24
Arjen
My wife was at it again. I couldn’t keep up with the woman, not even with guards trailing her twenty-four-seven. How she kept getting away from them was beyond me because they were all former military.
“I’m sorry, Loud. She’s good. She set up a decoy so that I was following the wrong SUV for a few miles before I realized it wasn’t her.”
Mecca had no idea how overprotective I had become of her. The four guards I’d had keeping an eye out for her had multiplied to ten. I had one in every place she frequented. If shit went down and she needed me, I would be there to help her, whether she wanted me to or not.
I couldn’t hop into my clothes fast enough. She had crept into her closet this morning after her burner had gone off. I sensed something was going down and wasn’t going to sit back and wait for it to happen.
“If my wife comes home tonight with so much as a hair out of place, I’m going to soak that whole fucking neighborhood in gas and turn it into a topside hell. And all of you, who are supposed to be for her protection, are going to be burning with it if you let her slip through your fingers again.”