Page 96 of Maceo

“Fuck you,” I said, elbowing him. “You and the rest of those niggas are costing me money. I have clients waiting, and I can’t deliver because of that fucking Maceo.”

“You should have taken him out when you had the chance. All you had to do was shoot when they opened the back of the van. That was the whole purpose of you being there in the first place. Don’t put this shit on us when you fucked up your own mission.”

I spun around, glaring at him. “I was outnumbered, and I played it safe until I had a better opportunity. That girlfriend of his fucked up my plan B. Had he been single, it would have been easy to get close enough to find out more about him beforeI killed him. Other than most of his team being dead, we’re no closer than we were when we started.”

“And that’s my fault? Your daddy was the one with the underground connections.”

“Yet he went behind my back and entrusted you with his business. Now look at him… fucking dead.”

I almost teared up as the words left my mouth. Learning of my father and my brother’s demise had me ready to go on a rampage. Quame Parker was a lot of things. Ruthless. A tyrant. The Devil reincarnated. But he was my father. Quinton was my brother. While Quinton’s weak stomach having ass was the brains, I was the muscle.

My mother handed me over to my father when she saw firsthand how dark I could get. She already thought I was out of control with all the fighting I was doing at school and in the neighborhood. I wasn’t doing that slap boxing shit with these bitches.

I was hitting them until I saw blood. Not just a little blood, either. They had to be leaking before I felt like I’d done enough. It wasn’t until I was thirteen and I sliced up a bitch for playing in my face did she turn me over to my father. She claimed she was afraid to have me in the house.

Living with my father turned me into a savage. I did and saw things no thirteen-year-old should. He saw my thirst for blood, and he nurtured it. Because of him, I caught my first body at fourteen. I’d been moving underground since I was fifteen years old. The number of people I’d brought my father over the years was well into the triple digits. In fact, it was me that told him about black market organ selling.

He’d make more money selling the parts than people as a whole. Hell, there were even people willing to pay just to experience cutting someone open for the first time. The fact thathe handed his shit over to Blane and not me would forever piss me off.

I’d gone to see my father a week before his death. When I walked into the prison’s visitation room, he was sitting there as rigid as he always was any time I saw him. I sat down, and he didn’t crack a smile.

“Hey, Daddy.”

“Blane tells me there’s a problem, and there’s been a problem for a long time.”

“Of course he would snitch like the bitch he is.”

“What I’m trying to figure out is why I had to hear it from him and not you, Quinn.”

I rolled my eyes as he called me by my real name. Quinton had come up with the persona a few years back. It was my alias in case I ever got caught up. He created a whole life for Charity Lynn. Anytime someone looked me up, they would find exactly what he’d implanted online.

“I’m handling it,” I said.

“Not fast enough. This has carried on too damn long. You mean to tell me for almost a year now, you’ve been letting my product get snatched up? You’re wasting my time and money. Dead that shit and get back to business.”

I leaned in closer to him. “You put Blane in charge, remember? This is on him and you. I didn’t bring in an outsider, you did. Imagine training me to take over, then snatching that shit from me. I wouldn’t even be mad if it was Quinton in charge, but you brought in this nigga. You didn’t trust me to keep shit pushing after you got caught up, and look what happened, old man.”

“You know why I didn’t hand it over to you, Quinn? You’re skilled, but you’re a woman, and this is a man’s game.”

I looked at him in disbelief. “Did you really just say that to me?”

He shrugged. “It is what it is.”

A grin spread across my face as I stood to my feet and leaned in until our noses touched.

“I’m gonna handle this little problem, and once I do, I’m making some major changes. I don’t care who you put in charge. This shit is mine, and I’m taking it back. Ain’t shit you can do about that from here.”

He rose to his feet and towered over me. “We’ll see about that, dear daughter.”

Without another word, he left the table.

That was the last time I’d seen or spoken to him. A week later, I got a call that he was dead. Apparently, he’d been drugged, and his throat had been cut in his sleep. Quame Parker was a feared man, even behind bars. He didn’t trust too many people, and for him to be drugged meant he took something from someone he trusted.

Quinton was killed by a single bullet to the back of his head as he was walking down the street. I couldn’t prove that Maceo had something to do with it. He had to have figured me out somehow. I had no evidence of that, but I felt it in my spirit that he or somebody close to him was behind that shit. It was too much of a coincidence.

That was why I had his wedding shot up. I’d been tracking him since the day he showed up at the cleaning company. While he was inside talking to Kelly, I’d placed a tracker on the underside of his car, so I knew where he was at all times. Since I couldn’t get close enough to seduce him before I killed him, I’d just play with him a little. All I needed was one thing to smoke him out to make him come to me, and now I knew exactly what that was.

“You don’t hear me talking to you?” Blane said, mushing my head.

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