Page 52 of Priest

“The dark-skinned guy with the baldhead and beard told them to leave me alone because they didn’t need problems with you. I tried to back away, and I fell. When he went to help me up, the other two pushed him aside and stood over me.”

That would have been Ice. I needed to speak with him and let him know I appreciated him looking out.

“Anyway, while they were over me like that, I had… I had a flashback to the day my mama was killed.”

“What happened?” I asked.

I reached out, grabbed her foot, and massaged it. She seemed as surprised by the act as I was, but it helped her to relax. She told me the story about how three men broke into her house and assaulted her mother. She said that she wasn’t supposed to be there that day, but she hadn’t gone to a friend’s house at the last minute, because the friend was sick. She told me that they had beaten her mother, and when it seemed as if one of the men might try to sexually assault her, her mother escaped his grasp and ran for the knife block on the counter. She then told me that a third man shot her mother and killed her.

“In front of you?”

She nodded as the tears streamed down her face. “I wanted to help her, Priest. I swear that I did, but the other two held me back. I fought so hard, but I couldn’t break away. My mama lay on that floor dead with her eyes and mouth wide open. The last thing she lived through was trying to fight those men so they wouldn’t attack her or me.”

“What happened to you?”

“One of them hit me in the head, and I blacked out. By the time I regained consciousness the police were there. Our neighbors heard the gunshots and dialed nine-one-one.”

“Thank God. Did they ever find them?”

“No. But Priest?”

“Yeah.”

“I think…” She swallowed and didn’t finish.

“What? Tell me what you think, princess.”

“That my daddy had something to do with it.”

My blood ran cold.

“Why?” I clenched my teeth together and dug my nails into my palms.

She hesitated and chewed on her nail. September refused to meet my eyes. I reached out and gripped her chin between my index finger and thumb.

“Why?” I repeated.

“The day that you showed up, he and I were arguing. I’d been going through some online files, and I accessed a file that wasn’t meant for my eyes. That’s how I learned what he was doing. I confronted him about it, and I defended those women and appealed to his sense of decency. But there was something that he said during the argument that made me believe he was involved in her murder.”

“What did he say?”

“I told him they were someone’s daughter like me and someone’s mother like Mommy. He said, and I quote, ‘Snooping in shit that didn’t have anything to do with her, that’s what got her ass iced.’”

Fury ran through me on her behalf and her mother’s. That bastard had robbed his own child of the right to her mother. I didn’t doubt that he had something to do with it. I knew he did, and I was certain that he probably ordered a hit on her. But I wouldn’t tell September that, not now.

She cried, and I didn’t know what to do with that shit. I kicked my boots off, scooted to the middle of the bed, rested against the headboard, and pulled her into my lap. I wrapped her in my arms and grabbed her hand. I found myself rubbing small circles in the middle of her palm. We sat that way for a few minutes before she asked me, “Why did your mama choose such bad men? Who hurt you, Priest? What did they do to you?”

It wasn’t lost on me that the role of captor and captive had fallen away. We could pretend all we wanted that we were still in those roles, but we weren’t and hadn’t been for a long time.

“You ask a lot of questions, princess.”

“Tell me your story. I want to know.”

September rested her head against my shoulder, reached up, and cupped the side of my face. “Someone needs to care about you, too, Priest.”

I sighed.

“My mama had me when she was fifteen, but my grandmother supported her so that she could finish high school and then college. She met a man during her senior year of college that she really was feeling. He was an older cat, and I remember, at first, he used to come by and bring me toys to play with while he spent time with her. I didn’t think too much about it at first, but I noticed that she acted differently after he left.”

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