Page 9 of Truth

“And before you ask… Fuck yeah, that shit was necessary.”

I opened the box and shook my head. Inside were two fingers. One had the Dice Pound emblem ring on it. They specialized in running a gambling ring, but they were surrounded by wannabe gangster, low-level motherfuckers that wouldn’t pay out when they were supposed to. They stayed in their lane, but it didn’t mean shit was sweet. If they were involved, fuck that truce. The Saint Riderz were going to war.

With slitted eyes, I waved him closer. If he didn’t say some shit that made sense about the fucked up act he’d committed, I was slamming his face on this table.

We called him Brick because of his size. He stood at six foot three with solid arms, abs, and legs. I, however, was bigger, older, and wiser, which was why I needed to know why I had two damn fingers in a box in our fucking clubhouse.

“Talk.”

“What’s there to tell? The best way to bring a bitch out is to touch one of theirs.”

“Stupid as fuck.”

“Truth, man,” he drawled. “Like it or not, I did what I felt I needed to do. You had shut down, not allowing us to force the streets to come up off any intel, so I did a little research.”

He slid a drive to me. Damn, he really wanted me to spazz the fuck out.

“I was handling business, motherfucker.”

Just because I didn’t give him a play by play didn’t mean I wasn’t. Breeze, our sergeant at arms, and head of our security, had his orders. Brick, more than likely, had fucked them up. I knew the moment Breeze found out I would have to pull them off of each other. One was my brother, but the other was mybest friend. Shit hadn’t changed over the years. They still liked to irritate the fuck out of each other.

“Let’s go to the office.”

Whatever he needed to show me, I needed to see it privately. That and I wasn’t speaking on shit in front of prospects or rumblers that buzzed around trying to catch one of our eyes. I’d fucked most of them over the years, but none were worth circling back around. The bar would open soon, and quite a few worked here from running the bar to the kitchen to making delivery runs.

Once we made it in my office, I booted up my computer and slid the drive in.

“Beast put you up to this?”

He sucked his teeth and clenched his fists.

“Fuck no, but if he did, Gen’shisdaughter.”

“You forget that she’smyresponsibility? He gave that up when he went to prison, B.”

He shook his head, refusing to admit the facts. Once I stepped up at nineteen, I ran shit differently. I wanted better for us and better was becoming more economically sound. I was naturally an old soul since I hung out with the OGs, asked questions, and listened more. I found a way to clean up dirty money by opening up legitimate businesses, and we’d been on the up and up ever since… until Beast would call in a favor. It was mostly shit for people that held him down that was released. I let him deal with Brick since my words were few.

“You plan to look at it anytime today?”

“You can leave at any time. I’m sure a rumbler or two is waiting out front to suck your dick.”

This nigga smiled, bobbing his head like that was something to be proud of. He needed to grow the fuck up.

I looked at my watch and released a frustrated breath. Before he dropped this shit on me, I was working on my next move forAlix, our younger brother. He hadn’t been back since early this morning, and I had scheduled a meeting with President Windsor at Chancellor University. I needed the plans I had in store for him to work, because unlike me and Brick, Alix had options. They were simple—go to school or go to fucking school. Like I said—simple.

“The fuck you get this from?” I asked when the footage came on.

“Pedro, the bitch that runs the smoke shop on the same street. He slid me the footage. I knew he owed us after we bailed him out from losing that place.”

He was a cool Mexican that had been good to the Saint Riderz over the years when we were younger.

“It goes back a few days and up to the day of the fire. It shows this motherfucker snooping around. He came through a few times with those bitches on their bikes. The day in question, though, he was alone and on foot. When he rounded the corner, I never saw him again. An hour later, our shit blew up.”

“Ever wonder if someone he was riding with was parked on that side?”

He was on to something, but I wanted to see what else he’d considered. Sometimes the obvious opp wasn’t the real opp. He was gullible like that, eager to leap and ask for forgiveness later. There were no apologies once you fucked with another MC. He knew that shit, but he had kicked it off. We would have to see it all the way through, depending on how shit played out.

“Look, I’m not counting any motherfucker out. That snake ass DP was lurking.”

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