Page 49 of City of Gods

When I opened the door with Sanai beside me, her father and brother were on the porch. They wore stern expressions with furled brows and flattened lips as they nodded their greetings at me and stepped inside. I didn’t get the chance the shut the door behind them before another car pulled into my driveway. Both of Sanai’s sisters got out and walked up. They wore half smiles painted different shades of red with smooth skin and riotous curls like Sanai’s.

Everyone settled in my living room with the Sinclairs opting to sit on the sectional couch in my living room while my brothers and I sat in armchairs. Sanai stood in the middle of the floor.

“Okay, so I know this meeting is tense but let’s just jump right into it. My mother is in possession of five kilos of cocaine. I’m not sure where the hell she got them from, but she also had a list of contacts in the drawer along with the drugs. I don’t know how long she’s had the coke or if she’s been selling it but her first action should have been telling Father about it and she didn’t.” She paused to look around the room, but her tilted eyes lingered on mine. I nodded a little and she sucked in a shallow breath, continuing.

“I had dinner with Daniel Baptiste tonight in an attempt to feel him out. I was able to slip a bug in his car when he offered me a safe place after the shooting had occurred. We can monitor him to see if him and Junior are the ones trying to take down the Temple but I seriously doubt it.”

“I doubt it, too,” I said, rising to my feet. “We all talked with Junior and asked flat-out if he was planning to destabilize the Temple and he laughed at the fucking idea. He told us that what we were dealing with—the attack and someone telling us that he was the culprit—didn’t sound like destabilization.” I looked at the Sinclairs, making sure they heard everything that came out of my mouth. “He said it sounded like a territory takeover.” I stood beside Sanai, my arms folded tight across my chest.

“Okay, I hear all this shit but how do we know if Mother just hasn’t had time to tell anyone about the moves she’s going to make?” Eli asked.

“I sleep beside her every fucking night, Eli. She hasn’t mentioned a word about getting coke or thinking about jumping into the drug game. She knows I’m against that shit. Always have been. She talked about it once in the early ‘00s, but I shut it down then and I would have shut that shit down now.” Sanai’s father was pissed. It bled through his energy and stained the room. Hakim dug into his bowl of red beans and rice and decided to stay quiet for once.

“Does anyone else have any insight into what the fuck Mrs. Sinclair could be doing?” Maasai asked the Sinclairs.

“Getting into the drug game,” Zara answered simply. “If you look at this from every angle, you can see how it makes sense. I hate to say it.” She offered a simple shrug and looked at her glaring sister Kenya.

“Explain to me how easy it is to see this shit,” Eli said.

“You just found five kilos of motherfucking coke that none of us knew about. Mother set Sanai up to go on that kill without any evidence. She wanted Junior out of the way and she knew Nai was the strongest out of all of us. She also knew Sanai would be so happy that she got called on for a big mission that she wouldn’t question the usual protocol. That’s really why she was so pissed when she missed the mark. It wasn’t because of a failed mission; it was because it fucked up her plans.” The room fell silent after Zara spoke her piece. We all exchanged glances around the room, but nobody knew what to say next. The only sound that rose above the stifling quiet was Hakim eating fucking red beans and rice.

“Yo, do you even care that this isn’t the time to be eating?” Eli asked, a frown weighing his expression down.

“No. He never cares what time it is. He’s always eating,” I told him in a flat voice as I stared at my older brother.

“I’m also always minding my business. You should try it.” Hakim shot back after emptying his bowl.

“Anyway,” Maasai said, easing into the conversation. “We need to know what we’re dealing with as far as Mrs. Sinclair goes.”

Mr. Sinclair heaved a deep sigh and ran a hand over his face. “She’s deadly,” he told us all without hesitation. “She wants the Temple more than likely to set up shop for coke. She knows she can’t do it in any of our churches and the Temple is the only church in Bellmore we don’t own. It makes sense.

She’s going to do whatever she has to in order to get you three out.”

“Now it makes so much sense why she would float the idea of Junior trying to destabilize the Temple,” I said. I paced the floor as my mind rattled off idea after idea. “If we went at Junior, she knew we’d be met with deadly force.”

“It would do all the heavy lifting for her,” Sanai said.

“Exactly.” I stopped pacing and locked onto her beautiful eyes. Her lips curved in a small smile before going straight again.

“So, how do y'all want to handle this? Because I’m all about force,” Hakim told Sanai’s family. They all shifted uncomfortably at his words.

“It’s a family matter and we’ll handle it,” Mr. Sinclair grumbled.

“My best friend was killed by someone your wife sent to kill me. So you’ll understand if I don’t give a fuck about this being a family thing. We’re going to see to it that she’s killed. You’re not going to freeze us out and you’re not going to help her disappear. She needs to die.” I knew my words were harsh, but I didn’t give a fuck.

She had Rob killed.

My heart was a block of ice.

I didn’t have any sympathy for the Sinclairs. It was time they understood that they didn’t have as much clout as they thought they did. Sanai’s brother Eli puffed his chest out as I expected.

“The fuck you just say, nigga?” he asked, standing chest to chest with me. Hakim was on his feet in seconds, right beside me. Maasai followed his lead.

“You heard him. Your mother needs to fucking die. She’s going about this shit the wrong way. She can’t be trusted or rehabilitated or none of that shit,” Hakim stated, never once backing down.

“Sanai, you just going to let these niggas talk about killing our mother right in front of us?” Eli boomed, tossing his hand in the air. I pushed him back a few paces and folded my arms again, staring him down. The anger that still resided in my belly after seeing my brother get killed in front of me was about to be unleashed on him if he didn’t pipe the fuck down.

“Listen,” she sighed, smoothing stray strands of ebony hair up into her puff. “There’s no hiding the fact that death is the penalty for what Mother has done. She’s moving on her own and cutting us all off. If this was anyone else in the business, they’d be dead in a heartbeat without further consideration and you know it.”

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