Page 14 of Collateral Love
She wasn’t scared.
And I hated that part of me that respected the fuck out of her. Lil mama was sexy as fuck. She was of model height, about 5’11 with thick, long legs and long, straight hair. The type of chick that kept up with her weekly hair appointments. The bougie type with a French manicure, a tennis bracelet on her wrist, and a matching anklet on her ankle.
I stared at her from head to toe, noting her chocolate complexion, even and smooth.
“You know who I am,” I said. “You know what happens if you wrong.” Her full lips were glossed and thick, and I imagined her lips around my?——.
“Zay, you still here?”
I blinked at her boldness to call me by a nickname I hadn’t given her permission to use that name.
“Yeah.”
Ambition burned hot in my chest. It always had. I didn’t want to be just another Nigga surviving off reputation. I wanted reach. Longevity. Control.
Kenya was offering structure.
And structure was power.
“Alright,” I said finally. “Say I listen.”
Her eyes sharpened just a touch.
“Again, all this sounds a’ight, but what will you do when shit fails?” I asked.
She smiled slowly and deliberately.
The kind of smile that meant the math was already done.
I didn’t trust Niggas that didn’t have a motive.
Anybody could talk slick when numbers were clean, and daylight was doing most of the work. The real test came when shit got uncomfortable, when pride got poked, when consequences showed up uninvited.
So I decided to push her.
“You sitting here telling me how to run my shit,” I said, tearing my sandwich in half, “but you ain’t said nothing about what happens when things go left.”
Kenya didn’t blink. She reached for her iced coffee and took a slow sip, as if I’d asked her the time.
“They always go left,” she said. “That’s why you build margins.”
Xavier frowned. “Margins for what?”
“For bail,” she replied calmly. “For silence. For cleanup.”
I looked at my brother. His jaw tensed. He wasn’t soft, but he hadn’t lived long enough to hear someone talk about cleanup like it was a line item. I handled the real sticky shit so he could sleep at night.
“You talk like you've been around this,” I said.
She met my gaze. “I’ve been around enough.”
That answer wasn’t enough for me.
“You know what happened to the last Nigga who thought he could restructure my business?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But I know why it happened.”
That stopped me.
