Page 97 of Collateral Love
This was enforcement.
And the people who took me woke up the infamous King brothers.
They activated the system.
As we move through the wreckage, I catch my sister’s eye.
“I’m sorry,” I mouthed quietly.
She shakes her head.
“No,” she replies. “I was always going to be this.”
That one hurts more than the chains ever did.
As we step into the night, sirens distant, city unaware of what just shifted beneath it, I lean into Zayden’s chest and let myself breathe.
Because tomorrow? Tomorrow comes consequences. And somebody is going to learn what collateral love really costs.
Kenya’s beatenbody was laid across the back seat of my armored Escalade as a queen dragged from war. Her face was swollen, one eye was puffed, her lips were split, and her wrists were raw where the restraints had bitten her. Every inhale looked like it hurt. Every exhale looked like it cost her pride.
Channy kept turning around from the passenger seat, gun in her lap, eyes locked on the window as the city slid by. Xavier drove like a man who’d been waiting years for the chance to steer again. His hands were steady, eyes cold, movements economical. He didn’t speed. Didn’t weave. Didn’t give anybody a reason to remember us.
That was the difference between the old us and the new us.
Old us would’ve left a trail of smoke.
Miles sat in the third row, talking low into his phone, already giving instructions. His voice was measured, law school diction wrapped around a street boy’s instincts.
People loved a man like Miles. He was useful in rooms that hated men like me, and X. We sent him to meet people who would be turned off by our tattoos.
Kenya had introduced him years ago as safe. Xavier had vouched for him after they were locked up together, and Miles was exonerated. Since he got home, his private investigator business had helped Crown Logistics tremendously. He was the face we sent in to close, but was as ruthless as we were behind closed doors.
“Take the long way,” Miles said, still on the phone. “No highways, I don’t trust the randomness tonight.”
Something about the way that motherfucka said it felt shifty. I never got that feeling before, but I learned early on to trust your gut.“We are already in handcuffs,” I said. “We just don’t know whose name is on the metal yet.”
Miles finally looked at me then, and he smiled like I was joking.
I didn’t smile back.
Channy’s eyes flicked to mine for half a second—quick, curious, like she felt the temperature drop too.
Kenya didn’t move. But her fingers twitched once against the seat, like she wanted to reach for me and refused to.
That was my wife.
Even half-broken, she still tried to protect the system. Still tried to keep my emotions from becoming the headline.
I hated that I loved her more for it.
We got her to the private clinic on the east edge. It was one of ours, earmarked for our soldiers. No signage. No uniforms. No paperwork would exist stating that Kenya Davis-King was in the building. The nurses looked at my wife the way people looked at storms: with respect and fear, as if they moved wrong, the weather might punish them.
They tried to wheel her away fast.
I stopped them with two fingers on the gurney.
Kenya opened her good eye and found me.
