Page 9 of Contract With A G

She shook her head and walked towards the room door.

“You know, you look down on me for my lifestyle, but have you ever thought that Mirical is here in this position because of you?”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means that you have put out so much bad karma into the world by being a womanizer, beating people up, killing God knows how many people.”

I sat up in my seat because now the conversation wasn’t so lighthearted anymore.

“Dukarii, have you ever once thought to yourself that all of that bad shit you did could come back on you? Trust, I know that karma exists because look at me now. I watched you kill that man at the corner store and said nothing. I helped you wash the blood off your clothes at just fifteen years old, and now I can’t catch a break. Karma, if you ask me.” She spoke of when I caught my first body.

Back then, I shot a man outside a Quik Trip corner store who rushed into the store past her, knocking a drink into her chest when she was pregnant with Mirical. I waited for him outside, walked up to him, and shot him in the chest point blank range because he disrespected her. I blocked that night out of my head as I did many nights, but I see she didn’t do the same. Maybe that’s another reason those pills felt so good to her back then. It stopped her from feeling, and so did the many other drugs she tried after that.

“Jalisa, I know I’m not perfect, but don’t put shit I did, on my daughter. This is the fault of the little niggas that shot out of their cars into a crowd she was standing in. They will all pay for what they did. That will be the true definition of karma.”

She placed her hand on the doorknob.

“Killing them all won’t lift her up from that bed, Dukarii. God is the only thing that can help her. I’m trying to change, and maybe you should too.” She opened the door and walked out.

“Shut the fuck up, straw leg ass.”

I mumbled to myself because she had put so much shit on my mind that I didn’t want to think right now. I got up from the chair and walked over to take my normal seat.

After sitting down, I finally looked at Mirical.

“Baby girl, daddy is tired as hell, but I’m going to thug it out up here with you for another hour or so.”

I spoke out loud to Mirical as I tried to get comfortable in my seat. The problem wasn’t actually physical discomfort; it was that mental shit that plagued me harder than any backache ever could.

My mind always played tricks on me, but the scariest part for everyone around is when it goes completely blank. That’s when the goon comes out. That's when I don't give a fuck.

Chapter 3

Caine

The next day

Standing at the back door of the funeral home, shit was running through my mind constantly on a loop because I tend to overthink shit. People called my ways selfish and stubborn, but I didn’t see it as a bad thing. I was just a nigga who knew what he wanted and expected shit to shake on command.

Pops and this whole heir shit is what was stressing a nigga out the most these days. I tried to do everything right, starting with getting with Kharti ass in the first place. I remember even with tears in her eyes, standing over a casket, she was still beautiful as hell. She looked half Indian to me at the time, before I found out her mama was only half Hispanic. Her looks and the fact that her sisters had nothing but little boys running around drew me in closer to her. Where at first she was just a piece of candy I wanted to taste, she quickly became a whole meal ticket in my eyes.

From that point on, I couldn't help but see those seven nephews as some kind of sign that maybe Kharti carried whatever DNA in her blood that made boys come a dime a dozen in her family. Maybe that wasn't the kind of shit you could prove in a doctor's office but could see when you looked at a family tree full of little niggas running around, so it only made sense.

That was my hope anyway when we got engaged. She said that she wasn’t going to have kids with just anybody nor stop taking her birth control for a fling. She was high value enough for me to say fuck it and get married to her at the courthouse a little over a year ago. To me, it was an arranged marriage that would help us both out financially and hand me the empire I been working hard to get many years.

Fast forward to today, and we still hadn't made a kid, nonetheless a boy. So, this whole surrogacy shit with her friend came up one night she was desperate after I told her that maybe it was time for me to move on and get a divorce that would cost me a pretty penny because we didn’t have a prenuptial agreement. That meant that the half a million in my bank account would be much less, and I would take a big ass pay cut just for some shit that didn’t work. Kharti then suggested we find someone else to try and carry a baby for us, which is how her friend Toya got involved. I didn’t know Toya and didn’t spend any time around the girl. To me, she was just a name I heard when Kharti would mention she was going to hang out with her friends. I tried telling her we should try to do it with one of her sisters because they had proven to be able to have children, and boys at that, but she said she didn’t trust them as far as she could throw them, in her words. She said Toya was her girl, had two boys previously, and that she knew she could trust her if no one else. Kharti’s plan was if Toya doesn’t get pregnant with a boy, she'll get rid of the baby or give it up for adoption.

Kharti said not only was Toya desperate for money, but she would also hold our secret forever. That, on top of the fact that she felt Toya wasn’t my type because she wasn't skinny like her. Little did she know that wasn’t a deal breaker at all. I don’t lift weights and have all this dick for nothing. I like women of all sizes as long as they’re pretty and take care of their hygiene. I enjoyed Toya the other night and planned to enjoy her a little bit more while making shit happen on the surrogacy side.

I inhaled the blunt I was smoking as I watched one of the Essex funeral vans backing in to drop off that little nigga Smoke’s body to be embalmed after leaving the coroner’s office. I knew he was coming here before we even got the call because every black family in the city uses our funeral homes.

I blew smoke from my nose, flicked the ash off the end of the blunt, then put it out against the wood on the threshold before tucking what was left behind my ear.

The passenger door of the van swung open first, and Duke’s big ass foot hit the pavement before the rest of him even made it out. He grabbed the top of the door to pull himself up, then walked around the front of the van heavy and hard like he always moved, taking his sweet ass time like there wasn’t a dead nigga in the back defrosting.

“Hurry your big ass up and bring the body inside.” I bugged the nigga on purpose.

“Man, fuck you.” Duke tugged his pants up as he came around to the back.