Page 11 of Collateral Love
Sometime after midnight, when the house had settled and the street outside went quiet, I got up and opened the small lockbox at the back of my closet.
Inside were things that didn’t belong to a nineteen-year-old girl with a scholarship and a careful smile.
Cash cleanly wrapped. Account numbers written in my own shorthand. A burner phone I’d never turned on in this house.
I ran my fingers over the edges of it all, grounding myself.
This wasn’t new.
I hadn’t stumbled into control because of Zayden King.
I’d been preparing for it long before he decided to bring his operation an hour out of Crestwood.
He didn’t know yet that he’d walked into a structure that already existed. I was already dealing at Cherry University, but I was building quietly—brick by brick. Zayden’s connections would amp up my operation.
Loving Chanel meant funding her law school dreams. I was saving for my Baby Bear’s future and for my brother, Jared’s, appeal attorney. It meant I needed money, and if that meant becoming something dangerous in the process?
So be it.
I closed the lockbox and turned out the light.
Tomorrow, the real work would begin.
I didn’t sleep much.
A Nigga wasn’t scared.Fear made you sloppy, and I’d been doing this too long to get sloppy over a woman with a mouth and a plan.
But Kenya wasn’t just a mouth.
She was math. And math didn’t care how hard you were. I could respect that type of hustle.
The morning after the library, I woke up with that tight feeling behind my ribs. The one that came when something didn’t add up the way it was supposed to. I lay there staring at the ceiling, replaying her voice, her posture, the way she didn’t flinch when I reached for my Glock in that study room.
Most people reacted to power.
Shemeasuredit.
That bothered me more than her pink gun ever could.
By noon, I was dressed and out the door.
Gray tee. Black jeans. Fresh Jordans. Nothing loud. I wasn’t going to war, but I wasn’t going to brunch either. The deli on Ninth had been around longer than most of the Niggas I knew. Old-school Jewish spot. No nonsense. Cash only. The owner didn’t ask questions as long as nobody made him regret it.
We considered it neutral ground in Southside Crestwood.
Xavier slid into the passenger seat as I pulled off.
“You look irritated,” he said.
“Mind your business,” I replied.
He laughed. “That college girl got you thinking.”
“She got me calculating,” I responded. “Big difference.”
Xavier leaned back, stretching his long legs. Eighteen and already too comfortable in the world. Pretty-boy syndrome. Quiet confidence. The kind that made people want to protect him or test him, but I raised my little brother always to be ready to lay a Nigga down if they tested too hard.
“You meeting her today?” he asked.
