Page 35 of Collateral Love
I heard another one of my baby’s screams. Then the line went dead.
I stared at my phone for one second. Then hit speed dial.
X answered on the first ring. “Yo.”
My voice dropped low into solid steel.
“Charles took YaYa.”
A beat of silence passed.
“He what?”
My knuckles were already cracked from gripping the wheel.
“It’s time for the King brothers to come out of retirement.”
Retirement was a myth.
That’s what I realized the second the line went dead.
You didn’t retire from power. You just stopped using it loudly. I stopped letting Crestwood see my teeth.
I took the exit ramp too fast, tires screeching like they understood what my chest refused to say out loud. My mindstayed ten moves ahead of my hands the way YaYa had trained it to move before the feeling arrived. We used to plan for shit like this. As much as it got on my fuckin’ nerves, I could hear her voice in my head telling me to not let grief turn into rage. Rage made men sloppy, and sloppy men buried what they loved.
But the feeling came anyway.
My wife was missing. Not late. Not “probably stuck in traffic.”
Taken.
And the Nigga who took her had just signed his death certificate in blood, whether he understood that or not.
I didn’t go home.
Home was where my twins were sleeping, soft, innocent, and safe, and I refused to let my rage touch them. I wouldn’t have my children remembering the night their father turned into something ancient.
Instead, I pulled into the underground garage beneath the west-side office. The one that didn’t exist on paper. The one the city couldn’t subpoena because the city didn’t know it existed.
The gate opened because it knew my car.
That was what the empire looked like when it stayed quiet.
I stepped out and felt the air shift—doors opening, men standing straight. These weren’t corner boys and crash dummies. These were soldiers. Disciplined, compartmentalized, trained to move like they had families to protect. Kenya helped me choose them, although they had no clue the first lady was my equal. Shit didn’t move unless she okayed it. I taught them structure, redundancy, and silence. Clean money bought access. Dirty money bought protection. Together, they bought time.
Nobody asked what happened because X made them all aware already.
“Lock it down,” I said.
The words traveled through the facility like a pressure change. Screens came alive—traffic cams, street feeds, plate readers, private systems that weren’t supposed to belong to anybody. Kenya had always insisted on redundancies. If one door closed, we built three more.
“Pull the street footage,” I said. “All angles. Last six hours.”
A tech nodded, fingers already flying.
“Call Miles,” I added. “Wake the whole fuckin’ team.”
Another nod.
