Page 15 of When a Soul Cries

I thought that meant I had won.

Then Kai went to jail.

The state wanted to put my little brother away for the rest of his life.

For the first time, there wasn’t a phone call I could make or an amount of money I could spend that guaranteed I could protect him.

I watched Sugga sit behind him in that courtroom with her Bible pressed against her chest. She looked smaller every day.

The jokes stopped then.

There was nothing funny about hearing the word life connected to my little brother’s name. Nothing funny about watching officers lead him away in handcuffs while Sugga cried into my chest.

But the case against Kai started falling apart in ways nobody expected.

The detectives had built everything around evidence they claimed was airtight. A seized package. A weapon. Statements from two officers who swore they had followed procedure from the moment they arrested him.

They lied.

One of those officers had been dirty for years, taking money from dealers and planting evidence whenever it helped him close a case. The other had been covering for him. They thought Kai was an easy conviction because of our reputation, and they assumed nobody would question the chain of custody.

They were wrong.

A clerk found a discrepancy in the evidence log. The timestamp on the package didn’t match the arrest report. Security footage from the precinct showed one of the officers entering the evidence room alone after the property had supposedly been sealed.

Then the package disappeared.

The weapon disappeared too.

The department called it a clerical error. The prosecutor called it an unfortunate break in procedure.

Our attorney called it what it was.

Evidence tampering.

The dirty cops were arrested, but that didn’t erase the months Kai spent behind bars or the way Sugga aged in that courtroom. It didn’t erase the fear of hearing a judge say his name and sentence him to a life he hadn’t chosen.

The charges were dismissed when the state could no longer prove what had supposedly been in the evidence room.

Kai eventually came home, but the experience changed all three of us.

The night he walked through Sugga’s front door, I made the decision for both of us.

We were done.

I took the money we had made in the streets and put it into our first property. Then another. Then another. Kai questioned me at first, but once he saw the first return, he stopped asking questions and started finding buildings.

We didn’t leave the game because we became soft.

We left because we finally understood we had something worth living for.

Now every dollar connected to our names was legitimate. The same city that once whispered about what the Devereaux brothers did in the dark now invited us into brightly lit rooms to shake hands, pose for pictures, and cut ribbons.

People loved a redemption story when they didn’t know all the details.

Thirty minutes later, I was pushing a cart through the grocery store with Sugga’s list open on my phone. The woman had requested enough food to host Thanksgiving, Christmas, and somebody’s repast.

I grabbed flour, sugar, cinnamon, butter, and the softest peaches I could find. I added the greens she claimed nobody cleaned correctly except her, two packages of chicken wings, and smoked turkey.