*UNEDITED*
(NOTE: Contains explicit language and adult themes suitable for ages 16+)
© K.L. Hall and www.authorklhall.com, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to K.L. Hall and www.authorklhall.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Prologue
“Bitch, did you think I wouldn’t find out?” Whip roared as his large, calloused hand tore across the side of my face.
My cheek stung like I’d just been attacked by a swarm of bees. I cut my eyes at him from the floor where his smack landed me. He narrowed his eyes and then tossed a wad of one-hundred-dollar bills into the air. I looked up at the money as it rained down to the floor around me and shook my head. I wanted to fight back. I wanted to cuss, scream and swear, but I didn’t. I knew better. He’d caught my ass red handed.
“Whip, baby, look! I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry!” I muttered as I held my burning cheek, trying to ease the pain.
“You’re sorry, huh? Oh, you ain’t seen sorry yet! Are you trying to get me killed, huh? Was that your fuckin’ plan, bitch?”
Truth be told, it wasn’t, but as far as I was concerned, if it happened it would’ve been icing on the cake. All I was trying to do was skim some money off the top of whatever he was bringing in, stash it away for a rainy day and when I had a good enough cushion, I was going to leave his no-good ass and never look back. To date, I had five-hundred thousand of his “hard-earned” money stashed in different places all over the three-bedroom home he and I shared together. The problem was, he’d just found twenty thousand of it and tossed it all on the floor around me like it was Monopoly money. But, Whip wasn’t kidding. He was pissed.
“Answer me!” He yelled as he drew his hand back and struck me again.
My chin dipped down toward my chestas tears dripped out of my eyes. I watched specks of blood drip from my lip onto the taupe bedroom carpet beneath me. The tart taste of the blood pooling on the inside of my lip left a sour taste in my mouth. It was then that I weighed the pros and cons of my decision to bite the shit out of the hand that had been feeding me for the past year. I’d finally learned what it tasted like.
“No, baby, it wasn’t.”
“Haven’t I given you everything your ass ever wanted? Huh?”
“Yes, yes, baby you have!”
“Then why the fuck would you steal twenty thousand fuckin’ dollars from me, huh?”
I shook my head slowly, purposefully not looking at him. “I…I don’t know, baby. Just for security or stability…”
“Stability? Bitch, I’m the most stable thing in your raggedy ass life!”
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry. Can you please forgive me? I’ll do anything!” I cried.
His look softened a bit and an unreadable look crossed his face. I exhaled, thinking my begging had finally gotten through to him.
“You wanna make it up to me?” He asked with his lip curled in disgust.
“Yes! Yes, I do!” I nodded. “I’ll do anything! Anything you want!”
Whip cast his eyes down at me with his forehead wrinkled and his fists balled tightly at his side. Beads of sweat were nudged in the creases of his forehead and on the bridge of his flaring nostrils. The two of us stared at each other in silence. His chest pumping up and down from anger, mine from fear.
“You can make it up to me by fucking dying!” He yelled as he wrapped his hands around my hair and started dragging me out of the bedroom.
I started kicking, screaming and begging for him to let me go, but the more I squirmed, the harder he pulled. The carpet caused a burning sensation against my thighs as he dragged me down the hallway toward the stairs. He pulled so hard, I could feel my scalp bleeding as my body hit each stair going down.
“You ain’t shit but an ungrateful ass, lyin’ ass bitch! I should’ve left you right where I fuckin’ found you in that goddamn strip club!”
As soon as I hit the bottom step, Whip landed a punch to my ribs. A pained expression crossed my face and I screamed out in agony. He left me lying on the floor with tears streaming down my face, begging for him to call 9-1-1 because I could barely stand to breathe. I couldn’t stop the tears from flowing no matter how much it pained me to cry. He came back moments later and stood in a wide stance, hovering over me. I glanced up at him through a scrunched brow and noticed the gun strapped to his hip. My body tensed as I started thinking about the worst-case scenarios.
Instead, he scooped me into his arms and carried me into the single-car garage attached to the house. The clicking sound of the car unlocking put me at ease and I let my body relax against his hard chest. I thought he was going to take me to the hospital so that I could receive proper medical care, but instead, he walked around to the back of his BMW and tossed me in the trunk like garbage.
I looked up at him with tears in my eyes. “Whip, what—what are you doing?” I trembled.
He rested his hand on the lid and scowled at me. I’d never seen so much hate in his eyes.
“Shut the fuck up!” He yelled, slamming the trunk.
The cold tone in his voice lifted the hairs on the nape of my neck, instantly sending panic racing through my body. I heard the engine start and the car slowly ease out of the driveway. My mind kept replaying the events over and over in my head as I screamed for help.
“Whip! Baby no! No! Please! Please don’t fuckin’ do this!” I yelled.
It took everything in me to keep yelling. With every breath I took, it felt as if a knife was cutting through my ribs. I gripped my mid-section so hard that my knuckles turned white. I kept wishing I had enough energy to try and kick the back lights out like I’d seen people do in movies, but all I could do was lay there. I tried closing my eyes to focus on where he was taking me, but he kept taking swift turns and speeding so fast that my stomach churned. Everything was moving too quickly to process. Amidst the beeping horns and whoosh of cars speeding past as he picked up speed, he turned up the radio to make sure the bass from the speakers drowned out my sparse cries for help and the rattling of what I knew were my broken bones.
It was that moment when I knew I was going to leave the world exactly how I’d come in, bloody and broke. Accepting my fate wasn’t as hard as accepting the fact that Whip’s ass would live to see another day after the way he’d treated me. As I started to come to terms with dying, the car came to a sudden stop and everything went silent. The engine had been shut off and I couldn’t hear the sound of the radio anymore. Right before I drew in a deep breath at my last attempt to save my own ass, I heard yelling and then a loud thud right against the top of the trunk. My fingertips latched across my lips and I bit the inside of my cheek in an attempt to stay quiet.
“So you dodgin’ my calls now, nigga? Did you think I wouldn’t fuckin’ find you, mothafucka?” I heard a man say.
“Lourde, nigga it’s not even like that, I swear. I can explain. Just give me a minute. I was right in the middle of somethin’.” Whip begged, sounding like the true bitch he was.
“Give you a minute to do what? Steal more of my mothafuckin’ money and waste more of my time? You better stop while you’re ahead, before I slide your head clean off your neck, nigga!”
“Lourde, it’s not even like that, I swear to God!”
“Okay, so tell me what it is then. I’m all ears.”
“It’s my girl. She—she fuckin’ stole from me!”
“Your girl, huh?”
“Yeah! I found a stash of twenty G’s today! I know there’s probably more. Just give me some time to find it and I’ll get it back to you, plus interest! I swear!”
“Plus interest, huh?”
“Yeah, whatever you want. I swear to God on my motha, I got you!”
“And where is this girl of yours?”
My insides twisted as I waited to hear Whip tell him I was stuffed in the trunk, but instead, I heard the lock click. I laid there with one hand over my mouth and the other wrapped around my ribs. My eyes grew wide as soon as I caught eyes with a man who had his gun pointed right at the center of my forehead. He was standing his ground with his legs planted wide. My skin was prickling with fear as my eyes darted from left to right, trying to see where we were. We’d somehow ended up in a deserted underpass right underneath the main highway.
“Well, well. What do we have here?” He asked.
“See! I was gonna handle her ass for stealing your money! I wasn’t about to let either one of us go out like that!” Whip added.
With his nose wrinkled, he cut his eyes at Whip. “Shut the fuck up, nigga.” He growled.
The man looked back at me and lowered his gun. The tightness in my chest increased and I could feel my body temperate rising to unhealthy levels. Against my better judgment, I darted my eyes over to his, staring widely into his cold, chocolate brown eyes. He clenched his jaw and then spoke.
“Your bitch ass boyfriend is stupid. He owes me a lot of money. Would you happen to know anything about that?”
With tremors in my voice, I replied, “No...no, I don’t.”
Trying to calmly articulate my words with a trembling jaw was nearly impossible. His face was set in a hard expression as he stared at me in silence. I could feel my pulse in my throat as I waited for him to speak or some distraction that would force him to divert his eyes away from mine. I could tell he was trying to read me. For that reason, I tried my best to keep a straight face, but the pain radiating from my side prevented that. All I could hear was the sound of vehicles zooming on the road overhead and droplets of rain tapping against the trunk lid.
“You see, that’s what I thought.”
“How…how much does he owe you?” I asked, choking out my words.
“If my memory serves me correctly, it’s about five-hundred thousand dollars, and I take that shit real personal,” he said.
I pinched my lips together and nodded slowly. Fuck,I thought. He squared his shoulders as he turned his attention away from me and aimed his gun at Whip.
“What happens when you take a loan from the bank and don’t pay it back?” He asked.
Whip stared at him, mute. “Answer me, mothafucka!”
“I…I don’t know. They take your shit back.” He stuttered with an ugly twist of his mouth.
While gulping down breaths to keep quiet, I stared at Whip, waiting to see him use the bullying tactics he’d always used on me. Instead, his hands began to tremble. It was the first time I’d seen him cower in front of anyone. I darted a look at the man holding the gun and my pulse jittered. There was no way Whip or I were making it out alive.
“That’s exactly right. You borrow from the bank and they take your shit. You borrow from me and I take your life,” he said in an eerily controlled tone.
“C’mon now, please! Look at that bitch! She’s a liar! I know you see that shit!” Whip yelled, pointing his index finger at me like a rat.
The man turned back to me, sending my self-esteem plummeting to my feet. It was almost as if he could see right through me.
“One thing about me, I can’t stand a mothafucka that lies. With that being said, I don’t trust either one of you mothafuckas! Now, since it was this mothafucka’s responsibility to account for all of my money and he failed, and you say you don’t know anything about it, what you think I should do about your boyfriend?”
“You’re—you’re asking me?” I asked with a weakened voice.
With a scathing tone he replied, “Yeah, I am.”
My eyes gazed at the man that I’d grown to hate over the past year and then dashed over to the man who sounded as if he could possibly grant my get out of death free card. My thoughts were spinning around my head like I was on a Tilt-A-Whirl. Life was all about choices, and I never wanted to be the victim of a nameless bullet even if I did deserve it. I had to do what was going to benefit me in the long run.
“Kill him.” I muttered.