ChapterSeventeen
Skai
I open the door and there is a loud clank behind me but before I can turn to see what happened I hear Uncle Asher say, “Lynn.” Lynn, Lynn, Lynn. I roll the name around my mind trying to remember why that name is important. And like a Mack truck it hits me. “Is this the Lynn from your club that changed the angle of the camera?” I say looking at the chick standing in the doorway looking like she hasn’t seen the inside of a shower in weeks. “Yes,” Uncle Asher responds, and I turn to look at him. He seems frozen in place, well I’m not. When I turn around, I reach back and punch her dead in the face, and rock her clock. I grab her by the collar of her shirt and hit her again. Blood is freely flowing, and she is screaming and trying to pry my fingers from her shirt. I hit her three more times, once in the eye, once on her nose, and I hear bone cracking, and once in her mouth. “I know you didn’t bitch!” I scream in her face as I pull her by the collar of her shirt and throw her into the house. “You helped get my uncle arrested because of the stupid shit you did!” When she scrambles up on her hands and knees to try and crawl away, I kick her so hard on her side Gerard Butler would have been proud to have me as one of his 300. She slides across the floor with the force of the kick and by the time she stops I am there, dressed pulled up to my upper thighs and I straddle of her and punch her again. “For all the time he spent in jail and with an ankle monitor on him, I am going to beat your ass! You’re going to wish your ass stayed hidden.” I tell her as I grab her by the hair and bang her head on the floor. By this time, she puts her hands up to her face to try to deflect the blows and everyone moves to grab me off of her. Arms wrap around my waist and pull up off the bleeding, crying, terrified woman lying on the floor in the fetal position, and I know instantly its Jabarri who’s holding me. Once he has me clear of her, he sets me back on my feet and I try to rush back over there to finish what I started but he stands in my way blocking me.
“Move Jabarri!” I rant at him.
“No Skai,” he says calmly which only fuels my anger.
“She deserved it and more.”
“I agree, but you’ve done enough. Okay?”
“No! It’s not enough.”
“Come on let’s go for a walk.” He looks over his shoulder and motions for Alayna to come with us and he forces me out the house to take a walk and calm down.
Asher
Lennox, Brooklyn, and Aryan, help Lynn with the various injuries she sustained in that quick but brutal fight. That little Tasmanian devil did all that damage in a matter of seconds. Once Lennox and Brooklyn leave the room to take Lynn to the bathroom, Atlas says, “Damn I think I trained her better than I thought I did. She did that in under three minutes. I was so impressed by the ass whooping she was dishing out, I completely forgot we should have been trying to stop it.” He says like a proud parent, but I couldn’t agree more. I know I shouldn’t be, but I am touched by Skai’s defense of me, even though it was a savage defense. Lynn didn’t stand a chance in hell against Skai. “I think we all taught her too good.” I stated.
“Let’s not forget, when she came to us, she was carrying a gun around in her purse and was well equipped to use it,” Josh says, and we all nod our agreement.
“Well, we enhanced her previous training.” Anson says. “Jabarri, please tell me you got that on camera.”
“I got it.” He proclaims. “Skai’s going to be on World Star!” and we all laugh.
“Y’all are laughing at that young woman who just got her ass handed to her, literally. You all should be ashamed of yourselves.” Savvy says.
“We’re not!” we all say in unison, and she shakes her head.
“Says the woman who slammed a woman’s face into a dinner plate and proceeded to climb across the table and beat her ass at a graduation party.” Peter says.
“That’s different.” Savvy huffs indignantly.
“How?” Joseph asks.
“It was me.” She says deadpan and we all break out in laughter again. A few minutes later they return from the bathroom with a patched up and clean Lynn. Lennox sits her at her chair and Jaasiel offers her a plate from which she shovels the food in her mouth despite the busted lips. We give her a minute to eat and drink before I begin the questions. I am not even sure why we are letting her eat. But up until the night Antonia was killed, she was a good employee. A sweet, hard-working young woman, whom I truly liked. She could have been my kid sister or a niece. She has information about that night, and I can finally get justice for Antonia.
“We’ve been looking for you for a while Lynn, why did you come back now? You need to tell us what happened that night and why you ran.”
Lynn
Everything hurts right now; I didn’t expect a warm welcome, but I certainly didn’t expect to get beat up either. The night my world came crashing down I made another stupid decision to run. Actually, it was a series of stupid decisions that led me to this moment. I was doing good balancing everything quite well, paying for school, books, supplies and rent, then I lucked up on this job that pays damn good and that’s when I got comfortable and stupid. I made sure I kept my finances on a tight leash to make sure I could cover everything. Once I got this job and actually had surplus finances, I got lax and then everything happened at once, my roommate moved out and I couldn’t find another person, the apartment complex decided to almost double the rent, and my tuition was due for the upcoming semester. Even though I was spending more I still had some savings, at least that’s what I thought. When I went to use my savings to pay for tuition and books, I realized my roommate cleaned out my savings.
I was in a real bind, and I wasn’t sure how to get out of it. I was in my last semester, and already had a job lined up provided I could graduate in three months. My parents couldn’t help me financially, I was working so hard to get the degree because I wanted to help them out financially. It was a mess, so when a classmate of mine suggested a friend to borrow the money from—even against all the warning bells going off in my head—I took the money. Then the loan came due which was fine, but the interest... I realized I didn’t have enough to pay back the loan. In response to me not being able to pay the loan, I was told I could work the money off in “other” ways.
That night at the club I was complaining to a coworker about all the money I needed to come up with and fast. I was sitting at the bar on break sipping a water and running my mouth, completely oblivious to the fact that anyone would want to listen in on my conversation, but someone did. So, when I went back to work that night in the security booth and was approached by a man offering me double what I needed for such a simple request…once again I did it. It seemed harmless, until it wasn’t. Once I realized what I had allowed to happen, I took all the money and ran. I ran like my life depended on it because it did. I used every trick I could think of from every crime drama I had ever watched and stayed off the grid. It wasn’t until I had almost run out of money and dared take a job that someone found me. I don’t know how I knew the two women coming up the stairs was for me I just did and I ran again. But with no money, and people hot on my trail I decided the safest thing for me to do was come to my boss and plead my case.
I relay the entire story to Asher, from beginning to end, leaving nothing out. He looks so disappointed in me for many different reasons.
“Lynn, why didn’t you just come to me? I would have given you the money to pay your tuition. We build and own houses, I could have put you in an affordable housing situation and all of this could have been avoided.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t want you knowing how messed up I was. What if you fired me or something for being too much of a hassle? I couldn’t risk it Mr. Gideon, your job was all I had left. Everything just kept crashing down around me and no matter how hard I tried once I got one thing under control another thing went wrong,” I tell him through tears.
“But once they found me,” I say gesturing to the two women who came to my room that day, “I knew I had run out of time.”
“So, you decided to come here, to the man you fucked over for refuge?” one of the women asked me.