Page 24 of Love At Close Range

Reiana was already questioning me more than I liked, and the last thing I needed was for whatever I had going on in the streets to find its way anywhere near her or Rhyse. She didn’t know about this side of my life, and I wanted to keep it that way. Rhyse might not have liked my ass, but he was still a kid, and neither one of them had anything to do with the choices I made.

The more I thought about Cyrus, the more I knew there were only two possibilities. Either that nigga had really decided the loss wasn’t worth taking any further, or he was somewhere putting together a move I couldn’t see yet. I didn’t believe the first one for shit, which meant I needed to be ready for the second.

Whatever Cyrus was doing, I needed to find out before he had the chance to bring that shit to my front door.

10

Lennox

earlier the same day…

Ihad been following the tracker on Pierce’s truck since earlier that morning. When it stopped at a breakfast spot, I pulled up far enough away to keep from being noticed and waited. Cyrus asking me to hold off on the contract didn’t mean I was going to stop watching the nigga. The more I knew about Pierce’s routine, the easier my job would be when it was time to handle him.

Almost an hour later, I saw him coming out and grabbed my camera. Reiana was walking beside him, which didn’t surprise me this time. I already knew they were together after seeing them at The Blue Room the other day, even if I still didn’t like the shit. I raised the camera and snapped a few pictures of them while they headed toward Pierce’s truck.

Before I could lower it, a little boy came outside behind them. I kept the camera up and watched him catch up with Reiana. She turned toward him, then reached over and grabbed his hand. I figured he was her son because there wasn’t anything about their interaction that left room for me to think otherwise. I snapped another picture and zoomed in on him. I adjusted the lens and looked again because there was no fucking way… the little nigga looked just like me.

“What the fuck?” I muttered as I lowered the camera long enough to look at him without it.

I brought it right back up and took another picture when he turned in my direction. The first one had me thinking, but this second one confirmed my suspicions. He favored Reiana, but all I saw was myself and Lennyn in this little boy.

I kept taking pictures while Pierce opened the passenger door for Reiana. The boy stood beside her waiting to get in, and I got another clear shot of his face before he climbed into the back. I lowered the camera and stared at the screen.

Ain’t no fucking way...

I pulled up the pictures I had just taken and started going through them one by one. Every fucking picture gave me something else to look at. His eyes… his brows. The way his face frowned up in one of the shots. Even that little irritated look on his face was all too familiar.

How old was this little boy?

That was the first question that came to mind, and the answer I came up with had me looking at the pictures again. He looked about seven or eight. Reiana had been gone eight years, so the shit adds up.

“Ain’t this some shit?” I mumbled as I sat the camera in my lap and looked back toward Pierce’s truck.

I wasn’t about to convince myself of some shit without talking to Reiana, but I wasn’t stupid either. I knew what the fuck I looked like, and I knew what the fuck I saw when I looked at her son. If that was my son, why the fuck didn’t I know about him?

I gave them enough time to get away before I pulled out and headed back toward the hotel. I kept replaying the last few minutes while I drove. Reiana had a son who was old enough for the timeline to make sense and looked enough like me for me to spot it from across a fucking parking lot. If he was mine, that meant I had a son walking this Earth who didn’t know shit about me. I had a daughter who I’d been there for from the second she came into this world. I knew Lennyn’s favorite foods… what made her mad… what scared her, and what she was going to ask me for before she even asked. There wasn’t a part of her life that I didn’t know shit about. Now I was sitting here trying to figure out if I had another child whose name I didn’t even fucking know. That pissed me off more than anything. Reiana knew me. Whatever happened between us, she knew I would never willingly leave my child out here without me. We could hate each other for the rest of our fucking lives, but that had nothing to do with my responsibility as a father.

I gripped the steering wheel while I ran back through the end of our relationship for probably the first time in years. There had been too much anger between us back then and too much shit I refused to revisit once she was gone. I convinced myself she left because that was what she wanted, and after enough time passed… I stopped looking for any other answer.

Seeing that little boy changed all of that. I didn’t know his name… I didn’t know his exact age, but I knew he was mine. There was no doubt about that shit.

***

By the time I got back to the hotel, my mind was going in a million directions. I dropped my keys on the desk, opened my laptop, and pulled up the pictures I took outside the breakfast spot. The clearest one had Reiana standing beside the little boy while Pierce was a few feet away, and I zoomed in on his face again. Looking at the picture up close didn’t change shit because the little nigga still looked like me.

I minimized the pictures and started looking into Reiana. Finding people wasn’t hard when you had the right connections, and I had more than enough people I could call when I needed information that wasn’t readily available. It didn’t take long before I had her address in Ashmere Park and information on RÉIA Facility Services pulled up.

Reiana had really built some shit for herself. RÉIA Facility Services had multiple contracts and almost forty employees. That let me know she was on her shit. Back when we were together, she was finishing school and talking about wanting to have something of her own one day. Apparently, she figured out exactly what that something was and turned it into a seven-figure company.

I sat there reading through the information for another minute before moving on. I found information on her cousin Mona. When Reiana left, so did Mona. She was Monica Scott-Ross now, married to Quentin Ross with kids and living not far from Reiana. I knew exactly who Quentin was. I did a few jobs for him as well as supplied him with a few guns. If Reiana left Cannon Hills pregnant, Mona knew about it. There wasn’t any way around that shit because Reiana wouldn’t have gone through something like that without Mona knowing every detail. That didn’t mean I was blaming Mona for anything when I still didn’t know what happened, but I knew for a fact she could fill in some blanks if it came down to it.

The next name I found was Taryn Michaels. I didn’t know shit about her, so I dug a little deeper and found out she originally came into Reiana’s life as the nanny when her son was younger. Somewhere along the way, that changed, and now she was one of Reiana’s closest friends. Between Mona and Taryn, Reiana had built herself a solid circle in Arbor Point.

I finally searched the name that mattered the most to me and pulled up Rhyse Scott. He was seven years old, and his birthday was September ninth, meaning he would be eight in a few months. I read the birthday again and sat back in the chair. There wasn’t shit for me to calculate because I already knew where Reiana and I were eight years ago. We were together, and the timeline lined up exactly with the last months of our relationship.

I kept going and found that he attended Briar Glen Academy, but nothing came up about a father. I pulled the pictures back up and put the clearest one beside the information I found. Rhyse favored Reiana, but I could see myself too damn clearly to ignore it. The eyebrows, eyes, and that little frown he had in one of the pictures looked familiar because I had seen the same shit on my own face my whole life.

“Man, this shit is crazy,” I muttered as I rubbed my hand through my locs and continued staring at the screen. I still wanted to hear it from Reiana before I called that little boy my son, but at this point, I wasn’t expecting her answer to be anything other than yes.