Page 252

The whole kitchen went quiet, like the house was trying to process what just happened, just like me. Nikki dropped before I could catch her. Her body hit the floor beside me by the table, and the folder slipped from her hands with papers flying everywhere. My ears were ringing as I lowered the gun and looked down at her.

“Fuck!”

All the years we had in, and this is how it ended because she couldn’t mind her fucking business. We knew so much about each other. I knew the face she made right before she started crying because she hated anybody seeing her vulnerable. She hated getting her feet touched, and how she would use a whole roll of paper towels while she cooked. Now she was laid out on her kitchen floor. All that fucking digging got her ass bleeding. She took the shit too far by threatening to step to Kyenna. This was not how I wanted this shit to end. I had come over here prepared for an argument. Maybe some fucking crying. I expected her to throw my little shit out of her house and tell me she hated me. Hell, after her finding out about Kyenna, I was willing to accept whatever. She had every right to be pissed. I hated that I lied for so long and fucked around behind her back. Then I sat right at her table and told her I wasn’t going to stop pursuing Kyenna. That alone probably made me the worst nigga she had ever dealt with.

What she held in her hand changed everything. I looked at the papers scattered around her. This shit was bigger than me fucking Kyenna. I put the gun on the table and knelt to start gathering everything. The first few pages were things I recognized immediately. The page that she had flipped was close to her head; when I grabbed it, text messages were staring back at me. The rest of the papers were King Family business.

“How the fuck did you get this shit?”

She had copies of contracts, old text messages from numbers that were no longer active. It was stuff in this stack that I hadn’t seen in years. Some of it by itself wouldn’t mean anything to a person who didn’t know what they were looking at. The last thing I needed was Kyenna getting this and then having questions that I didn’t have the answers to. I placed the papers back in the folder and looked at Nikki again. Shit was still crazy that she was lying here dead. The woman that I said I loved. The anger came back because it was easier than everything else I was feeling. She could’ve confronted me about Kyenna, and I would’ve been fine with it. Hell, she could’ve revealed the shit to my family, and I still would not have given a fuck. It wasn’t like my sister hadn’t picked up on the shit. I could have handled being exposed as a cheating ass nigga. What I couldn’t handle was her walking into Kyenna’s house with this damn folder.

I stood and grabbed Nikki’s phone from the counter. Flipping it up, I entered her code. That made me realize just how fucked up our relationship had gotten. I knew the passcode to her phone but had no idea she was following me for weeks. My first stop was our text thread, and all the memories and texts between us went on until my thumb got tired of flipping. Nikki had nothing out of the ordinary in her text. I went to her email, and she had nothing but business shit. Where I did find information was in her cloud storage. Nikki had all the files that were in the folder on her phone. Nikki might not have been built for the streets, but she wasn’t dumb. She had enough sense to know if she was going to confront me with something serious, she needed protection. That meant there was a chance somebody else knew. The next thing I grabbed was her laptop. She had it protected with a password. I tried everything and had to stop before I locked myself out.

“Think, Meek.”

Then I remembered she used to joke that all her passwords were variations of the same phrase because she couldn’t remember shit. I typed, and the laptop came to life. I went through all her shit. She had pictures of at least three of my warehouses. She had Kyenna’s name searched so many times that I had lost count. Nikki searched property records on the compound. Her ass wasn’t just suspicious. This bitch was building a case on my whole family. Nikki searched for how to encrypt files and emails, and how to automatically send documents if something happened to you. All I could do was pull the chair out and sit down.

“Bitch, you were snakin’ me the whole time.”

I cleaned my hands, grabbed my phone, and called the one person I trusted for issues like this. It was late, so I knew he was asleep.

“This better be important,” he said, half asleep.

“I need you.”

I could hear shuffling. “What happened?”

“I need a house cleaned up.”

There was silence.

“How clean?”

I looked down at Nikki. “Like no one was ever here.”

“Send the address.”

“I need you to come alone,” I told him.

“You know I don’t work alone.”

“This one, I need you alone.”

“Meek–”

“I’ll pay whatever.”

The phone disconnected. I sent the address and went back to work. There was no way I was leaving everything for somebody else to clean up. I grabbed gloves from underneath the sink and started going through Nikki’s shit piece by piece. There was nothing left untouched. She had another flash drive in her work bag and another copy of screenshots tucked in a magazine under her mattress. That shit pissed me off. I couldn’t believe that she was planning this shit over some pussy. Nikki had been preparing for this conversation for some time.

By the time my guy pulled into the driveway, I had a pile of anything I thought could connect her digging back to me. He walked in carrying two large black bags and stopped when he saw Nikki. His eyes met mine.

“Don’t ask me shit. That’s how our contract is set up,” I told him. “I need her gone. Car too.”

“You want it to look like she left?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s more work, Meek.”