The Family Business 3(16)

“Well, I’m going to leave you boys to talk.” She kissed Daryl’s forehead. “Love you. Don’t stay up too late.”

“Love you too,” Daryl said. “And please make sure you turn the oxygen on, babe.”

Even after she closed the bedroom door, I could still hear the sickly woman coughing. My uneasiness must have been written on my face, because Daryl came to her defense in a hurry.

“Don’t judge her. I love her.”

“Enough to marry her?”

“Yeah, can you believe it?”

“Honestly,” I said, “I can’t.”

A deep sadness passed over him. “She’s got cancer, Vegas. She only has a short time to live, and I’m going to be here for her, no matter what. Which is why I was about to tell you that I can’t come back.”

I pressed a little harder, not wanting to accept his decision as final. It may sound cold, considering how sick his wife was, but my family was in dire circumstances. “Dee, please. The family needs you. I need you, bro.”

“I’m sorry. She’s been too good to me. She’s been there for me when I needed her most. You know you and the family mean the world to me. I owe you all more than I could ever repay you in a lifetime, but I won’t abandon her, man. She’s my family too.”

I have to say I was a little disappointed in Daryl. As tight as we had been, and as much as my father had done for him over the years, I never would have expected him to say no when I came looking for him. But I saw that he wasn’t going to change his mind. Daryl had family of his own now, and he needed to tend to her. I decided to let things rest—at least for now.





Sonya





10


You know, I never used to understand people who talked about committing suicide. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that anything could be so bad you’d want to take your own life. Well, that had changed, because in the past few days I’d come to the conclusion that without Junior, life just wasn’t worth living anymore. There is something so brutal about having that kind of love and losing it; it’s almost better to never have had it at all. What made it even worse was that I knew he still loved me as much as I loved him. If he’d abandoned me or left me for another woman, I could have wallowed in my anger. Instead, I had left him. Not that I’d been given a choice, with Xavier threatening to kill him and his entire family. So, I’d been seriously considering taking my life to get this intense pain over with.

I didn’t want to go out bloody or suffer in any way, so this morning I’d laid out a bottle of sleeping pills next to my favorite bottle of wine. I figured it wouldn’t be that hard; all I had to do was take a couple of handfuls of pills, chase them down with wine, and then go to sleep and never wake up again. In all honesty, the only thing holding me back was the fact that my death wouldn’t guarantee the safety of Junior or his family. Xavier hated losing anything that he considered his property, and it would be just like him to try to make Junior pay for my final choice. He’d never consider that he was the one to drive me to take my life by keeping me away from the man I loved. No, that would never enter his mind because that would mean he was at fault, and he had too much of a God complex to ever admit he was wrong about something.

I walked wearily over to the table and poured myself a drink as my phone started to ring. I stared at it, wanting to pick it up because I knew it was Junior. He’d been calling constantly ever since I left his house, but I hadn’t answered any of his calls. I couldn’t. Whenever I felt myself growing weak, I recalled the image of his mother’s desperate face as she held that knife to my throat, and I let it ring. I did not want to have to face that woman again and explain to her that I couldn’t stay away from her son, even though I had promised to never go near him again. I couldn’t risk it, knowing what Xavier would do to that family. In the years since my husband had gone to prison, he’d become far more dangerous than he’d ever been before, and the types of people he dealt with would do anything for him, including wipe out an entire family if he asked.

I sipped my wine, making my way over to the living room window to peek out. The blue sedan was still parked across the street with someone sitting in the driver’s seat. I didn’t know if they were staking me out in shifts or what, but that car hadn’t been moved since I came home from the Duncan estate three nights ago. They weren’t even trying to hide their presence from me. No, like everything else, Xavier was trying to send me a message, letting me know I was a prisoner in my own home.

“I’m not going to let you win, Xavier,” I said out loud, finishing off my wine then heading to the bathroom to take a much-needed shower. In the three days since I’d returned from Junior’s, I hadn’t showered or slept, and I had barely eaten. I’d called my job and taken a leave of absence, because the last thing I could imagine was taking care of anyone else right now. As a nurse, I was accustomed to being the calm in the storm, but if I walked into that hospital in my current state, my boss would probably try to admit me into the psych ward.

The shower helped to revive me enough that when I emerged from the bathroom a while later wearing the tightest, most revealing dress I owned and plenty of makeup, I felt a new determination. Everything about my attire was chosen to be a gigantic “f*ck you,” and for a second it actually made me laugh. On my way to the front door, I stopped and scooped up the bottle of pills from the table. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure how this was going to go down, but if I had to die tonight, then so be it. I planned on making sure Xavier would witness it firsthand.