Baby Momma 4

by Ni'chelle Genovese

  I couldn’t wait to meet this little person who sounded like he was the best parts of me and Swiss all rolled into one little being. A part of me was worried about how I’d get him from Shandy and whether he’d like me once we met. I didn’t even know if I’d be a good mommy or where we’d go after this. We wouldn’t be staying at my parents’ forever. In the space of a night, I’d gone from no babies to having a toddler and a baby. My life had a crazy way of never going the way I expected.

  It didn’t look like anyone was home when we pulled up at Tariq’s place. There weren’t any cars in the driveway, and no lights were on inside. Genesis called my phone, making us both jump.

  “Girl, you still got that damn thing?” Momma grabbed my phone slamming it onto the dashboard before snatching the battery out of the back and throwing it out the window.

  “If whoever you’re running from has even a lick of sense, they can track you. Get a new phone and a new number.”

  I hadn’t even thought about it. But knowing Genesis, if he was calling now, it was only because he’d realized I’d left him and his precious Kenisha. The reality of my life was slowly starting to sink in. I was about to be a real full-time single mom with two kids. But I’d also been kidnapped, shot at, beat up, and I survived a jump from a bridge. As scary as being a single mommy sounded, it was nowhere near as scary as all of the other shit I’d survived. For the first time ever, I could honestly say that I was ready to take on the world. And Shandy was my first stop.

  The plan we came up with really wasn’t much of a plan. Momma was gonna go up on the porch and ring the bell and knock like she had an emergency and was looking for Tariq. We only hoped that Shandy would answer the door. I pulled the blazer off, parking down in front of a house a few doors down. I made sure I had the keys and all before creeping around the side of Tariq’s place. There weren’t any lights on at the front of the house, but there were plenty on around back. The doorbell echoed through the house, and I stood on my tippy-toes to peek in between the small crack between the blinds.

  It was the room from my nightmares. The one I’d laid in for months while Tariq watched over me. Shandy’s silhouette was all of what I could see at first. She climbed off the bed, taking the sheets with her, leaving some dude naked on the bed. I squinted to see where she was going . . . but not before I saw my daddy sit up on the bed. I dropped into the bushes beside the house with my heart in my throat. I could hear movement from the window on the other side, and I eased up. Tariq had a handful of wheat-colored hair wrapped around his fist. Sweat poured down his back, pooling in the dip above his ass. Heather’s head was tossed back; her eyes were closed in ecstasy. There were two identical cribs in the room with them, and my heart stopped in my chest. I know these niggas were not fucking in the same room the babies were sleeping in!

  Momma was on the porch knocking and ringing the hell out of the doorbell. I slid around the side of the house and caught her attention.

  “Abort mission,” I whispered, scared that she’d spook Shandy into running with the kids.

  “Huh?”

  “Shhhhh. Abort mission.” I pointed in the direction of the Chevy.

  The woman had the nerve to shake her damn head at me.

  “Yo’ daddy will bring Tariq out here so we can handle this shit,” she hissed at me in a sassy whisper. She pulled out her phone dialing Daddy’s number.

  I cringed.

  “What the fuckin’ fuck,” Momma blurted out from the front porch.

  Daddy’s phone had started ringing from inside the house. He had the ringer set really loud, always had it that way because he’d never feel it when it vibrated and he wouldn’t hear it if it wasn’t turned up super loud. “Footsteps in the Dark,” by the Isley Brothers played loud and long in the house.

  Momma hung up, and the song stopped. I leaned against the side of the house. Shandy was the worst kind of friend a bitch could ever have. I probably wouldn’t even get the chance to kill her for all the bullshit she’d done. Not if Momma got her hands on her first. I didn’t know what to do with myself. If I walked around to the front door there was a chance Shandy wouldn’t open it at all once I was spotted. The humidity and my nerves made sweat bead on my forehead. I inhaled, smelling the rain that was coming and the rosebushes on the side of the house that’d just started to bloom. The sky was dark from the clouds gathering in the distance. Lightning flashed every so often, lighting up the sky. I stood waiting but was completely unsure of what I was waiting for.

  NOVIE

  35

  Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself

  My blood turned to ice water in my veins. A hand closed over my mouth and something was thrown over my head, handcuffs were tight around my wrists. Rough carpet scraped up my arms and elbows. I hit whatever it was so hard it hurt my ribs.

  Metal slammed shut, and I was rocked into motion. I lay still and listened, trying to figure out who’d grabbed me and where they were taking me. Whoever it was stayed quiet, but I could hear someone nose-breathing from the passenger seat so I knew if I tried to do anything, there would be two people to contend with instead of one. The tires rumbled across the road. We were moving fast from the sound of it. I rolled across the back on a sharp turn. The darkness of the hood over my head and the motion of the van or car was starting to make my stomach turn. When we finally stopped, someone grabbed me by my ankles, sliding me out of the vehicle. I kicked and fought back until I thought I’d pass out from doing so much.

  “Are you finally gonna put in some work, or do I have to do this job too?”

  I knew that voice. The question came from Genesis’s number one dick rider, a nigga everybody called Foreign. We already had enough bad blood between us. He yanked the hood off my head. I wasn’t trying to catch anymore so I buried my chin in my chest, avoiding his gaze. He walked over to post up near his partner Chief standing beside me. We both knew that this “job” Foreign was asking about really meant me.

  I almost laughed out loud at how stupid I’d been.

  Chief shifted his weight from foot to foot hesitating. He either had to piss some kind of bad, or he was avoiding the question.

  Foreign rolled his eyes and hissed through his teeth. “Move out of the way with your old soft ass. I got this, just like everything else. But you buying me a cheddar bacon burger from Five Guys when we get done.”

  Foreign looked foreign, like his name, with dark autumn-brown skin, pretty, naturally curly hair that he kept cut low on the sides, and vacant ice-blue eyes. They were glassy, empty points on his face that would’ve fit better on something without a conscience, like a snake or a cat. Permanent dark circles under his eyes made him look half man, half raccoon. Something about him had always made me uneasy. He just came off as shady, the type that’d steal from his boys and ask you to hide that shit when they came looking for it type of shady.

  Chief backed up so Foreign could take over.

  Foreign’s dirty nails dug into my elbow. It didn’t make any sense for a man as pretty as he was to come off so dusty and unpolished, but he did. Maybe he thought his good looks exempted him from maintaining good hygiene.

  Foreign reached into the back of his waistband. Don’t cry. You better not fucking cry, I chanted over and over to myself. They weren’t about to run back and tell that nigga how I cried and begged for my life or for him to have a change of heart. The tears still marched down my cheeks, even though I told them not to.

  Dread was tearing me up inside as I watched him go for his pistol. He waved it, motioning for me to turn and face the other direction. The nigga slid in, pressing himself up against my body until the short prickly hairs on his cheek brushed against the side of my face.

  “You know how baaad I been wanting to put something up in you? Just to see what made you sooooo fuckin’ special,” he admitted in a deep, ragged whisper. “Damn shame it’s gotta be this hot lead instead of this hot pipe.”

  I exhaled the air I’d been holding, relieved when he stepped back, pressing t
he heavy barrel of the gun between my shoulder blades. “Don’t be scared, heaven or hell awaits,” he cooed.

  I almost turned around to laugh in his face. I’d spent so much time playing hide-and-seek with the devil that I wasn’t even scared of hell anymore. Hell was empty. All those devils and demons had been right here the whole time.

  “I’m gonna make this as painless as possible, but I don’t want brains on my van. So walk,” he demanded.

  His orders were accented with the poke of the barrel into my back.

  Daddy had taught me more about guns by the time I was five than most people learned in their entire lives. Between the DEA’s drug raids and other dealers, he was so paranoid that he kept guns hidden all over the house. It was safer to show me how to use one, than to have me find one that he’d forgotten about and accidentally shot myself or someone else. I’d never been scared of a pistol, just scared of being at the wrong end.

  Daddy would always tell me take a deep breath to steady my aim before sliding my finger onto the trigger. So now I waited, listening for that breath that meant a bullet was on its way. All I could hear was the swooshing of waves underneath me; they crashed against the rocks as my heart pounded against my ribcage. Air shot through my nostrils in quick, erratic spurts. It seemed like I could hear everything except Foreign. I could barely make out Chief, eerily reciting what sounded like the Lord’s Prayer. And that’s when I heard it. The shift in the air as the pistol rose from the middle of my back toward the back of my head. Foreign inhaled a slow, shaky breath through his mouth. His calloused finger was steady as it slid across steel.

  It wasn’t supposed to be this way. But my dumb ass had to be a part of Genesis Kane’s world, a world he manipulated to get what he wanted, no different than the words he manipulated in the courtroom. Genesis who didn’t have anything in his life that he didn’t have a use for.

  The first shot split the air; bullets zipped by my face, and they were so close I felt the heat in passing.

  “Stop!”

  The sound of Genesis’s voice brought relief . . . along with a whole new source of terror.

  I couldn’t stop shivering. Every part of my body was shaking.

  He walked toward us. It only took him a few quick long strides to get to where we were standing. When he stood in front of me, I was too disgusted, too ashamed of his sin to even look him in the eyes.

  Foreign jotted over to Genesis’s side. “You came to watch this one happen live and direct? You wanna do the honor? Pull the trigger?”

  Genesis’s shadow stopped at my feet. I watched the dark shadowy version of him on the ground. He shook his head, holding his hand up, silencing Foreign. In his other hand he held something else.

  “You’re pregnant.” Genesis didn’t ask, he spat the words like poison.

  “What difference does it make to you?”

  He threw the pregnancy test down at my feet. I’d forgotten all about those damn things. When I looked up, he was running his hands over his head.

  “I don’t know what the fuck it means. I told you I didn’t want kids.”

  “Why not? You scared you won’t be able to keep your nasty hands off of them?”

  No sooner had the words left my mouth than I found myself on the ground with Genesis standing over me, blocking out the sun.

  “Nah, I want kids. Just not with you.”

  Even though I thought he was disgusting and foul, his words stole my breath. Chief and Foreign looked at each other and shared a smirk at the harsh way I was being handled.

  Genesis snapped his fingers. “Put her somewhere. Somewhere nice and cozy so she can have the kid. And when it’s here, you let me know.”

  He stood in front of me and leaned down until his face was a hair’s space away from mine. “You trying to take my baby girl from me? You gonna watch me take that motherfucka from you because I do not give a fuck about you or it.”

  I watched Chief shake his head out of the corner of my eye as Genesis stormed away.

  “Man, shiiiit,” Chief said over the wind with what sounded like regret in his voice. “We ain’t never did no pregnant bitch before. Seem like some bad juju-type shit, like killin’ a spider in the house or steppin’ on a grasshopper. Typa shit you don’t think about that’ll come back and fuck you up later.”

  Gravel scraped against the black pavement under the heel of Foreign’s scuffed Jodhpur boot. “Yeah, well, if it’s in my house or if it fits under my boot, I’m squashing it,” he spat in Chief’s direction. “I don’t believe in juju, karma, luck—none of that. I control what I control. And it can’t be all that bad if we’re making bank. You heard what Kane said. Let’s just find somewhere to put her until it’s time. Gotta be somewhere good too. She knows too much.” Foreign directed his frost-blue gaze down at me before glaring back at Chief. “She knows too much about all of us now, you included,” he said with a sneer.

  Yeah, I’d learned a lot about their fake asses, and I hated every single thing about them. From the way they’d all played me to the left, right, down to the way they’d all betrayed me.

  Either way it went, Genesis Kane was going to kill me.

  Justus

  Washington, DC, 2031

  That’s it? That’s all there is? My fingers held the brown leather journal in a death grip. The dingy reddish-brown splatters on the page blurred and came back into focus. Maybe it was blood. I ain’t need nobody to tell me that it was my mom’s. My fingers avoided those spots like they were acid. They were scattered across the page running over flowery handwriting. I tried to convince myself that they were old juice stains or hot cocoa. I read my mother’s words again. Genesis Kane is going to kill me. Tears burned my eyes, and my heart pounded away in my throat. When I got to the last word I slammed the leather book shut with both hands.

  “Justus?” Aris yelled through the house. “Boy, what are you doing? Bryan is about to blow out the candles on his cake.”

  She cracked my door, peeking into my bedroom without knocking. Something I’d told her a thousand times not to do, but she never listened. It felt like Aris was always watching me for some reason.

  “Damn, I’ll be there in a minute,” I barked back, throwing one of my J’s toward the door. My brother’s birthday wasn’t as important to me as what I’d been reading. Not right this second anyway.

  “My bad. Didn’t know you were in there having you-time. Wash your nasty hands and hurry up,” she snapped before closing the door.

  I looked at Aris in a whole new light now. There was a reason why her voice was deep for a girl, and she was always pissed off and strong as fuck too. Aunt Shan tried to say it was because she hadn’t gone through the change yet. I think part of it was because Aris was mad. She didn’t have any of the boobs or the booty that the chicks in school had. That was fuckin’ with her worse than the change itself. The other part was Aris was as much of a dude as I was. We all took the same sex-ed classes. She probably didn’t understand why she had a dick but had been treated like a girl his whole life.

  Aunt Shan had always told me that my mom had abandoned me and Bryan, but she hadn’t. Her name blared at me in letters etched deep into the cover. Novie Deleon.

  I shook my head, swinging tears across her journal. My vision blurred. That couldn’t be it. Nah, there was no way the story ended like that. But deep down, I knew that was the end of her story. I could almost sense it. My insides felt like they were vibrating from the years of grief and sadness. I’d shoved all those bullshit emotions that came from not having my mom deep down into my gut. The feeling swelled up inside me, made me rock back and forth on the edge of my bed like the addicts I’d seen in the park. I couldn’t tell if it would swallow me whole or make me implode from the inside out. I’d never felt anything like it.

  “Justus, your BP level is abnormally high,” the mechanical bitch’s voice sounded off from my wrist.

  I clawed at my life tracker bracelet trying to rip it off.

  The bracelet made its usual anno
ying warning blips before announcing, “Your Aunt Shan has been alerted.”

  Getting it off was pointless. I don’t even know why I tried.

  Rain tapped against the window outside. I sat with my legs hanging over the side of my bed, bracing myself because I wasn’t ready to face the fact that my pops the murderer and my Aunt Shan were just as foul.

  The life tracker wirelessly signaled for him sending a message to the life tracker he wore to monitor mine. She’d be busting up in here in about zero-point-three seconds like this bitch was on fire. These fucking bracelets were un-fucking-removable, and they tracked every-fucking-thing. . . my mood, where I went, what I ate, and what the fuck I did. Mine was mostly for a heart condition I’d had ever since I was a baby. Everyone thought I’d grow out of it by now, which sucked because I hadn’t. Dying didn’t scare me, and neither did having a janky heart. Why the fuck do they make us pick our career path and start training fresh out of preschool anyway? Nobody takes the kid with the fucked-up heart, especially not when it comes to playing sports.

  Even though I was only sixteen and already six-three, Aunt Shan was just happy she had an excuse to keep me out of the “legal slave trade,” as she called it. She wanted me to be a lawyer like my father so fucking bad, and he wasn’t even a real lawyer his damn self. That isn’t even what hit me the hardest. Now, I knew the real truth. I knew if it wasn’t for him, I probably wouldn’t even have this heart condition. And I probably wouldn’t have gotten passed over to play basketball.

  Now my heart was pounding so hard I could feel it booming in my forehead.

  “Justus?”

  Aunt Shan yelled for me, shouting through the house. “Son, are you all right?”

  Nah, I wasn’t all right. I’d been wronged from day one. Shit, from before day one, when my mom was standing there for both of us. I felt full but hollow as fuck, pissed off and sad at the same. I couldn’t believe it when I’d found it. A real book, written by hand, and not only that, it was written by my mom to me. It’d taken me almost a month to read it, especially since we streamed books now. I wasn’t about to get caught dead walking around with an antique book tucked under my arm.