“I’m okay,” she replied.
“You sure, because you seem distanced from me since you got back from California.”
“I just have a lot on my mind.”
“Like what?”
“It’s nothing.”
“The look in your eyes says it’s probably more than nothing. You can talk to me about anything, baby,” he said.
She couldn’t tell him the truth; she was in love with another man and wanted to discontinue their affair.
Cristal felt reluctant to end things between them, no matter how heavy her heart got. She was on her way to the top, and she didn’t want to be a fool and rock the boat. She felt she had things under control; as long as she kept E.P. happy, he would never find out about Hugo.
Cristal turned around in his arms and looked him eye to eye. She smiled. “It’s nothing, just some drama between Tamar and me,” she told him.
“Well as long as it doesn’t interfere with the business, then everything’s copacetic,” E.P. replied coolly.
“It won’t. Just girl bullshit.”
The two kissed. E.P. lifted her into his arms and planted her naked ass on the granite countertop and placed himself between her soft thighs. He once again lined up the fat head of his dick with her warm hole and thrust himself inside. He couldn’t get enough of Cristal. She was his addiction—his new love. They fucked passionately in the bathroom, and while E.P. was inside of her, the only thing Cristal could think about was how upset Hugo was going to be because he had called her numerous times and she hadn’t been able to speak to him since she arrived in New York. E.P. took up all of her time, and there was no escaping the lust he had for her. He’d fucked her six ways from Sunday and wasn’t done with her yet.
She moaned and groaned, feeling her pussy stretching out like a rubber band from the pounding dick. As E.P. thrust into her, Cristal silently shed a few tears knowing she was wrong for this. But it felt so good.
...
Fourteen hours after her arrival into JFK airport, she finally broke away free from E.P.’s strong lust and was able to go to Hugo’s place. When she arrived he wasn’t home. She called his cell phone but he wasn’t picking up. Cristal sat in his bedroom for over an hour and wondered where he could be. He always answered her phone calls but now her calls were going straight to voicemail. Hugo could be anywhere: at the strip club, maybe out of town, or out on business with his peoples. She could only be upset with herself for allowing E.P. to take up too much of her time when she had a doting man waiting for her to come home.
Cristal felt Hugo not being around was a good thing anyway. After E.P.’s sexual onslaught on her body and pussy, she needed to recuperate and chill for a moment. Hugo was going to want some pussy too once he saw her, and Cristal knew she wasn’t up for it. She was drained. She had to wash and scrub herself free of E.P.’s smell and relax and get her body right again. And she did just that, spending over an hour soaking and scrubbing herself in the bathtub and resting up. It had been a long two days and jet lag started to set in. She didn’t get much sleep being with E.P., but the minute she closed her eyes, she slept for hours, close to twenty-four hours straight.
Thirty
It had been seven weeks since the California hit, and things had been quiet all over, except for home. Her relationship with Hugo had been up and down, rocky, but still loving. They constantly argued about having kids. Hugo continually pressured her for a baby, but when Cristal brought up the rules given to her by the Commission, Hugo would shout out, “Fuck the Commission! They don’t fuckin’ put fear in me, Cristal. I want a family. I want children. I want us to be normal.”
She wanted the same thing, but her life was much more complicated, and she hated that Hugo didn’t see things her way. And with her affair with E.P. carrying on, the pressure was building. She felt Hugo pulling away from her. It wasn’t the same as it had been a year ago. She felt there was something else pulling Hugo away from her. She didn’t know exactly what it was, but she was determined to find out.
Cristal found out what—or who—had Hugo distracted from her when she went to visit him at the strip club he owned. She heard rumors that he was fucking with one of his strippers down at the club, but she didn’t want to believe it. She walked into the dimly lit club and immediately stormed toward Hugo’s back office. Seeing Mesha exit the office with a smile on her face before she could enter herself made Cristal see red.
The two confronted each other in the hallway. Cristal was ready to fuck her up. Mesha didn’t back down, and the quarrel ensuing brought Hugo out of his office and security coming to break things up.
Hugo denied that he was fucking with Mesha and explained to Cristal that the only reason she was seen coming out of his office was to bring the bottle of vodka he requested. Cristal knew he was lying. Cristal wanted to fight everyone in the club, even Hugo, and she became so out of control that security had to drag her away. She loved Hugo, and the thought of him fucking the enemy made her blood boil.
She felt like a hypocrite for becoming so angry at Hugo for his indiscretions and wanting to kill Mesha when she’d been secretly fucking E.P. for so long. She’d tried hard to cover her infidelities, but the more she tried, the more things seemed to fall apart. And when she went to talk or complain about her dilemma to her only friend left, Mona, Mona called Cristal a fraud too, and went into one of her rhetorical speeches about other strange things.
“We’re all playing with fire, Cristal, and eventually we gonna all burn in purgatory, trapped between earth and hell for our sins,” Mona proclaimed oddly.
Cristal had been dumbfounded by Mona’s words.
Unbeknownst to Tamar and Cristal, Mona had been having a change of heart about her career path of murder for hire. She started to see the souls of their victims in her dreams almost every night. She began going to a voodoo priest who told her to burn black candles for the murdered and white candles to release their souls. Mona was chanting, praying, smoking, and drinking all while she was being haunted. She predicted their demise was coming soon. She’d been having premonitions of betrayal and death coming her way, so she continued to live a monastic lifestyle and remained eccentric in her Bronx apartment. She missed Lisa greatly and continued to have doubts about her friend being the lone wolf.
While locked away in her apartment reading and tending to her plants, Mona had time to think. She had time to put the pieces to the puzzle together.
“They killed her,” Mona had uttered out of the blue.
“What? What are you talking about, Mona? Who was killed?” Cristal felt her friend was losing her mind.
“Lisa. She’s dead. I know it. I have dreams about her almost every night. She’s no lone wolf, Cristal. They killed her. I don’t know why, but they did,” Mona had bizarrely declared.
Cristal didn’t believe it. Mona was speaking nonsense.
“Mona, that bitch is dead to us, because she abandoned us and went out to do her own thing. She ain’t really dead, psycho!”
“Do you truly believe that, Cristal? Do you think Lisa would ever abandon her best friends?”
Cristal didn’t know what to think anymore. It had been over two years since they joined the organization and had their training on the Farm. Together, the girls had performed over a dozen murders and made so much money that they felt not rich but wealthy.
After Cristal left Mona’s place, she didn’t know what to do with herself. Friendship was becoming a memory, and her love life was in shambles. Hugo wasn’t going to give up until she was pregnant and having his baby. Cristal felt their issue was driving her man away to be with other women, slut bitches like Mesha, and she needed to fix her relationship by any means necessary.
And by any means necessary, Cristal came up with a cunning plan that might satisfy them both in the long run, and keep her from breaking the Commission’s rule and losing her life—and this plan involv
ed her cousin Mia.
Cristal had gotten Hugo to agree to her cousin, Mia, carrying their baby. They were to find a doctor on the down low to do the in vitro fertilization, combining Cristal’s eggs and Hugo’s sperm to impregnate Mia. Of course Mia wanted a substantial amount of money if she was going to do this for them, so Hugo offered her fifty thousand dollars to carry the baby, and he also bought her a house on a lake in upstate New York. Their plan was to keep everyone on the low and keep the organization from ever knowing any of this.
When the baby was born, Cristal would have a live-in nanny, but she and Hugo would keep hustling until their retirement age. Cristal planned on keeping the New York condo in SoHo, but would spend most of her time raising their child in an undisclosed location. The two of them figured it was a mastermind idea, and that their child would be under four years old when Cristal could retire from the Commission. And with her twenty-first birthday approaching, the countdown began. She couldn’t wait to get out of the murder for hire business.
The Farm
Upstate New York
The desolate area that sat on several acres of land nestled in the backwoods of upstate New York continued to be the breeding place for training young assassins to do the Commission’s dirty work. Another herd of young-faced applicants were going through the same vigorous and grueling program that dozen before them endured. It was the final stages of the training—the last week when the recruits were pushed into a barren room to kill for the organization for the first time.
Lisa could hardly get her bearings in the cold and foul-smelling room. She lay across the wintry and hard concrete ground like a wet mat in her tattered clothing. She had been continually shot up with heroin and drugged to the point where she no longer knew her name or her history. She didn’t even know what year it was. For more than two years, she had been living under extreme and deplorable conditions. While her friends were under the assumption that she was a lone wolf living extremely well, she had actually been yanked out of the course the first week of her training. The harrowing staff noticed she and the others continually failed the tests, and they were weeded out for destruction. She didn’t have what she needed to survive undetected as a hired gun.
Lisa was thrown into a barnlike dwelling with several other men and women the Farm felt were disposable. She was hardly fed and was a couple of ounces shy of being anorexic. She barely had enough meat on her to cover her rib cage or hipbones.
She was treated like a test subject. She wasn’t groomed or treated for any sickness, and she had been living like a dog. Her hair was nappy, and she was emaciated. She was unrecognizable and looked like she had aged two decades.
She barely knew who she was anymore, and she mumbled to herself and was caked with dirt and stench. Flashes of her past would come and go like lightning striking. Her family would never have any idea what happened to their little girl. Lisa felt death was her only escape from the torture and brutality she’d endured since arriving at the Farm.
The next training group started to pour into the room, and one by one, they were tested on their will to kill easily. Gunshots echoed from a distance, and one by one, the homeless-looking men and women Lisa was grouped with in the inhospitable concrete area were taken from the room to be killed by the trainees.
Today was finally the day of death for some of them. Lisa was picked to become one of the homeless-looking people that potential assassins would have to murder in order for them to leave the Farm to pursue their deadly careers.
The steel door opened to the room the unfortunate victims were hostage in and Lisa was roughly pulled out by two men and dragged into another similar room and thrown to the ground. She thought she was alone, but she wasn’t. She was met by a young, stoic-looking woman in a white jumpsuit, holding a .9mm in her hand.
The voice crackled over the intercom, saying to the lean and fit Spanish-looking woman, “Kill her.”
The woman trainee raised the gun to Lisa’s head and didn’t hesitate to shoot.
Thirty-One
E.P. had always been a disconnected and cold character, as well as a shrewd and calculating man when it came to business and murder. His aloofness toward everything in his life had always been his survival. But the twelve-by-eight glossy pictures E.P. gazed at, of Cristal and Hugo together in several passionate ways, kissing, sexing and loving each other, sent him into an emotional freefall. He had been careless and too trusting with Cristal because he was in love with her, but now he saw that she was playing him for a fool. He had risked his life to be with her and he alarmingly found out that she was in love with another man.
He had been feeling the distance between him and Cristal. She hadn’t been spending much of her time in her SoHo condo and she was acting strange around him. It sent red flags flying E.P.’s way, so he hired a private investigator for twenty-five thousand dollars—the best at his job. E.P. had Cristal followed and investigated for three weeks without anyone knowing. And what the private investigator came back with made E.P. furious.
Unbeknownst to Cristal, E.P. wanted to marry her, and he was ready to take a chance by asking the Commission to allow her out of her contract. He was aware of the fate that awaited the killers once they reached their twenty-fifth birthday, and he didn’t want Cristal to fall into that harsh outcome. The Commission lied to their recruits and their young, lethal killers that spanned the world. There was no retiring from the organization at the age of twenty-five. The only way out was death. They kept track of everyone, and a deadly and meticulous cleaner was sent around the world to wipe out those young killers who were about to age out. The Commission couldn’t afford to have any evidence linking back to them or to take chances on someone going rogue, maybe talking to the government about their shadowy business. It was easier to replace and train new assassins every year than to keep around any old ones. Many were wiped out and their bodies never found—victims to their own trade. And the overseas bank accounts, filled with millions that kept the young killers motivated—it was more like Monopoly money because it was never to be paid out.
Her love was a lie, and E.P. felt betrayed. She had gone behind the Commission’s back to start a family with Hugo. He found out about her cousin Mia carrying the baby for them via in vitro fertilization, and about the hush-hush location they planned to live at in upstate New York. She had broken the rules; therefore, Cristal was a dead bitch.
...
Tamar moaned from his dick being pounded inside her throbbing pussy from the back. Her ebony lover had shoved his eight-inches into her with intense heat and she felt the muscles of her pussy walls grabbing him. He held her hips and pushed forward, listening to Tamar cry out. She looked back at him and said, “Fuck me, nigga! Fuck me!” And that’s what he did.
Her tall and brawny ebony lover stroked and thrust and drove every single inch of his hard meat inside her. Tamar was going wild, chanting and moaning and begging for more. Tamar’s full ass was wiggling and bouncing up and down, and the wet sounds of sex filled her bedroom as he kept pounding her.
They both were horny muthafuckas on a mission to cum. He fucked her harder and Tamar moaned louder. She was on the brink of exploding her white juices on his penetrating cock inside of her. He could feel the cum in his balls simmering to discharge. And just like that, jointly, they both came intensely and exhaled. Tamar’s young ebony lover looked down to see his big dick glistening with her juices.
Tamar removed herself from the bed and donned a long robe. She had the need for a cool drink from her kitchen. Her sweaty male company collapsed on his back on the bed, uttering, “Get me something to drink too, babe,” as he tried to collect himself from their dynamic fuck.
The second Tamar turned on the lights to her kitchen she saw it and was puzzled. The large manila folder placed on her kitchen counter was odd. Was it a murdergram? Why was it there, and who placed it there, and why was she receiving it unexpectedly instead of Cristal? Sh
e carefully walked toward the folder and opened it to see the target. Tamar was taken aback to see that the target was Cristal.
“The Commission wants her dead,” a voice abruptly spoke from out of nowhere.
Tamar reached for a sharp knife out of her drawer and posed in attack mode, pointing the knife in the man’s direction. E.P. emerged from the shadows of her kitchen. She was shocked to see him of all people in her kitchen. They glared at each other.
“What the fuck?” Tamar spat.
E.P. was unruffled by Tamar with the knife in her hand. He stepped closer to Tamar and said, “She broke the rule, and she needs to go.”
At first, Tamar was ambivalent about the hit on Cristal, but when she learned Cristal was keeping secrets from everyone, especially about her cousin Mia having her baby, Tamar became irritated and angry. It didn’t take much persuasion for Tamar to accept the hit. The way E.P. looked at her; she knew she didn’t have a choice.
“If I do this, I want to be on my own, no crew…a lone wolf,” she said.
E.P. nodded.
Tamar smiled.
Thirty-Two
Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” blared throughout Grandma Hattie’s apartment. The smell of Thanksgiving dinner cooking in the kitchen seeped into the lively living room. Everyone could smell the turkey cooking, yams in the oven roasting, catfish frying on the stove, and various cakes and pies being baked by capable hands, while the men watched football on the tube.
Three generations convened in Brooklyn only on holidays. Sixteen relatives came from all over to gather around two lightweight folding tables that were usually used to host card games and eat the best soul food cooked within the Tri-State area.
Everyone was ready to eat except for Cristal. She stood by the window repeatedly pulling the blinds back and gazing outside. She was waiting for her man to arrive. Cristal asked Hugo to stop at the store to pick up a case of Grey Goose and some oysters for her pregnant cousin, Mia, who was craving them.
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