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My jaw tightened but my face didn’t move past that. I reached in and checked the top of the center console, and that’s when I found it. An envelope sitting there like somebody had placed it carefully. Like they wanted to make sure it wouldn’t be missed. It immediately caught my attention from outside the car.

After grabbing the paper, I wasted no time opening it. I was confused as fuck on what was really happening.

One piece of paper. Typed, not handwritten.

South Dallas is off limits. Any loss we take, you’ll take ten more. This a warning. Shit can get worse.

I stood there and read it twice. Then I folded it back up and put it in my jacket pocket and stepped back from the car. I rubbedmy hands over my head trying to process what this meant. South Dallas was off limits? That was my shit!

Everything around me was moving — my men talking, radios going, the energy on that compound shifting into something coiled and ready — but inside me everything had gone completely still the way it always did when something required a decision that couldn’t be undone. My father was placing me in position, so right now, as much as I wanted to call him and ask the next move, I knew that I had to set it in motion on my own before bringing this to him. Of course I was gonna make him aware, he needed to know what heat was just brought to his front door where our entire family lays our heads.

Somebody had killed a loyal man. Delivered him to my gate. On my property. While I was standing inside my own house.

This wasn’t Fort Worth. This was Dallas. And whoever sent this car wanted me to understand that they didn’t recognize who was running Dallas now. The least of their worries now was work being moved in their territory. Shit just got way bigger than that.

That was the last mistake they were going to make.

“Get the car off my property,” I said. Quiet. Even. “Handle Darius properly. Make sure his family is set up nicely. I want to know every move he made in the last seventy two hours before the end of tonight.” I looked at my head of security. “Find out who drove that car to my gate and walked away. As a matter of fact, he’s on foot! Hurry and find that nigga before he gets too far! Bring him back here!” I barked but I knew he was probably long gone.

“Yes sir.”

I turned around to head back to my property and Tatti was still standing exactly where I’d left her. She hadn’t moved. Thephone was still in her hand but she wasn’t on it anymore. She was looking at me with something on her face that wasn’t fear exactly — it was the look of a person who had just understood something they couldn’t understand. Like a door had opened that she couldn’t close again. If she ever had a doubt about the life I lived, she knew now.

I walked toward her and held my hand out for the phone. She gave it to me without hesitation while still wearing a look that told me she was scared straight. She knew a dead body had been hand delivered to me, and now I wondered what was going on in her head exactly. To me, although this was fucked up, this was just another day.

I handed her phone to Mars. “She’s done, you know what to do with it.” Then I looked at her. “Get inside.”

She didn’t snap back. Didn’t have a response. She just looked at me for one more second — like she was seeing me for the first time and wasn’t sure what she was looking at, then she turned around and walked inside like she was instructed to do.

I walked back out and stood in my driveway for a moment after the door closed behind her.

Fort Worth. This shit wasn’t making sense.

Somebody had signed their death-wish and thought a dead body at my gate was going to make me look the other way.

They didn’t know me yet, but they damn sure were about to.

Isat on the edge of that bed and stared at the wall for a long time. I was shaking like a damn stripper.

I didn’t know how long I’d been back in this room. Long enough for the noise outside to die down. Long enough for the compound to go quiet again like nothing had happened. Still not long enough for my hands to stop doing that thing where they shook without my permission.

I had seen a lot of things in my life. Growing up the way I grew up, moving in the circles my father moved in even from the outside, you picked up on things that most people with normal lives never had to see. You learned how to read a room. You learned when to be quiet. You learned what certain kinds of silence meant.

But I had never watched a man get pulled out of a car with two bullets in the back of his head and delivered to somebody’s front gate like a package.

I pressed my hands flat against my thighs and made them stop shaking.

Think.

That’s what I did when things got too big to feel. I stopped feeling and I started thinking because thinking was something I could control and feeling wasn’t. I had been doing it since I was sixteen years old and it had never failed me yet. I’d done and been through shit that even those closest to me didn’t know about. I knew how to cope with stress, this just hit different.

If I knew nothing else, one thing I knew was that someone had sent that car to Kaseem’s gate on purpose. On a Sunday. While he had a guest on the property. While he was fresh into taking over his family business. That wasn’t a coincidence and it wasn’t random. That was a calculated move from somebody who either didn’t know who they were dealing with or knew exactly who they were dealing with and didn’t care.

Moments before all of this went down, I’d called my father and told him that I was with Kaseem. I couldn’t say too much because I was being watched and monitored. In so many words, I told him that I didn’t come willingly and he told me that he could assure that I was in good hands. Moments later, this shit happened so somebody was lying! Good hands my ass.

From what I heard. This was a message sent from the other side. Which meant Kaseem or his father had been moving into forbidden territory and had no business. And somebody with enough power and enough nerve to put a body on the Carter compound gate wanted them to stop.

This was really the family my father willingly handed me over to? This man dropped me off in the middle of a damn war and didn’t care. Why? Clearly he had something going on with this family where he felt as if he had to give me away with no other option. Now, I needed to know what the hell that was. This was too much.