Pride (2 page)

Up ahead someone yelled out the young girl’s name. She glanced down Lenox Avenue and saw her whole family standing behind the window of the Dominican beauty parlor where she used to wash hair.

Grandmother, Jimmy, Cara, Dicey, and even Aunt Ree. They were all there in her terrifying dream. Huddled together at the window looking worried in the face. Peeping the devil on her tail, they started jumping up and down and beckoning with their arms. They screamed for her and reached for her. They begged her to run like hell.

The young girl’s feet were heavy as she fled toward the beauty shop. There was safety on the other side of those swinging doors, and if she made it inside she might just live.

But if she got caught…a bitter chill crept down her spine. If she didn’t get inside that shop then the devil was going to ride her until she wished she was dead.

The sun beamed down on her as she fled. A Johnny pump was open near the corner and a bunch of little kids played in its gushing spray. The girl darted past them and her feet splashed in the cold water. She had just stepped up on the curb when the devil’s hot breath scorched the back of her neck.

Flinching, she slipped and fell in the wet gutter. The skin of her knees ripped on the gritty pavement. She sat up soaked and terrified. She wiped her hands on her shorts, and to her horror the icy water was now steaming-hot and had turned red and slick like blood.

She yelped in disgust, and that evil-ass devil laughed dead in her ear. He scared her so badly that she almost surrendered right then and there. But she couldn’t. Because her people were waiting for her in that beauty shop. They were screaming for her. Crying. Begging her to move.

“You betta run, goddammit!” Dicey stood in the doorway and hollered. Her eyes bulged in her pie-face and when she opened her mouth the girl saw a mangled stump of flesh where her friend’s tongue should have been.

“Run, Juicy-Mo! Run! You seent how that evil mothafucka did me, right? Don’t you let him get a hold of you too!”

Jumping to her feet, the young girl scurried onto the sidewalk. With the devil hot on her tail, she sprinted toward the open arms of her old friend and the safety of the beauty parlor. Seconds later she lunged through the doorway. Her friend grabbed her hands and pulled her inside, and then pushed something soft and warm into her palm.

“I made it!” The young girl cried, sinking to the floor in exhausted relief. “I made it!”

She crawled past Dicey and further into the safety of the beauty shop. She looked toward the window for the rest of her family, but suddenly the front door banged shut, and just like in a dream...everything changed.

The girl blinked and glanced around. She was in a familiar place, but it wasn’t a salon full of Dominican hair stylists. No, she was someplace else. In a fancy, expensive joint. Then suddenly she knew.

And that’s when the terror hit her.

She was at the G-Spot. The hottest gentlemen’s club in Harlem. She glanced around the posh room. Everything about it screamed sex, money, danger, and drugs. Kingpins and high-stake rollers stood around wearing diamond Rolexes and high-priced clothing, and half-naked dancers aimed to please.

The girl glanced down. The floor she was kneeling on was spotless and made of real marble. Stripper music played in the background and the smell of Hennessy and crisp dollar bills floated in the air.

Oh hell no
, the young girl thought, trembling in fear. She wasn’t in a beauty parlor. And it wasn’t Dicey who had snatched her inside either.

Her throat closed up when she saw the hellacious pair of alligator shoes that were suddenly right in front of her. She was scared to imagine who they belonged to, and she forced herself look up from her knees.

She shivered as her eyes climbed a pair of long legs clad in the finest of fabric. The devil might have been a liar, but he sure looked good and he smelled good too.

His teeth were bone-white and his hands were rough and black. Evil rolled off him, and she could tell he was pissed by the way he twirled the huge onyx ring on his middle finger.

Her eyes traveled further up his thick, muscled-up chest and paused near his throat. A raging pulse beat visibly under his smooth dark skin, just below his jaw line.

“Get moving, you nasty bitch!” said the devil. His voice scraped her ears like hot gravel and the girl knew she was going straight to hell.

“
Move
, hoe!” The devil swung his foot and planted it deep in her stomach. She collapsed, and he grabbed her by the hair and hauled her down a hallway and into a crowded room full of people.

The blue lights were dim, and the odor of smoldering hash and sweet Philly blunts filled the air. The crowd had been waiting patiently for the devil. They fell silent as he approached, and she could tell the devil had their love and their respect too.

He barked a series of orders, and suddenly the music stopped and all the lights came on. The devil dragged her out to the middle of a large stripper stage. The girl’s mouth went dry as she peered at the waiting crowd.

Her family had front row seats. A bloody sheet was draped over her mother’s slender, creamy shoulders. Grandmother had mortician’s makeup caked all over her face, and Jimmy-Jo and Aunt Ree both wore hats to hide the bullet-trimmed portions of their skulls that were no longer there.

Something warm pulsed and throbbed in the girl’s clenched fist. She uncurled her fingers and stared at the soft, wet thing she’d been holding.

It was Dicey’s tongue.

She yelped and flung it to the floor. The devil laughed, then stomped it like a fat cockroach under his shoe.

He held his hand high in the air and signaled to the multitudes. The room grew cold and still. He spoke in a rumbling voice that sparked terror, even in the hearts of the dead.

“Listen up!”

The devil growled from his fine, evil mouth. “This is Juicy-Mo from 136th Street. I’m gonna ask y’all once and I expect the mothafuckin’ truth. Who in here done had them some of this? I wanna know if anybody up in here ever sucked her or fucked her. If any of you bitches ever rubbed your clit on her. I wanna know if anybody ever had they fingers in her. Their
tongue
! Let me know right dammit now, if any mothafucka up in here done so much as smelled this pussy!”

The young girl cringed as nearly everyone in the room jumped up hollering, “Me! Me! Me! I did! I did! Yeah, I fucked her! I sucked her! I licked her too! Hell fuckin’
yeah
I got me some of that! Me too! Me too! That’s a
community
pussy! I got me a lil bit too!”

Her baby brother stood up in the front row and the girl cried out at the sight of him. The bright lights shone down on his injuries and she moaned with grief. Jimmy raised his hand and wiggled his broken fingers in the air.

Her brother had nothing but love for the devil as he laughed and yelled, “Man, every niggah in
Harlem
done tapped that ass! That bitch gives some real
dead
head!”

The crowd cracked up laughing, and the girl could only weep as the devil gazed down at her with a dark, evil stare.

He was going to kill her.

She could see it in his eyes.

Fast as lightning, he snatched her by the throat and cut off her breath. She didn’t even struggle as his monster blows rained down on her head and he called her every kind of stank bitch and nasty hoe he could muster. He pummeled her face, her chest, and sought out her tender gut.

And when the devil finally flung her over on her stomach and began unbuckling his belt, the young girl just lay there helplessly. In total submission. She was ready to die. The will to live flew right out of her as he yanked her naked hips high in the air. His penis was black and erect, and poised to ram her straight into nightmare hell.

But the girl didn’t fight back, and she certainly didn’t refuse the devil.

There was no need to.

Because if the pretty young girl hadn’t been taught a damn thing during the two years she’d been Granite “G” McKay’s woman, she had definitely learned one thing was true: come hell or high water, the devil always got his due.

$$$$$

I woke up in bed with my nightgown tangled around my neck. Somehow I’d ripped it off in my sleep and gotten caught up in it. I struggled to catch my breath. A scream pushed against my throat and my heart banged so hard I thought my chest was about to explode. My nightmare had felt real as hell. I was so convinced it was actually happening that my fists were balled up and my booty-cheeks were clenched tight.

For a moment I was right back where it had all started. Back in Harlem. Back inside the G-Spot, the high-rolling nightclub where I had lost my soul and almost lost my life.

I glanced over and saw Gino snuggled under the sheets beside me, and suddenly everything began shifting back into focus.

They had come to me in my dreams again. My family. Grandmother, Cara, Aunt Ree, Dicey, and worst of all, Jimmy. Not the way they were when they were alive and loving me, but the way they were in death. The way G wanted me to see them, and most of all to remember them. Twisted, sliced, bloodied, broke down, shot up. Brutalized.

It had been six months since the night I’d run out of the G-Spot with nothing but a filthy sheet wrapped around me and a nasty tube sock pressed between my legs. Six months since the life I was living had cost me almost everything and everybody I had ever loved.

Something inside me broke wide open and the fear and pain came flying out. My tears were hard and silent. The kind of cries an innocent girl makes when she’s been crushed in her soul.

I had been a naïve and sheltered seventeen-year-old schoolgirl when Granite McKay rescued me from my grandmother’s raggedy apartment on 136th Street, and took me and my brother Jimmy to his luxurious penthouse on Central Park West.

G might have been an old hustler, but he was top shelf all the way. Between his shiny new whips and imported tailor-made clothes, G was legendary and had absolute power on the streets of Harlem.

At the age of forty-six he had conquered a New York City Kingdom and he ruled it with a perfect balance of fear and respect. People on the streets had love for G. He knew exactly how to take care of the community and he was real generous when he wanted to be. G was real rich and he surrounded himself with nice things. He had turned me on to the finest stuff money could buy. When we moved to Central Park West, G hired two maids and a driver. He paid a stylist to do my hair, and a Swedish woman to massage my body and keep my skin soft just in case he felt like touching me.

But just because a man had money it didn’t mean he could put his thing down the right way. G was rich, but he was set in his ways too. I was just a delicious piece of eye candy to him, and the only thing he allowed me to do was sit up on a barstool and look good every night.

So while I liked what G was giving me, I wasn’t satisfied with the way he was giving it to me. G was like a big bucket of ice-cold water, and my young body was sizzling hot, burning straight on fire. A buster like him couldn’t help but want to splash on me and put out my flames.

So, yeah. I had been really stupid while I was busy thinking I was so smart, but if I’d had even a little bit of sense on the cap, I would have never let Granite McKay take me up on the G-Spot stage and announce to the world that I was his. I had felt so lucky for getting chosen by the King of Harlem! But let’s face it. If Lady Luck had really been on my side, she would’ve told me to break up out of the G-Spot and run for my life.

CHAPTER 2

“You a’ight?”

I shivered as Gino reached for me in the darkness. I felt his strong hands rubbing my back, and then trailing down my arms.