“Just say it father,” Julius finally had to say when Romano beat around the bush, making idol conversation.
“I want to know what the fuck is going on with Quill and you.”
Fuck.
“What do you mean?” he asked, twirling his shoestring around in his fingers. He couldn’t look at him. He was a horrible liar. He could lie over the phone or with his head down. He just couldn’t look someone in the face and lie.
“Are you fucking my daughter, Julius?”
“She’s not your daughter.” Shit, that slipped.
“What do you mean she’s not my daughter? She is my daughter and she’s your Goddamn sister. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“She is not my sister. I was ten when we brought her home. Remember? Father, I love her. I want to be with her. Who else are you going to hand her off to?”
Romano didn’t get a chance to answer before they heard the loud crash. They both grabbed for their guns tucked behind their pants.
Valdez joked with his comrades about the spoiled rich girls as he licked his chocolate cone. He didn’t think anything of it when he saw Julius’s name flash across his cell. “Yeah,” he answered. He panicked, he didn’t know what to do. He knew he had three choices; get Aquilla to the underground room beneath the house, get her to the hidden dock where he could get to a very fast speedboat, or to the helicopter on the roof of a building in town. He saw the man in a black suit flash his badge and a picture to a bystander at the exact same time he heard Julius yell “RAID!”
He wasn’t going to prison for the rest of his life, because Romano was careless and stupid about their last run. He tried to tell him it was too reckless, he wouldn’t listen. He dropped his cone in the trash and quietly told the two men to get Aquilla out of there and walked with his head down, ducking down a dumpster alley.
Aquilla didn’t think anything of it. She figured that her father had called him home and wanted her to ride home with Talin’s bodyguard. It wouldn’t have been the first time. She didn’t think anything of the worried look on his face as he drove her either. Talin and her were too busy laughing and singing a new pop song that she had downloaded. What caught her attention was when he dropped her off a ¼ mile from her door, her father would have shot out both his kneecaps for doing that.
“You have to get out here, Aquilla,” he demanded. She got out as Talin and her exchanged a confused look.
“I’ll talk to you later,” Aquilla told her. She lied, she wouldn’t be talking to Talin or anyone else.
As soon as she walked around the bend, her heart sank. There were seven black tinted windowed cars, all with the doors hanging open. Something was going down. She was worried about Julius and her father. She was pissed at Valdez for leaving her, he could have at least warned her.
She climbed the little bank leading into a patch of palm and white cedar trees, hunched down, and walking quietly toward the house. She didn’t know where to go. Did Julius and her father get out? Looking at her cellphone and seeing that there hadn’t been any calls, she had a feeling that they hadn’t. Julius would have called her.
She heard the exact same cracking, crunching sound that she had heard when she broke Tua’s arm. Someone tried to grab her from behind. Executing the same move for the second time that week. She had never used that move in her life, and here she had broken two arms in one week. What the fuck? The guy hit the ground and grabbed his shoulder. She didn’t have time to react when she turned around, hearing the click of a gun.
Two men stood behind her, holding guns. “Get down!” the smaller of the two yelled. She held her hands up and dropped to her knees. The other one cuffed her hands behind her back while the short fat guy held his shaking gun to her head. What did they want? She didn’t know anything. She wouldn’t be able to answer one of their questions.
They didn’t speak to her and shoved her toward the front door. Two other men had run to the guy lying on the ground crying like a baby, holding his arm and making dreadful sounds as his body rolled from side to side in unbearable pain.
Aquilla looked around her house. She didn’t see anyone, but could hear voices coming from the north wing. They were in the training room. She turned her eyes toward her father’s office on the right and screamed. It was him, those were his shoes, and he was covered by a white sheet. They had killed him. Oh, God, where was Julius?
Ducking and swinging her upper body down and around, she was able to break the hold the two men had on her. She jumped from one foot to the other, swinging her left foot into the air, landing it right across the jaw of the taller, older man. The younger, short one just stared at her with wide eyes. He couldn’t even reach for his gun, what a pussy. It stunned them both long enough for her to run to her father. She turned enough to pull the sheet from his face with cuffed hands. She had to make sure. She had to see for herself.
She wailed, dropping her face to the side of his in some kind of makeshift hug with no arms. They fucking killed him. They didn’t have to kill him. Where was Julius? She didn’t get to properly say goodbye before she was pulled from him. She was pissed. She was beyond pissed. She was crazy infuriated. Aquilla dropped quickly to the floor and right back up, landing two quick elbows to the one man’s face, a kick and a knee to the other man’s, and then a shoe right to his crotch. She turned back to defend herself from the taller one when she was picked up by the back of her pants by another man that she hadn’t seen. He looked familiar. Why did he look familiar?
“Are you fucking kidding me right now?” the man yelled to the two guys, one holding his nuts in a ball on the floor and the other holding his bloody, broken nose. “She’s in fucking handcuffs?” he said in disbelief as he held her up on her arms and the back of her shorts, pushing her toward the training room.
“Where’s Julius?” She yelled at the guy manhandling her toward the sitting room where the rest of his crew must have been.
“Why don’t you tell me where Julius is? Better yet, why don’t you tell me who the fuck you are?”
There was no way she was telling this guy shit, she instantly shut up., but at least she knew Julius got away. He would find her.
When she walked into the room she almost fell. Standing in front of her was the beautiful Ms. lying fucking bitch Seri.
“You’re a fucking fed?” Aquilla screamed. It wasn’t really a question. The guy tightened his hold on her when she tried to go after her.
Seri dropped her head when she saw Aquilla, trying to figure out why this young blonde beauty was involved with the Chavez men.
Aquilla wondered if she’d told her spy buddies that she had licked her pussy and fucking loved it. She was sure she hadn’t. That’s why she couldn’t look at her.
The guy shoved her over to the sofa. The sofa that she had spread her legs for Agent Seri on, or whatever the fuck her name was.
“You have some explaining to do,” the man that she now recognized said as he pulled up a chair in front of her. He was the new client who had come to claim Seri. She was sitting on his lap that night by the pool.
“I don’t have shit to say to you,” Aquilla assured him. It wasn’t like she couldn’t really tell him anything if she had wanted to. She didn’t know what her father and Julius had done. She knew what they did, but she was never involved in the details.