Chapter 55 Childhood

Chapter 55 Childhood
Jerome’s P.O.V

There are betrayals that burn hot and loud, and then there are the quiet ones, the kind that hollow you out from the inside.
Gerald’s was the second kind.
I have stood over bodies without flinching. I have ordered men to their deaths with a voice steady as winter. I have watched empires crumble and built mine from the wreckage, but when Biggie told me what they found, I felt something inside me split clean down the middle.
Only three people knew about that structural weak point in the east wing of the house. Me, Douglas and Gerald.
The news wasn’t surprise as I already had my suspicions but it set my suspicions in stone.

He really tried to kill me.

By the time the confirmation came back from our tech team, blueprints accessed from Gerald’s encrypted terminal, burner phone pings triangulated to the perimeter the night the explosives were planted.
Biggie was already moving pieces across the board.
He found me in my office, the city bleeding neon through the floor-to-ceiling windows. I hadn’t turned on the lights. I didn’t need them.
“He’s gone. ” Biggie said.
His voice was controlled, but I could hear the strain beneath it.
“Gone how?” I asked.
“Accounts wiped. Properties cleared. Warehouse on Pier Twelve burned from the inside. No bodies. No trace. It’s like he evaporated.” He said as he displayed papers that meant evidence of his words.
Gerald was many things. Reckless at times. Arrogant, even, but he was never careless.
Which meant this wasn’t panic.
It was preparation.
“How long?” I asked.
Dario hesitated. “At least two weeks.”
Two weeks.
I swallowed the taste of iron rising in my throat. He probably set the bomb on the day he came to get Aiyana.
“Who knows?” I asked.
“Core team. No one else.” Biggie responds in his monotone work voice.
“Keep it that way.” I ordered
Biggie nodded once, but he didn’t leave.
There was something else.
“Aiyana?” I asked.
“She knows.”
Of course she did.
Aiyana had been the first to suspect something was wrong. She was the one who noticed the slight delay in the security feed loop and also suspected Gerald when I didn’t.

I found her in the training hall not long after, hitting the heavy bag like it had personally offended her. Each strike landed with a crack that echoed off the walls.
“You’re going to break your wrist,” I said.
She didn’t stop.
“Good.”
Sweat clung to her dark hair. Her eyes were rimmed red, but not from exhaustion.
“He knew that spot would bring the whole wing down,” she continued. “He knew we’d be in there most nights.”
Yes.
He did.
That’s what made it personal.
“I don’t want him dead,” I said quietly.
Aiyana stared at me like she didn’t recognize me.
“I want him found.”

~=•=~
The search began before dawn.
Biggie orchestrated it like a military campaign.
Safehouses were checked first. Every property we’d ever used under false names. Nothing.
Then the offshore accounts. Gerald had siphoned funds in increments small enough to avoid detection. He’d built a quiet escape route while standing at my side.
Biggie assembled three teams.
One to sweep the city, ports, private airstrips, underground clinics.
One to dig into digital shadows; dark web chatter, encrypted forums, dormant contacts reactivated in the last month.
And one to revisit the past.
That was the one I oversaw.
Because if Gerald ran, he didn’t run forward.
He ran backwards.
Gerald and I met when we were kids.

He had blood on his knuckles and defiance in his eyes.

I had grief and silence.
We recognized something in each other, two boys shaped by loss before we understood the word for it.

He was there when my sister died.

He held me back from running into the burning house, took the blame when I shattered the principal’s office window three days later.

He slept on the floor beside my bed the night I stopped speaking for almost a week.

He was my brother long before I ever wore the crown they call the Black Mafia’s head.

So I started where we began.

The old neighborhood.

The cracked basketball court behind Saint Mary’s.

The abandoned bookstore where we used to stash stolen candy in the ceiling tiles.

All empty.

But memories cling to places, even when people don’t.

Dario joined me at the court that evening.

“You think he’d come back here?” He asked.

“No.” I said. “But he’d remember it.”

Dario studied me carefully.

“You’re not angry,” he observed.

I almost laughed.

“I am furious,” I said. “
But anger is easy.”

“What is it then?”

I looked at the hoop with no net.
“I want to know why.”