Vengeance(19)

The home had ten-foot ceilings throughout, with a two-story foyer and cathedral ceiling, a pool house, outdoor fireplace, computer room, media room, library, exercise room, and the list went on and on. Excessive for one person, even one with a small entourage of employees, but again, it was all for show and it was a drop in the bucket to me. If money truly bought happiness, I should have been the happiest sister on the planet, but I was depressed, pissed, and ready to seek the vengeance that I had gone there to get. I donated tens of millions of dollars a year, so that was a good thing. I purged my closets every season and donated the clothes to women who needed them, mostly domestic abuse shelters or women reentering society after serving prison terms. Outside of drugs, domestic abuse was the main reason women ended up in such a predicament. If they did not flee and go to a shelter, they ended up snapping on men who had been beating their asses for years and they had to serve time behind it. At the very least, I was able to provide others with some happiness or basic human needs.

The only two things that actually mattered to me in the entire house were my bed—I loved comfort—and my piano that I had had shipped down from my penthouse in NYC. The place needed to be decorated and that was the beginning of the end of my misery. I called it Operation Renovate, Then Destroy.

“Nikki, what time is Mrs. Hudson supposed to be here?” I asked my assistant as I sat at the breakfast counter eating a bowl of fresh strawberries and blueberries with vanilla-flavored granola. “She’s still coming, right?”

Nikki was typing away on her MacBook Air, responding to e-mails and requests for interviews and appearances. I had several publicists, but Nikki had a direct line, nearly around-the-clock access to me, so all of them had to go through her to see if I was even interested. Plus, Nikki kept my calendar, so she was the only one who truly knew my availability, even more so than myself.

“Earth to Nikki!”

She finally paused and said, “Huh? I’m sorry.”

“Is the interior designer still coming today?”

“Oh, yeah. She’ll be here about eleven. That’s a good time, right?”

I giggled. “You tell me. All I know is that alerts pop up on my cell phone two hours before and then ten minutes before I’m supposed to be someplace or do something. You do a good job at making me look timely.”

“Well, it’s a quarter to nine, so you’ll be seeing one in about fifteen minutes telling you that she’s coming at eleven.”

We both chuckled.

Nikki was a fantastic assistant. She’d been with me for four years and I wouldn’t trade her for anything in the world. She always switched her hairstyles out to express herself. She was shorter than me, which I liked, light-skinned, thick, and always smiled. She had graduated from Spelman in 2004 with a degree in music, so she was excited that I had moved to Atlanta. In the entire time of her employment, we had never traveled there once because I had never been back since 1987.

That was a year that I wanted to forget forever. Well, most of it, up until that night in October where I almost died and was actually resurrected in the downtown Greyhound station. Hannah had saved me from other people, and from myself. I was determined to die, one way or another, but she breathed oxygen back into my lungs.

I clamped my eyes shut when I thought about what had happened at my high school homecoming. Those bitches and bastards had actually tried to kill me. It may not have been their exact intention, but it was the most probable outcome. If Hannah hadn’t cared enough to save me from bleeding to death, it would have been over. What I had craved and yearned for all the years prior, death, was right there in front of my face. I could almost reach out and touch it, smell it, embrace it.

“Wicket?” Nikki snapped me out of my thoughts. “Did you need anything else from me right now?”

“No, I’m about to work out for an hour.” I climbed down off the barstool at the breakfast bar. “I have to keep these tits and this ass tight for the stage.”

Nikki grinned. “And you keep them tight, too.”

I walked off to throw on a sports bra and pair of sweat pants so I could get in a good sweat before Bianca Hudson, formerly Bianca Lee, showed up at eleven. She thought she was coming to acquire the decorating contract of her lifetime and I was going to give it to her . . . right before I took out the knife that she had embedded in my back decades earlier and fucked the conniving, heartless bitch up with it.



* * *



“It is such an honor to meet you, Miss Wicket. Should I call you Miss Wicket or do you prefer just Wicket, or do you prefer your real name, Miss—”