Six Months Later
“It’s a wonderful thing what you’re doing,” Dominique said, her arm linked in Sol Danjuma’s as she leaned into him. “You’re making a difference to these people.”
“You’re making me soft in my old age,” he laughed enjoying her nearness. “You’re a bad influence.” But he liked the feeling this place gave him. It felt good to be doing something good. It had taken a while to clean up the old military base, but it had been transformed.
The day after what could have turned into a war but ended so differently because of the woman standing next to him, Danjuma had returned to the site of the slaughter to find that he’d been mistaken—there had been shots, and yes, some had fallen, but only a handful. Most of the defenders had surrendered. He hadn’t lost a soul from his own men.
He’d been happy to allow the defenders the dignity of burning their dead, as was their custom, but after they had done that, they’d been lost, leaderless. He had offered them the choice; leave, go back over the border to the homeland they had abandoned and take their chances there, or stay here and try to build something new.
Most of the Awon Woli had chosen to stay.
Thankfully, his girls had suffered little more than a few cuts and bruises that healed a lot faster than the trauma Rakeem’s betrayals had done to their minds. He had to smile at the way they fussed at the tiniest scratches on their skin. He told them scars were things of beauty because only survivors carried scars, but they weren’t buying it.
Dana had refused to come out to this place again, but her sister was in the thick of things, full of ideas as to what should be done with the place.
He wasn’t a psychologist, but he was smart enough in terms of people and the way they acted, to know she was doing it as a form of exorcism. She was banishing the ghosts of this place, her dead, even though he knew she would carry them with her for the rest of her days. What was obvious though, was that she enjoyed being around the boy, Daudi M’Beki. Not that it was going to be some fairy tale ending for them. It was more like a broken bird thing, with her wanting to fix him before she sent him off into the world. Danjuma could live with that. For now.
Even so, it was hard to trust that his girls were growing up twice as smart as he’d ever been. But then they took after their mother.
Rakeem.
The betrayal stung.
It had taken Dominique to tease the full extent of it out of Dana, but more than once she had found Rakeem following her, turning up in unexpected places. She’d mistakenly thought that he’d ordered his man to shadow her and had shrugged it off as more overly protective parental intrusion.
But then she had seen the way he looked at her in the truck and she’d known.
“He was infatuated with her,” Dominique explained. “He probably thought you’d give her to him, a gift, keeping it in the family, cementing his place at your side, good old Uncle Rakeem…”
He was only ten years older than her, he thought. Was. Of course, he wouldn’t get any older.
When the truck had rolled, he hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt, unlike the girls. That had saved them. He had broken his neck and was dead before Danjuma had dragged his girls out of there.
He could have tried to get the body out of the truck, but in that moment, he realized the Awon Woli had the right idea when it came to their dead. He had put a light to the gas tank and stepped back, watching the bastard who had so very nearly cost him everything burn.
“You can’t blame yourself.”
“That’s easy to say.”
“The girls don’t blame you, even though they know what you asked him to do. They know you did it because you love them.”
“And what do I do about this one?” he asked pointing across at Daudi who was laughing as he shared a bottle of water with his youngest daughter. They looked happy together. Painfully so. But she was young; too young.
“Sometimes you just have to let them make their own mistakes. But I’ll keep an eye on her. She seems to like me.”
“They both do,” he said and grinned. “And with good reason. It’s me they’re not too fond of right now, mainly for keeping you hidden.”
“Well, that’s on both of us,” she said. “Not just you. Leave it to me. I speak teenage girl. I’ll go and see if she’s ready to head back with us to grab some lunch.”
Danjuma watched as the woman walked away from him, all lithe and sinuous. He had worried things would change when he’d seen what she was capable of. Maybe they had, but only for the better. She was one of a kind.
The old base no longer served as a base of operations for drug runners and people smugglers, even though some of them remained.
The huts had been turned into living spaces and a few extra buildings had been added, nothing special, but safe, and that was what was important. Now they housed family after family of refugees. The place had a generator and a well that provided clean water, and outside the walls, a patch of land was being cultivated. It was already home.
Most of the young girls had stayed, too.
One or two had come from villages not too far away, and Danjuma had promised to see they got back home. A few of the others had been taken in by some of the families who had lost children of their own or had girls of similar ages. A handful of others chose to remain here, together, turning the room that had been their prison into a fresh start.
Sol Danjuma didn’t know what had happened to the other American, or the four blocks of cocaine that had brought him here in the first place. He knew that Travis had left with the cash he had been promised, so most likely Connors had gotten the bricks of coke and they’d both left with what they came for after all.
They’d found Boss’s safe.
One of Danjuma’s men had blown it open.
There was money in there. A lot of it. But Sol Danjuma wasn’t a thief. He didn’t need the dead man’s money. Instead, he offered it to those of Boss’s men who’d chosen to remain, and they had decided that it would be better used towards the work they were doing in exchange for a place in it for themselves.
A fresh start.
A safe haven.
Danjuma could hardly refuse.
He watched Dominique walking towards him, her arm around his daughter’s shoulder. They were chattering away like the oldest and best of friends. She was exactly what Dana needed. Danjuma knew that everything would be alright. Things were changing, yes, but sometimes change was for the best.
THE END