Twinkle of Love - Completed

Prologue

The Underground, Atlanta, Georgia

Two Days Later

Alls my life I should fight, nigga

Alls my life I...

Hard times like, "God!"

Bad trips like, "Yeah!"

The sense that everything was swiftly spiralling out of his control was nothing new. His hand moved from the gear-shift stick to flick on the high-beam lights. With its neon glow eating up the night, he shifted his ute back into high gear, cleaving through the silent darkness and his looming sense of foreboding. The fear that he was finally losing his mind was always there. It was a fight to keep the dark tendrils of impending doom from consuming him whole.

Nazareth, I'm fucked up

Homie, you fucked up

But if God got us, then we gon' be alright

His deep voice stretched and dropped in bass to ring out hauntingly as he sang along to the famed lyrics of Kendrick Lamar's Alright, in sync with its smooth beat. The music worked its magic, its beat entrancing as Blaise belted out his own vocals to the song, drawing on its deep well of meaning in shoring up his will. His grip tightened on the steering, even as his mind revolted but delved helplessly over the recent past, and even as his body shuddered from the pain of loss.

"You are not my son!"

The passing words of the only woman who had been his mother still rang jarringly in his ears. His heart thudded and wept silently with each syllable ricocheting off his senses, but his eyes remained dry.

"I am not your mother."

Blaise Shubert had known that he was not her son. He couldn't have been. No more than he could have been the son of his piss-pot father. They were too different from him to have thought otherwise. Not necessarily in appearance, but in everything else. Everything that mattered. But instinctively knowing it... and actually hearing her confirm it... was another matter entirely. Blaise had looked at the worn woman, once beautiful in her blond hair and blue eyes, and had known instinctively that there was nothing of her in him. Sure, they shared the same blue gaze, but where his offered a glimpse into his soul, hers had been devoid of anything but the barest link to life. His gaze ran over her bare arm to settle on the most recent of puncture wounds and had instantly known—that this time the drugs-induced glaze would not clear from her starry-blue eyes. He had sat with her for the moments it took for the life to seep out of her, and had still been staring when the glaze left her eyes to leave behind only the stillness of death.

His hand hit the steering in agitation, then Blaise pulled over his ute up onto the grassy embankment at the side of the road. He was here. Turning off the ignition, the silence of the cold dead surroundings crept hauntingly in. Blaise stared out into the dark, straining his eyes searchingly. Ever alert. Breathing out a warm puff into the chilled night air, he waited until the tremble in his limbs eased before he resolutely stepped out into the night.

It was dark and rank outside, as any cemetery deep in the night could be expected to be. The marble town of the hood planted with uncharted graves. Not every grave reached as deep as six feet under, but those that did were legit. The unmarked graves that demanded respect. Graves that belonged to the real deaths of head of the hood, long immortalised through their officiated untimely demise for the black and white of the law. What ain't alive can't get imprisoned, and so it was not only money that got laundered through these soggy pastures but the people who worked it.