Billionaire Heiress of Lasgidi, page 24
I scoffed. Like anything could complicate the friendship they shared with Uncle Toks.
However, I was not about to confess to my parents that I had fucked Nimi once and I very much looked forward to doing it again.
“Have a safe trip, mom,” I said, grateful that they’d at least softened towards each other during the conversation.
Outside, I joined Malik in the passenger’s seat of his dark green G-wagon. Behind retro dark shades, he peered at me. “So, the Sule guy, what exactly is his deal?”
“Nothing I’m willing to share.”
“Fine. He’s in one of my Dad’s warehouses on the outskirts. I’ll drive you there. You can do with him what you want.”
“You can just drop me at mine, ‘Lik. Give me the address and I will figure things out.”
He watched me unconvinced. “Is this another case of someone selling you bad drugs?”
I shook my head, retrieving my sunshades and shielding my eyes from the onslaught of the harsh sun. At the beginning of my bender, I had been completely out of control. It was late night after late night and partying recklessly across the world without a single care.
Still, everything had been kept under control until a new plug sold me Vicodin mixed with something that almost proved fatal. Furious, I had gone in search of the guy and almost beat him to death.
It was not one of my proudest moments and when I showed up at his house in Surulere I hadn’t been sober for three months.
Malik had him taken to our family hospital when it was obvious that he was going to succumb to the injuries sustained from the beating. We tried to keep it under wraps but the news eventually found its way to our parents. My parents were livid and that and the reaction from my music and yet another brick wall in school drove me over the edge.
The next morning, I almost bled to death after I slashed my wrist.
Malik claimed he’d never been so scared of losing someone in his life.
According to him, he thought I had died.
I had intended to.
“No. He hurt someone that I care about.”
In silence, I knew that he was aware of who it was. It was the thing with me and Malik, our ability to understand the depth of the problem or situation the other was in without much being said.
It was the strongest part of our friendship.
“What did he do to her?” He asked.
“Malik, we don’t have to discuss this. Aren’t you supposed to be on your way home?”
“No. I’m doing whatever this is with you.”
He sped out of my parent’s large estate, treating every single traffic sign on our way as if they were mere suggestions.
I watched him a few times, aware of his moodiness yet unwilling to be dragged into another Malik episode.
Whenever he was determined to insert himself into a plan there was no stopping him.
I knew any effort I put in would be futile.
Outside the huge warehouse, security threw the gates open for us without questions. We drove for a mile or so, smoothly moving through aisles created by smaller containers in the massive space.
The further we drove into the compound, the less human contact we had.
If I knew Malik well enough, I knew that nobody knew the Sule Adeoye guy was here.
An interesting fellow he was, that one. A brief look online after Nimi told me what he did to her revealed his amazing rebranding in the past two years.
He was Sule the law-abiding citizen who had served his community well in years, given back, and barely used his royal privileges while throwing himself into public service. And in the period after he violated Nimi he disappeared from the public, basically became a ghost and nothing was really known of what he did in that period.
He reappeared a couple of years after, built an incredibly large followership on social media, and began to criticize the current government.
He fed the dissatisfied citizens with the constant condemnation of the current government’s policies and his Twitter account which was embellished with a picture of him in a well-tailored blazer and a decent pair of jeans and white shirt was constantly siding with conversations on gender equality, anti-tribalistic conversations and poverty eradication.
It wasn’t public yet but the guy was going to announce his decision to run for political office in the near future.
A situation I was going to kill before it had life.
Guys like Sule Adeoye owned and wielded the playbook of appealing to the public's emotions by championing certain causes and riding the wave of public support to the home of personal interest.
In a few years, he was going to be the next Senator making a fool of his constituency by demeaning the common man’s plight and choosing oblivion many times over the awareness of the average Nigerian’s plight.
Then he would remain in politics long enough to line his pockets, reach the elastic limit of his foolishness and become the butt of everyone's jokes.
Malik pulled up and I glanced at him before I alighted.
“Your Dad is in town, isn’t he?” I asked.
“Yep.”
I got out of the car. “Go home.”
“Nope.”
He alighted and was by my side in seconds. There was pin-drop silence enveloping us as Malik started for the entrance of the large container where I figured Sule Adeoye was waiting.
I drew him back.
“Malik, you are going home this very minute.”
“I am not going home.” He repeated the words in French as if the words he spoke in English went over my head.
“You are here because you don’t want to go home. You have to talk to your father at some point.”
“You make it sound as if I was keeping malice with him or something.” He chuckled and retrieved a cigar from his pocket. “The old man doesn’t need me making conversations with him. He has everything figured out. He always has.”
I didn’t miss the slight contempt in his voice. He loathed home. After he figured out how to be by himself after his sister Mariam got married, Malik barely spoke of his parents.
But I wasn’t unaware of how badly he wanted his father’s approval and at the least, his attention.
He was a hard guy, he’d figured life out on his terms, and at 20, he’d handled too many family responsibilities by himself.
Still, I could sense the desperate need to be accepted every time he spoke of his parents.
He and Lili carried the same brokenness about them. The sort they channeled into other things. For him, it was the depraved parties, the endless and wild sex binge, the lavish spending, and the refusal to stay around his parents whenever they eventually returned home.
For Lili, it was the intent to fuck others up and maybe self-destruct in the process.
We were all broken in some way but I also wasn’t going to act as if things weren’t somehow different for me.
Maybe Malik had never OD’ed or tried to kill himself as I had but this was also him acting out.
He tried to light his cigar to no avail. When it fell from his fingers, I grabbed it before it hit the floor. I handed it to him.
“I can handle this bastard myself,” I said to him standing in his way as he tried to brush past me.
“No offense but you’re not The Rock. This guy will have you beaten to a pulp in a second.”
“I would like to see him try.”
Malik sighed, frustrated. “Ryan, I haven’t seen my parents in a year, what the fuck am I supposed to say to them?”
“I don’t know. But maybe ideas can come during your drive home.”
He scoffed, cussing.
“Let me handle this guy. Go home.”
He fell silent because he knew there was no point arguing with me.
He turned and left without a single word.
As he sped out of the compound I knew that he wasn’t headed home.
Things got worse at home when his parents took away half of his privileges a year ago. Of course, that still left him with quite a lot but I knew he despised their reaction to what was a desperate call for attention.
And I knew he would rather sit in this warehouse watching me threaten Sule Adeoye than go home to his father and have normal conversations.
I pulled up the heavy door and watched from the entrance as he shielded his eyes from the onslaught of the sharp light from outside.
It gave me ample time to study him carefully, trying to decipher his current state of mind as I read a message from my Driver saying he’s on his way to my location.
Malik had called him.
“Mr. Adeoye, we finally meet.”
Nervous eyes followed my movement as I found a chair and sat opposite him. He was bound to a chair but that was it. He hadn’t been touched or beaten as I had instructed.
“I think there has been a mistake,” he said quickly. “I don’t know why I am here but I think you have the wrong person. My name is Sule Adeoye, a law-abiding citizen, a good man, a husband, and a father. I am not a troublemaker.”
“So you’re not a rapist.”
If those words shocked him, it didn’t feel like it. His gaze briefly swept through me, as if trying to decipher who I was and what I knew.
“I am not a rapist.” He sighed. “See? I told you that you have the wrong person.”
“So you don’t know this young woman,” I said, unlocking my phone and showing him a very recent photo of Nimi. It was one of my favorite photos of her. Her hair was in a loose bun, strands of hair brushing across her face, her full lips covered in a shiny gloss as she leaned against the railings somewhere in Ibadan. It was shortly before she came to Lagos, before I met her. Before everything about her became my business.
Sule Adeoye tried to mask the look of recognition that flashed through his face when he saw Nimi’s photo on the phone but I saw it.
Not the recognition alone, the brief look of lust, of desire, of the knowledge of a past that was.
Irritation flooded through me and I clenched my jaw, holding myself back from smacking him across the face.
Even now, he’d have touched her again if given the chance.
“I don’t really know this face. Is she an Influencer?” he asked, looking at me from where he sat bound to a wooden chair. "Or a Twitter activist? You know many of them follow me and interact with my tweets."
He really thought he was that important. Cute.
“No. She was your student.”
“Really? I taught in a few schools before I finally left teaching and pursued other things. I can't remember the faces of all my students.”
“How many girls did you rape in the process of teaching and pursuing other things?” I asked as calmly as I could.
“Sir, I don’t know what this is about. I had just gotten to Ibadan last night when I was abducted and brought here by unknown men. All these things you’re asking me, I don’t know. Are you sure I am the one you’re looking for?”
“Isn’t this your wife and kid?” I asked, showing him another photo.
“Yes, but-”
“And you taught Nimi Carew when she was a minor and raped her on a rainy evening after you managed to gain her trust.”
He fell silent.
“And now you have managed to rebrand yourself for politics, a career path that’s a perfect trajectory for the life you’ve lived if you ask me. I know things, Sule. Many things. Like how you embezzled funds at your last place of work and how you looked the other way when your political rival was killed.”
His eyes darkened. “She and I were close.”
“Oh, now your memory’s been juggled.”
“We had sex. I didn’t rape her.”
“So you’re confessing to having sex with a minor which is statutory rape. So, still rape.”
“No! These girls were always throwing themselves at me, wearing makeup, acting as if they were older. I thought she was 18! She looks older than her age.”
I had to give it to him, he was going to make a good politician. Blatant lies, refusal to admit his wrongdoing, and shifting the blame were part of the shameless Nigerian politician starter pack. He was well on his way to becoming a successful Politician in this clime. The problem was I was going to be in his way.
When I looked him up and had Malik put his boys on his trail, I knew that when he disappeared, he was working in some remote areas and urban ghettos. The possibility that this fucker had raped other girls after Nimi was very high. He was going to do it again.
And when men like this gained power, it was going to get worse.
“What do you plan to do with me?” He asked, doing his best to keep the trepidation out of his voice.
“I don’t plan to let you leave.”
The panic seeped into his voice, he tried to move in his chair. With every fiber of his being, he reached for the only weapon he could in his stationary position, an empty threat.
“I don’t know who you think you are-”
“My name is Ryan Chimezie Dokpesi. My Parents are in the oil and gas, real estate, and shipping businesses. Donald and Nkem Dokpesi, you may have heard of them.”
Terror flashed through his eyes, worry plonked his shoulders, his gaze darted in horror.
“I am a rich kid who will get away with your murder. If I so choose to you know, murder you.”
I watched as I said the words, almost tickled by his reaction to the things I said.
“I swear, I didn’t know-”
“Know what? That your dick violated a child?”
“That-that-she was that young.”
Even now that he knew my capabilities and how my privileges would absorb me of murdering him in this place where nobody knew to find him, he was still lying.
I wanted to hit him until he couldn’t speak.
Nimi wasn’t fragile or anything. Yes, she had demons she constantly tried to hide from the world but we all had demons.
However, knowing that she was a child who couldn’t have known what to do, who had no one who could fight this man, and having her whole life taken from her because she was violated by the person who made her fan the flames of her passion in writing in the first place was devastating.
He’d taken away the one thing she liked when he raped her.
And without realizing it, she’d been stripped of the pleasure of sex along with it. I was grateful that she was beginning to find some sort of healing this early. Some people weren’t that lucky.
I stepped closer to him, each step renewed by the determination to have him fucked up.
My fists were balled. I knew that if I hit him I wouldn’t stop. Memories of the guy from Surulere flashed through my mind.
I couldn’t hit him.
If I did, I would never stop.
“I will let someone else handle you. Someone who won’t be able to hold back knowing what you did to his child.”
His eyes widened. “Please,” he begged. “Oga, you and I fit talk dis tin o. Abeg.” He was pleading, because he knew how deep the hole I had dug for him was.
If Uncle Toks walked in here and found him his career was going to be over but that was going to be one of the last things he’d have to worry about.
“Guy, you and I know how these things sometimes go.”
What the fuck is he saying? I don’t go around raping women.
But I ignored him as I fished for my phone and scrolled to Uncle Toks’ number.
His pleading intensified, his voice desperate. “It was a mistake and I have since learned my lesson. See, these things are not in black and white.”
“Ryan, hey. I have to call you back later. Something just came up…”
“Okay. Fine. I just wanted to tell you about a guy who hurt Nimi-”
“You have my undivided attention,” he said.
“He’s some guy named Sule Adeoye and a few years ago he… he…”
“I know what he did, Ryan.”
There was silence as I realized Nimi had gone to her father with the details of what transpired in her past.
She’d gone to her father because she damn well knew what would become of a man like this if Tokunbo Carew handled it.
The realization of the power she willed drew me closer to her like a magnet to steel. I was crazier about her at that moment, because she was someone who knew damn well what a situation like this required.
“Give me the details of where he is.”
“Alright, Uncle Toks.”
“Ryan?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t do anything. Let me handle this.”
And because I trusted him, I said, “Fine.”
As the call ended, I turned.
The shock of finding Sule standing in front of me before he whacked me with the chair was the last thing I saw before I blacked out.
Chapter 17
NIMI
The sound of approaching footsteps snapped me out of my quiet time. I sighed as I mentally counted the seconds to when I would have to stop thinking about how to scream Ryan into realizing sending me gifts meant nothing after he treated me like I was just pussy five days ago.
Aunty Nurse's voice pierced through the conjured moments that were shifting through my mind like slides in a presentation. She smiled when I glanced at her from the pool chair.
"Are you fine?"
I shrugged.
She took a seat near me, her gaze briefly settling on the clear water before returning to me. "You've been acting very differently."
"I'm fine," I murmured. "It's been a crazy couple of weeks."
"I know that a lot of things have happened in that short period but don't worry, you will be fine."
She gave my arm a squeeze and I nodded. "Thanks."
"And I know grandma's death couldn't have been easy on you. With your father coming into your life and all in the same period. But loss gets easier with time."
"I appreciate your kind words," I said, reaching for the glass of Chapman sitting on a tiny stool near me.
"Banks said he was coming back," she said a few minutes after loud silence accompanied my response.
"That's good."
"Do you think he really misses you?"
