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Knox had a love in him for the streets, and no lie, that nigga was a better man than me.

He had a lot of wisdom. The way he moved around in the drug business, especially for him to be so young, it’s almost like that’s what he was put on this earth for.

We were only eighteen years old at the time, and Knox was out here running shit, and I was behind him, running shit with him.

Even with me being his right-hand man, I never felt like we were equal though.

Everybody looked at Knox as the head nigga in charge.

He was the one that was feared and respected.

When niggas wanted to get put on, they wouldn’t say that they wanted to move bricks for Dutch, and Knox.

They would say that they wanted to move bricks for Knox.

I already had a little envy of this nigga, starting from the moment when we were just kids.

I was jealous of the way his mama loved him.

Growing up, I had to witness the way everybody just clung to him, always telling him that he was going to be something special.

Even Lion used to tell him that shit, and Lion was the kind of person that wouldn’t say anything nice to anyone.

I watched the way Prime took him in, treating him like he was his son, loving him, showing him the game, putting him in rooms that a lot of young niggas weren’t getting put into.

I still loved him, but I was beginning to hate the nigga, and my jealousy was growing by the day.

During all this shit, Solace has always been in the picture.

The two of them had a deep love for each other, since we were all fourteen years old.

Knox didn’t play that shit when it came to Solace.

All the boys in our crew would be running through all kinds of hoes, but Knox was pussy whipped when it came to Solace.

He would talk about how they were going to get married, have a bunch of kids, and shit like that.

Goofy ass nigga did marry her too. They got married when they were only nineteen.

Did that shit at the courthouse, and I was his best man.

By the time they were twenty- two years old, she had given birth to Sevyn.

The hunger that Knox had for the game increased after he had a son.

Just as quickly as that hunger came, and as quickly as shit was happening for us, Mama Goldie died.

She died tragically, too. Mama Goldie suffered from epilepsy.

She would have seizures. As a kid, Knox used to always tell me that his biggest fear was of her having a seizure while she was driving, and she lost control of her car, and passed away tragically like that.

He’s been speaking on that fear for years.

When we started making money, Knox was adamant about his mama being chauffeured around, but mama Goldie was hardheaded, and she didn’t want that kind of lifestyle.

That nigga’s fear came true one afternoon.

His mama had a seizure on the highway, losing control of the car, which caused the accident.

Knox was just on a high from having his son, and then he lost his mama.

I have never seen my nigga that fucked up before.

Knox was at a low point. To know Knox is to know that he didn’t drink, or he didn’t do drugs, but when he lost mama Goldie, he started drinking and hitting the blunt.

During that time, I just knew that he was going to step down, and pass everything down to me, but he didn’t, and I didn’t want to ask him to because I would come off selfish.

He gave himself two months to mourn, and get himself together, and after that, I never saw that nigga shed another tear.

If he did shed tears though, he just wasn’t doing it in front of me.

He came back to the business, like nothing had happened, and he was hungrier than ever before.

Our plug Pablo that we had in Mexico, Knox put a call with him, wanting to up the drugs that we were getting from him.

At first, when he started telling me that he wanted more drugs to get moved throughout the organization, I thought that he was crazy, and even Pablo thought that it might have been too much, but Knox had faith that we could do it, and I swear we did it. We even beat Lion’s record.

After that shit happened, it kind of put our organization on. Everybody wanted to get put on and move weight for Knox. Mind you, Knox was only twenty- two when all of this was happening, so he made history in Miami, being the youngest, yet the biggest drug dealer to come out of Miami.

Nobody was saying that Knox, and his crew distributed all that weight though; motha fuckas were acting like he was the only one that had done that shit.

I started moving differently after that.

Going out, getting sloppy drunk, making enemies, just a bunch of wild, reckless shit that I started doing over the years.

I was making enemies with the wrong kind of people, so wars were starting, which would have us losing men because they were getting killed.

Knox, and I would have our times when we would get into it with each other, but we would always do that shit in private.

This one time, I brought the wrong kind of heat to the organization, where we were beefing with another drug organization, that led to one of the biggest wars that we’ve ever had.

I swear we lost over twenty men. Knox snapped in the middle of a meeting, where over fifty of our men were inside, and me, and this nigga just started tussling.

Knox had hands, and I had hands too, but he’s always been the better fighter.

I feel like I was stripped from my manhood that night, getting my ass beat by him in front of everyone.

Because I’ve known Knox for so long, we’ve fought over the years, and we would make up for it.

This time, we didn’t make up for it until a week later.

The only reason why I made up with this nigga is because I knew that I was going to kill him, but I didn’t want to still be beefing with him, and when the nigga comes up missing, everyone thinks that I did it because we had an ongoing beefing.

I made sure that everyone saw when we hugged that shit out, and we brought our beef to an end.

I was plotting. Sevyn was getting ready to turn three, and he was going to take him, and Solace out of the country for his 3 rd birthday.

The plan was for them to be gone for two weeks.

Even though it was a birthday trip for Sevyn, it was also a getaway from the game, and all the problems that we had going on in Miami.

With everything that I was plotting, I didn’t need this nigga to make it back after that trip.

The way I went about the shit, shooting that nigga in the back, catching him completely off guard, that wasn’t even the way the shit was supposed to go.

I just happened to be riding past his house, mind all over the place, thinking if I really wanted to kill my best friend, and before I knew it, I was rolling the window down, and I sent over thirty shots his way.

I know it makes me a monster, but I swear I live with that shit.

I’m a man that doesn’t sleep much, and I always have to be on the move, doing something because if not, and if it gets too quiet, I started hearing voices.

I started hearing screams. I can’t get the screams from Solace or her mom from our of my head.

Solace’s mom, Synclaire, was like a second mother to Knox.

She loved him as if he was her child, so she took the death extremely hard.

They were fucked up about losing Knox. Solace so much to the point that she’d lost her fuckin mind.

Synclaire ended up taking Sevyn in because Solace no longer had the mental capacity to do it.

I just remember when I would go to Synclaire’s house to see Sevyn, and I felt like she would be digging into me, trying to get information from me.

Always wanting to know if I’d found out who killed Knox, always wanting to know my whereabouts when the shit happened, and just asking me shit in a way for me to slip up, and tell on myself.

Synclaire was a smart woman, and I didn’t want her to catch on, so I knew that it wasn’t long before I was going to have to take her ass out too.

I remember one time I went over to her crib to see her and Sevyn, and she was telling me how she was having trouble sleeping.

She said at night that she would have images of Knox in her head, and she was always worried about her daughter.

On top of that, she was trying to raise her grandson.

I told her that I had the same problem, and how I would take sleeping pills at night.

She wanted the pills. I could have done the right thing and given her the actual pills that I would take, but instead, I came back the next day, giving her some shit that I knew for a fact was laced.

I got a call later that night, telling me that Synclair had passed away in her sleep.

That’s how Sevyn ended up in my care. I raised the fuck out of that little boy.

I didn’t know shit about being a father, but I knew that after all the wrong that I’d done, raising Knox’s kid was the least that I could do.

Sevyn, and I had a perfect father/ son relationship.

That lil nigga knew that he could come to me about anything.

He had love, and a respect for me, feeling like I couldn’t do any wrong in his eyes.

Shit, I don’t think the nigga felt like that anymore though.

Ever since that day I pulled up on him at his office, and he questioned me in a way about his father’s killing, it let me know that he might have been on to something.

I loved that man like he came from my nuts, but if he put two and two together, and found out that it was me that had killed his pops, I would put that nigga down myself, even though it would cause me more hurt, and pain than it caused me to kill my own best friend.

I hate that I fell for that tactic, where I fucked around and answered a question wrong, knowing that he’d intentionally asked it to me in a way for me to fuck up.

Since Sevyn was old enough to ask, he wanted to know the details of his fathers death.

He wanted every small detail, even wanting to know where I had been.

For years, I’d always told him that I was out of town on business with Darryl.

That’s been my story from day one. I let him corner me in, say that I was with Tee, and I agreed to it.

He reeled me right into that one, and no lie, he had me sweating, even though I tried to pretend that I wasn’t.

The good thing about this is that Darryl was no longer here, so he couldn’t ask him if my story checked out.

Tee fucked around, and lost his mind, getting high off our products, so you could find him walking up under a bridge, talking to himself.

There was no way that Law could point Knox’s death back to me. At least, I didn’t think there was.

“I think your son might be on to me, man. I just came out here to give you a fair warning. You only got three years to know that nigga, but if Sevyn starts digging up shit, using that brain of his, and if he finds out that I killed you, just get ready to be reacquainted with him,” I spat, looking down at the headstone.

The second I said that, a powerful thunder roared, where it felt like the entire earth had shook.

There was a picture on the headstone that held Knox, and Sevyn. I looked down at the picture, as if it was my first time seeing it, and before I walked away, I spat on the headstone, disrespecting the fuck out of that nigga one last time before taking off.

For years, I lived life knowing that I would never get caught for the killing of Knox.

There was no way I could have. I had an alibi.

A good one too. When I did that shit, niggas didn’t even know that I was in Miami.

They were under the impression that I was out of town on business.

That alone is why shit never pointed back to me.

That, and because niggas just didn’t take me as the kind of person to pop my best friend.

They saw us make up after Knox beat my ass. They knew love was there.

As a little boy, Law would look me in my eyes, and there wouldn’t be any fear there, and he would tell me that if he ever found out who killed his pops, he was going to kill them, and he was going to make their death a long, painful one.

As a little nigga, he would say some off the wall shit, just knowing how he was going to kill his pops killer.

I believed every word that he said, which is why I couldn’t let him find out it was me.

I would kill his ass before I gave him the chance to kill me.

Mark my words, I’ll have his headstone right next to his fathers, fuckin around with me.