Her Name Is Knight (Nena Knight, #1)

by Yasmin Angoe

When she walked through her front door, she was no longer Echo, only Nena.

“Keigel,” Nena supplied helpfully. He was her neighbor three doors down and also the head of a large local gang.

Alleged money launderer Dennis Smith was to be tried on RICO charges and witness intimidation.

“The Council wants Lucien Douglas, and Douglas wants Smith—for whatever reason—to remain prison-free. It’s easier to take the lawyer out and keep the man happy. And it’s cheaper and less time consuming than buying off a jury.”

“You just completed the Nigerian dispatch; the Cuban is next, and then the attorney. After that, little sis, you need to lie low for a few months.

She’d been dispatching for so long that taking lives, even corrupt ones, elicited no more emotion from her than firing off an email. She didn’t relish killing. Killing just . . . was. It was keeping order and advancing the Tribe’s cause.

These three parts of Nena, always at war with each other, always at war with one another for survival. She wasn’t sure which she wanted to be the victor. Nena or Echo. Echo or Aninyeh. Aninyeh or Nena. When the war finally came to an end, she didn’t know who she would be.

None of this is normal. Therefore this, all of this, must be a terrible dream. Either that or we are in hell.

Josiah would be the perfect advisor to Wisdom. Impulsivity never overtakes him as it often does me. Most of the time to my detriment.

make the pledge to unite all African countries—and by association all Black people of the diaspora—and work to make them a strong, legitimate force, equal to all the other supreme forces of the world.

Because when a little man-child like that took offense, he’d burn everything down to get retribution. Even his very soul.

Papa shakes his head. “Not like this, Paul. Not on the backs of people, of children, I cannot. I will not let you run routes through our roads to ferry people into twenty-first-century slavery. A true brother wouldn’t ask it of me.”

The change is so rapid I involuntarily cry out, wondering how a human can change so quickly, quicker than a chameleon.

Papa believing a man like Paul would take no for an answer was a gross miscalculation—the first mistake I have ever known my father to make. Nothing between them was over. Not then. Not now.

One of them threatened to rape the girl. Why was the first thing men resorted to exacting dominance over women through violation or defilement? Why did it always have to be rape? Because, Nena thought mirthlessly, that was all these types of males knew.

They laughed at her. Nena knew the laugh well. It was the laugh of people when they thought you were nothing, less than nothing.

She should have saved him for last, since he was to blame for what she was about to do.

Georgia Baxter. Daughter of Cortland Baxter, the federal attorney who was about to try Dennis Smith. The same federal attorney who the African Tribal Council had marked for dispatch by Nena’s hands. If Nena were one for laughter, she’d do it now, because the chances of this meeting were a zillion to none.

I wrap my arms tightly around his waist, something I’ve always done when in need of his comfort. But this time our roles reverse, and Papa needs my protection.

He reminds me that you should not take your eyes off a predator on the hunt, because the moment you look away, they pounce. Yet somehow I took my eyes off Paul, and he disappeared into the smoke and mass of bodies and reemerged.

Despite all your university learning, your doctorate and degrees, your multiple languages, and your association with Westerners and colonizers, do you realize they still regard you as a savage?

“your world will cease to exist. All you love will suffer and die. Your sons will die. You will die. And your princess will sell to the highest bidder. You, Michael Asym, who have had every damn blessing imaginable, have run out of them tonight.”

She couldn’t get sidetracked even if Cortland Baxter was the first man she’d ever noticed, ever considered . . . in that way. He grinned at her, his natural smile nearly making her reciprocate until she remembered she never smiled unless on a job.

My brothers, my father, and I have come together in all of this. We hold on to each other.

I strain through my own pain to see some semblance of repentance, some realization from him that he has gone too far. There is none.

The debate rages on his face. He does not want to do this, but he does not want to die. He is a cauldron of emotions I cannot discern. In the end, self-preservation wins out.

The laughter is worst of all, laughter at my pain, my humiliation, my being made nothing at all. It is laughter that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Nena had thought she would never want a man to look at her with the interest and the want that Cortland had looked at her with the other night. She didn’t want it, love, a relationship, did she? Was it even possible for her after all she’d endured?

All that is good about him, Papa gifts to me in that moment. There is only your before and your after. How many times have my brothers and I heard this and not known what Papa had meant? It is what you do after that matters.

I do not care about anything else they can do because there is nothing worse than what they have done to me, what they are doing to my papa.

Never again to feel safe, loved, protected, or settled. All fight leaves me.

Blame is a cold, viscous thing that consumes every inch of me.

It is the night my first life, my before, ends. And because I cannot imagine life devoid of the people I loved, I reject any after with every fiber of my being.

It was easy for her to be flippant about security when she wasn’t the one directly engaging in the risky behavior.

My first instinct is to trust those kind eyes because to trust is all I ever learned before the attack, but I am learning hard lessons about trust and good and evil.

They are, in fact, better than me, because they hold out hope all will turn out well.

“your name is the first thing your parents give you, besides life. Don’t ever let anyone take that away from you. So when someone calls you a name you don’t like, like Curious George, for example, stand up for yourself. Don’t accept it just because you don’t want to make a fuss.”

I am marching into an unknown world, moving away from a devil I know to one of which I have no idea.

What Bridget does is worse than any of the men I have encountered. What she does is deceive and deliver. She is the siren.

Freedom I have not known in who knows how long. Time, for me, is one endless stream.

She was worried about what she was starting to feel and whether she could control it.

“Suddenly I was a single parent to a little girl, trying to make a name for myself, which was—is—tough, especially for a Black man, you know? They’re so busy thinking you don’t know as much, or you won’t work as hard, or you got where you were because of affirmative action or to check a diversity box. Or they stereotype you. I had to know more, work harder, and be more of a hard-ass than my White counterparts.

Nena wanted him to see that justice was more than a system of unbendable laws. She wanted to tell him all systems were fractured, and laws were colored shades of gray.

She pitied the day when his idealism would be crushed.

I am not watching to relish her death. I am learning his moves. If I ever get a chance, a big if, I can never allow him to get me beneath him. He cannot wrap his fingers around me like he is doing her. I would never get him off, as she cannot. I will need to maintain the upper hand.

Her blank eyes stare in my direction, without fear this time because there is nothing. The silence after so much noise is deafening.

She is “it” now, no longer a woman he spent time with, no longer human. She probably never was to him.

My molten rage at the lies about my family is white hot, otherworldly. It is a feeling I have never experienced, a feeling that is awakening me from the deepest of slumbers.

It is not easy, killing a person. It is exhausting work. But I must finish him because to let him live is not an option.

Because while life on these unfamiliar streets is hard, it is infinitely better than where I have been.