Unique II: Betrayal

Chapter 5 - Coma

The next thirty-six hours were tortuous for Kennard. That day and a half at the hospital felt more like thirty-six years in a prison cell awaiting execution.
     Kennard never left Unique’s side and had to be pried away from her before she was taken into surgery He hated the fact that his actions might have been considered bitch-assness, but Unique was a part of his soul. He didn’t give a fuck what it looked like.
     The fight at Madison Square Garden took place as scheduled. But he didn’t really care about that bout; he and Unique were smack-dab in the middle of their own fight, one with a significantly larger purse: her life.
     Unique was now hooked up to a team of lifesaving machines. She was in a coma, and the doctor wasn’t sure when or if she would ever wake up. The doctor said that Unique was lucky that Kennard had found her when he did and that the EMT guys had gotten her to the hospital as soon as they did, or she would have died for certain.
      With all due respect to the doctor’s expertise, Kennard begged to differ. As he looked at his woman lying on a hospital bed, unable to move, Unique didn’t appear to be rolling in four-leaf clovers to him. Luck was relative.
      Kennard had cleared over eighty million dollars from the fight Saturday night and would have paid every dime of it to be able to change this particular predicament. But it didn’t work like that. Shit—life didn’t work that way. Money could buy him the best doctors but not time travel or a pass to keep his girlfriend from the gates of heaven or hell for that matter. Regardless of what Disney World wanted people to believe, fantasies didn’t accept credit cards.
      Kennard had to wrap his head around the reality Unique might never wake up.
     The doctor had said that the longer Unique remained with no progress, the more her chances of pulling through decreased.
     Kennard wanted to—he so badly needed to—take his anger out on someone, mainly the person or people behind not only this brutal crime to his woman but also of the violation and disrespect to him. Besides wanting Unique to pull through, he wanted to make these horrible people to feel her pain and their loved ones to feel his.
      He couldn’t believe that fate would have it that he had been in a situation similar to this one, almost a decade ago regarding Kyra, who was then his girlfriend and who, just like Unique, happened to be pregnant with his baby when she was kidnapped and held for ransom.
      It didn’t matter who did this or how long it would take him to find the people responsible. It had taken him two years of keeping his ear to the streets to find out who had killed Kyra. The murderers turned out to be three cats from Queens, who were delivered to him on a silver platter.
      The murderous secret eventually proved to be like water, too hard for them to hold. One of them, a kid name Righteous, started bragging to some homies and it didn’t take long for the word to get back to Harlem and straight to Kennard.
     Righteous had no problem killing, it seemed—that was easy for him—but he was less keen on pain being inflicted upon him.
      A couple of fingers cut off with a reciprocating saw and Kennard and his team wasn’t able to shut him up. Righteous tried to confess to every abject thing he’d ever done in his miserable life. He would have done anything to stop the pain. Anything to stay alive. He was a real sucker, and he took the coward’s way out.
      He hadn’t given a damn about the pain that had been afflicted upon Kyra or the hurt Kennard had felt every day afterward.
     Kennard only wanted to know two things from Righteous: who were his accomplices and why did they do it?
     In return, Kennard promised Righteous that he would not kill him slow . . .
   Righteous did not hesitate. He quickly gave up his two cohorts, their names, addresses, birthdays, and shoe sizes. He held back nothing.
     When he finished, Kennard thanked him, then shot him in the forehead.
     If nothing else, Kennard was a man of his word. As for how Righteous’s partners paid for what they had done, that’s a whole other story.
     Since then he never thought that he would ever love again or find anybody else that he would give his heart to—that was, until the day he innocently bumped into Unique at a party in the Hamptons.