The Black Widow Clique

by Genesis Woods

Genres: African American Urban; Romantic Suspense

Synopsis

Best friends and blood sisters for life, Melonee Reid and Fiona White have one goal in life—to get rich and live comfortably—but growing up in the inner city of Los Angeles isn't helping them obtain that goal. That is, until Fiona comes up with a plan to marry for money and murder for even more.

The girls seek out older, established, wealthy bachelors, drawing them into a web of deception with their good looks, sexy bodies, and loving personalities. Once their last names are changed and the ink is dry on the insurance policies, the clique executes their plan to have the new husbands die "accidental" deaths, leaving their fortunes to the widowed wives.

Their little marry-for-money scam works for years, until things take a drastic turn and one friend's connection to the new mark has her questioning her role in the Black Widow Clique. The other friend still wants to carry out the murderous plan to get a hold of a multimillion-dollar insurance policy. Friendship will be tested, lies will be told, and loyalty will come into play when one black widow decides that their cozy web of deception, love, and money isn't big enough for two anymore.

Release date: April 24, 2018

Publisher: Urban Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

“Happy anniversary, honey.”

The word floated through the air and pulled me from my train of thought. I was sitting in front of my vanity, brushing my hair and thinking about my life, when my husband of two years walked up behind me and slipped his arms around my waist and kissed my neck.

“Happy anniversary to you too, love,” I said and smiled as I looked at him through the mirror. “I’ll be ready to leave in ten minutes.”

“No need to rush.” He released me and stepped back. “As a matter of fact, I was hoping you still wanted to stay in tonight. I’ll have Lupe prepare us a romantic dinner, and then we can just enjoy each other for the rest of our evening.”

I turned around to face him. “I wish you would’ve said something earlier, babe. I already sent Lupe and everyone else home for the night. I didn’t want any interruptions after we came back from dinner, when I changed into the little surprise I picked up for you from Frederick’s today.”

He bit his thin bottom lip, then lifted my hand up to his mouth and kissed the back of it, trailing a path of light pecks all the way up to my collar. After he inhaled the scent of the Chloe Love Story perfume he had given to me earlier, I felt the moan that escaped from his throat vibrate against my neck.

“Hmmm. You know I love the way that fragrance smells on your skin. What are you trying to do to me, woman?”

I stood up from my stool and wrapped my arms around his neck. Looking into his forest- green eyes, I saw the same sparkle he always had whenever he was trying to sample a taste of my goodies. I brushed my fingers across his tanned olive skin, admiring how smooth and wrinkle free it was. No one would ever know my husband’s true age just by looking at him, since he looked as young as a colt but was as old as a mule. If this were some other point in time, I probably would’ve enjoyed being married to Mr. Douglas Wayne Evans III. He wasn’t my type physically or skin color wise, but he took care of me and treated me like a queen. Far better than anyone of my race had.

I remember the day that we accidentally ran into each other at his car dealership. I knew that once he saw my thick and stacked five-foot-nine frame, my smooth coffee-bean skin, my granite-colored eyes, and my gorgeous Rembrandt smile, he’d be putty in my hands.

It took only a couple of days for him to ask me out, a couple of weeks for him to say that he loved me, and a few months for him to ask me to marry him. Of course, his daughter from one of his previous marriages had objected to our short courtship, but once he’d added my name to his will and insurance policy, I didn’t really give a fuck about how she felt.

Douglas was the perfect example of why when it was my turn to get hitched, I chose to go for the type who was more seasoned, was quick to fall in love, and had already had multiple marriages. It was so easy to get them to fall totally head over heels for you and change, or add your name to, any document, entitling you to half or, in some cases, all their fortune. Sometimes you did meet one who was smart enough to make you sign a prenup; however, as long as my name was on the insurance policies, I didn’t care. My being a great actress in the bedroom was what would really seal the deal. The age factor wasn’t a huge issue for me, but I did prefer my future husband to have a certain maturity, as it worked in my favor. With Douglas being thirty years my senior, he got a kick out of his associates and friends praising him for pulling in a young and beautiful trophy wife like me.

“Frederick’s, huh?” he asked as he caressed my cheek with the back of his hand. “How about we skip dinner and everything else and you go change into my surprise while I get yours?”

I jumped up and down in his arms, pecked him on his lips, then ran off to the luxury two-story walk-in closet he had made especially for me in our master bedroom.

God, I’m really going to miss all of this, I said to myself as I entered my clothing sanctuary. Any designer you could think of hung from the hangers on the racks. The custom built-in vanity and the dressing area were every girl’s dream. The bag and shoe storage sections could hold over a thousand purses and heels each. I had thought about just keeping the house so I wouldn’t have to part with my closet, since my name had already been added to the deed, but that was against the rules.

“Honey, I’m ready for my surprise now!” I heard Doug call out, so I grabbed the Frederick’s of Hollywood bag I had tucked in the bottom of my lingerie drawer and dumped the contents onto the closet island. Since I had just gotten out of the shower and lotioned up a few minutes before Doug came into the room, I didn’t have to freshen up. I dropped the robe I had on to the floor, exposing my naked body, and slipped into the red-bow front-open teddy. Once I had secured my feet in the six-inch caged booties and fluffed my hair a bit, I walked back into the master suite.

The look on my husband’s face told me that he approved of his gift.

“Fuck. I can’t wait to unwrap you, Mel. Can I unwrap you, baby?” he said as he started to stroke his miniature dick. I didn’t say a word as I walked over to him and took over the back-and-forth rhythm he had going on his penis, which he seemed to be enjoying.

Sucking in a sharp breath, he let his head fall back and his eyes roll to the back of his head. The big vein in the side of his neck started to pulse noticeably, so I knew he was on the verge of cumming.

I stopped stroking his dick when the sound of glass shattering caught my attention.

“Did you hear that?” I whispered.

“Did I hear what, Mel?” he asked as he placed his hand on mine, willing me to continue with my knuckle shuffle.

I heard the sound of more glass shattering.

“There it is again! Did you hear it?”

This time he opened his eyes, then stood there for a minute, trying to see if he could hear any noise. “Baby, I don’t hear anything, and I don’t know why you’re so paranoid. I set the security system before I came up here, so if there’s an intruder, don’t you think the alarm would have gone off already?” He sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled me onto his lap. “If it will make you feel any better, I can go check.”

I nodded my head, and he lifted me up out of his lap and left the room.

I sat on the bed, waiting, for what seemed like ten minutes before he returned.

“I told you it was nothing,” he said. “No broken glass, no unlawful entry. Maybe Lupe or Juan came back to get something they left, got it, then left right back out. I mean, they are the only other people with the security codes beside me, you, and my daughter, so it’s plausible.” He put his hand under my chin, brought his face to mine, and gently kissed my lips. “Now, back to me unwrapping my gift.”

“You not about to unwrap a damn thing, muthafucka!” a masked gunman said as he burst into our room.

I screamed at the same time that Douglas yelled, “What the fuck!”

Two more gunmen rushed into the room, black masks adorning their faces and their weapons aimed at us. Douglas took in the scene and realized that we were outnumbered and unarmed, so he pushed my body behind his and tried to reason with the intruders.

“Look, fellas, you can take anything you want. If you need cash, I got a few thousand in the safe. If you want cars, the keys are on the key rings in the kitchen, and if you want some shit to pawn, there’s some jewelry in the closet. You can have it all. Just don’t harm me or my wife.”

“Nigga, shut the fuck up! We don’t need you to tell us shit. As a matter of fact, since you opened your mouth, we’re going to take everything you just offered and your wife,” gunman number two said.

“Hell yeah. I’ll unwrap the shit out of her and make her swallow all my babies,” the third gunman added.

I looked at the first gunman, who was standing in the corner, looking mad as fuck. I couldn’t tell if he was upset with his partners for wasting time or for looking at me the way they were.

Douglas cleared his throat, then tried to reason with the masked men again. He even offered to write them a check and not report their crimes if they let us go.

“Dude, shut the fuck up. You must think we stupid or something, huh? We don’t want no fucking check. Like my boy said, we’re going to take everything you offered in the beginning, plus your sexy-ass wife as a bonus,” said the gunman number one.

Pushing me farther behind his back, Douglas cleared his throat once again, pushed out his chest, then said, “Over my dead body.”

“Well, have it your way,” gunman number one responded with a sinister smirk.

The gunshots went off so fast, I never had time to react. All I remembered was hearing four loud-ass pops before Douglas’s body jerked and his head snapped back. Blood splattered all over my face and body before I finally felt my throat getting sore from screaming so loud.

When Douglas’s frame hit the floor like a large sack of potatoes, I dropped down and started to crawl over to him, intent on stopping his bleeding. His blood had already stained his clothes and the carpet. As I crawled over to him, the sound of a hammer being cocked back on a gun caused me to freeze in my tracks. Two seconds later, a pair of gemstone-green eyes I knew all too well leered at me before total darkness took over.

Two years later ...

“Okay, Mel, so you’ll start that stripping gig at Club Decadence tomorrow night.”

“Stripping? What happened to me bartending?”

I had to close my eyes and count to ten real quick. Although Melonee was my best friend, I couldn’t stand her ass sometimes. “Mel, did you even read the file I gave you last week?” I asked as I went into my kitchen and grabbed a Corona out of the fridge. The fact that she didn’t answer my question and continued to flip through the television channels led me to believe that she had not. “Come on, Melonee. How many times do I have to tell you that you need to read any and every file I give you on our new marks? You see how you almost fucked up that Doug Evans hustle in the beginning!”

“I didn’t mess up shit. If memory serves me right, it was my not knowing about his allergy to nuts that got me in the door to begin with.”

I sat down beside her on the couch and looked at her as if she was crazy. “Please explain this to me.”

She snatched my beer out of my hand, took a swig, then gave it back. “I don’t know how or why you drink that nasty shit and go as far as adding lime and salt to it, like that helps the taste.” She shook her head and stuck out her tongue. “I tell you about you hood bitches.”

She went on. “Anyways, back to Doug. That day I started working at his dealership, the dumb-ass secretary that he was humping before I got there brought him a salad that had walnuts in it. When his throat started to close up, the dumb girl just stood there like she didn’t know what to do. After I heard someone scream that he kept his Epi Pens in the top drawer of his desk, I hopped up from my seat, grabbed one of those things, and stabbed him in his thigh. After he was able to start breathing and shit again, he thanked me for saving his life after knowing him for only five minutes. Told me that he could tell what type of heart I had just by what I’d done. Then you know what happened next. I took ole girl’s job and her spot as his bed buddy. My dearly departed husband didn’t know what he was getting into by messing with a girl like me.”

“And neither will the rest of these rich fuckers who fall into our web of deceit.”

“You got that right.”

We high-fived each other and just continued to talk about the old scams we used to pull together when we were teenagers and the ones we’d been getting into ever since we’d grown up. For as long as I could remember, Melonee and I had always been about our money. If we weren’t boosting shit from the mall and reselling it to the people in our neighborhood, we were doing car accident scams with Melonee’s baby daddy, Proof, also known as Jaylen, and his crew, or we were doing the fake check hustle. At one point we were even doing the “slip and fall” scam at the grocery stores, but once they caught on to what we had going down, we hurried up and shut that shit down. Just thinking about those days had me dying in my head.

Melonee and I had actually met through my dad and her mom. They dated for a few years back in the day. At first, we really didn’t like each other much, but after our parents kept forcing us to go on these family outings, we had no choice but to get along. By the time our parents broke up, we were already best friends and thick as thieves. It was weird for a minute after their separation, because whenever we would have a sleepover at one another’s house, either Melonee’s granny would have to drop her off at my house or my older brother, Max, whom we call Cowboy because of his love of those old Western movies, would have to take me over there.

I didn’t know what caused our parents to split up, but whatever it was had them damn near clawing each other’s eyes out whenever they were in each other’s presence. Even after Melonee’s mom turned around and married her new boyfriend, they still had some type of animosity between them. Whenever I’d ask my dad what had happened, he’d tell me to stay out of grown folks’ business and tend to whatever it was that teenagers were supposed to do. Never understood that statement, but, hey, I made it do what it do.

When we were about fifteen, both Mel’s life and mine changed for the worse. The dude that her mother had married ended up beating her ass to death one night because he swore up and down that she and my father were sleeping with each other behind his back. I swear, when Melonee called my phone, crying and going hysterical, I didn’t know what to do. My father, who was sitting next to me, grabbed my phone from me and calmly spoke to her. Once she was finally able to get out what had happened, I swear, the look on my father’s face sent a chill down my spine. It was as if his soul had left his body and some psycho had completely taken over. He went upstairs and changed out of the sweats and the wife beater he had on and into a black T-shirt, black jeans, and some black tennis shoes.

When he came back downstairs and headed to the door, I asked him where was he going. He simply told me, “To handle some business.” After getting a couple of things out of his safe behind the entertainment center in the den, he gave me a hug, kissed me on my forehead, and left.

Although I witnessed my father’s arrest, I didn’t hear from him until a few days later, when he called collect from the Los Angeles men’s detention center. Turned out that my dad and Melonee’s mom had still been messing around, even though they both had moved on to other people. So when Melonee had called and told my dad that her stepdad had killed her mom, my father had gone and killed him that very same day, right in front of Melonee, the police, and whoever else was out there. He ended up getting sentenced to thirty years in prison. My life, as well as Melonee’s life, went from sugar to shit in a matter of ten seconds. She moved in with her granny, who was on a fixed income, and my brother went crazy and basically blew through the little money that my dad had left us, so Melonee and I ended up doing what we had to do and needed to do to get by.

“Uh, earth to Fiona,” Melonee said, snapping her fingers and bringing me out of my thoughts.

“Yeah? What’s up?”

She looked at me funny. “Are you okay?” Her gray eyes got a little darker, something that happened whenever she was in her feelings.

“I’m good, girl. Just thinking about this new hustle.”

“Speaking of this new hustle, what’s the prey’s name again?”

I rolled my eyes. Not only had she not read the file, but also she hadn’t even look at it to at least see what his name was. I got up from my comfortable couch and grabbed the manila folder that was sitting on my dining-room table.

“His name is Roman Black. Here!” I said, giving her the Forbes list I had printed out.

“Okay . . . Roman Black. Net worth, seventy-four-point-nine million. Source of wealth, RTD. What’s RTD?”

“Real Time Delivery. It’s the company that’s buying out UPS and is thinking about taking over FedEx. You haven’t heard of them before?”

She shook her head.

“Well, now you know.”

“But seventy-five million? It’s going to be hard to get next to him, Fee. We’re used to thousandaires and shit, not no multimillionaires. You see how I had to fight Doug’s daughter for almost a year in court, trying to get the little money I got from him. That little bitch was contesting damn near everything, talking about foul play.”

“And whose fault was that? I told you to make sure you knew where all the cameras were before the shit went down. But no, you only thought about checking the inside of the house. Good thing Cowboy was able to get ahold of the tape that showed your dingy ass talking to Proof on the patio an hour before the home invasion. What the hell was he doing there so early, and what were y’all arguing about, anyway?”

She got up and went to fix herself a drink at the bar next to my kitchen. The white tights and tank top she had on clung to her body like a second skin. Every dip and curve in the right place, without a hint of fat anywhere. The mismatched ankle socks she had on threw me off a bit, but she always wore her socks like that.

“Some dumb bullshit, as always. He thinks we’re still in a relationship even after I’ve told him a million times that we’re not. Just because we have a daughter together doesn’t mean shit. He was on my head, talking about I better not give that nigga Doug another shot of pussy before he dies.” She laughed and took a sip of her drink. “Do you know that the whole time I was married to Doug, Proof would text me every day, talking about NPT?”

“What’s NPT?”

“No pussy tonight.”

We burst out laughing, because I could see Proof’s sprung ass sending some text like that. She swallowed that first shot down whole, then took another.

“Girl, even with the dude before Doug, he would do the same thing. We should’ve never brought him on,” she said.

I could see where she was coming from. Things had gone a lot smoother when Proof didn’t know fully what we were doing. But after the incident we had had when it was time to kill my then husband, Kenneth, we both decided that having some muscle would be better than getting caught up with a murder charge and spending the rest of our lives in jail.

“Bitch, make sure you read that file as soon as you get home. My inside source at his company said that he’s scheduled to have a business meeting with some potential investors in a couple of days at Decadence,” Fiona said.

“What does that have to do with me? From what you just told me, he doesn’t even like strippers,” I responded.

“He doesn’t, but I need you to keep your eyes and ears open. Maybe one of your new coworkers knows something we don’t about him that will help me to get closer.”

I shook my head. That was her problem: she was always overthinking shit. I told her all the time to just let things flow. Men could tell when you were trying too hard to get their attention. That was why I never read any of those files. My natural charm and wit were what attracted them to me. My looks and my body were just added bonuses.

“All right. I gotcha,” I said as I backed out of her driveway. Then I headed toward the freeway.

Fiona had said that she got a job as a waitress in the VIP section of Club Decadence, the strip club, so we’d sometimes be working together. I wondered why she got to keep her clothes on but I had to take mine off. It wasn’t like she was slacking in the body department. I mean, her breasts weren’t as big as mine, but she had some wide hips and a nice-shaped ass. Her stomach was flat but not toned, so sometimes when she wore crop tops, you could see faint signs of a small pudge. A true fan of the thirty-inch Brazilian weave craze, Fiona had had some purple and violet bundles of different lengths sewn into her head. The color didn’t really compliment her light brown skin, but after she thinned out her eyebrows and put her makeup on, I liked the look a little more.

After getting off the freeway at my exit, I stopped by McDonald’s for something to eat. I pulled into the drive-through and ordered a Chicken McNuggets Happy Meal for the munchkin and a Filet-O-Fish combo for me. I thought about getting my granny something too, but I decided not to, knowing she already had a big pot of black-eyed peas on the stove and some bacon-grease corn bread in the oven.

“Good afternoon, ma’am. Your total’s going to be ten dollars and thirty-seven cents.”

“Can you add three oatmeal-raisin cookies and three sugar cookies?” I asked the drive-through chick politely as I handed her a crisp new twenty.

“Sure. No problem.” She took my money with one hand, then put her other over the mouthpiece of her microphone. “And by the way, I love your car. I can’t wait until I start making some real money so that I can get me one just like it.”

I smiled as I glanced at the peanut-butter interior of my Jaguar C-X17. I didn’t know her financial status or anything, and I’d never intentionally knock the next person’s hustle, but working at McDonald’s part-time was not going to pay for a car like this. Instead of saying what was actually on my mind, I opted for some words of encouragement instead.

“At least you’re starting somewhere. Just keep working hard, and you’ll get it one day.”

“Is that how you got yours?”

I hesitated for a second. I’d never actually had a real job in my life, so I didn’t really know how to answer that. If you could call baiting, marrying, and killing men for money a job, then I guessed that was what it was, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.

“Yep. Doing a job that I didn’t necessarily love, saving up, and working hard allowed me to buy this pretty little bitch as well as a few other things.”

The way her eyes lit up with excitement over what the other things could be made me laugh. I remembered a time when I used to get all excited about material things. That same drive and hustle that I could feel radiating off of her was what had got me to where I was today. Although I loved being able to go into any store that I wanted to without worrying about checking price tags, I felt I was missing something deep down inside me. Everything I’d ever dreamed of having when I was younger was in the palms of my hands, yet if I was being real honest, I wasn’t 100 percent happy. I mean, I was caked up like crazy, had racks on racks on racks, even for a rainy day, and was the mother to the cutest little six-year-old in the world, and yet I wasn’t content.

“Excuse me, ma’am. Your order!” broke me from my train of thought. It was either that or the loud blaring of horns from the cars behind me. I was so zoned out that I had to look around for a second to remember where I was. When I looked up at the drive- through chick, she had a weird expression on her face as she handed me my food.

“Uh, are you okay? It seemed like you checked out for a minute,” she said.

I smiled, slightly embarrassed. “I’m sorry about that. With your questions, you just had me thinking about the way I grew up.” I checked to make sure my order was correct. “Thank you for my food, and I’ll see you around.”

She nodded her head, then started talking to the ratchet-ass person who I could hear hollering through her headset. With music blasting, babies making all kinds of noise, it was a wonder she could hear anything the girl was saying. I shook my head as I pulled off; I didn’t think I could ever do her job. I’d be cursing the majority of the people who came to my window, ordering out food.

Pulling into my granny’s driveway, I couldn’t help but smile at the old lady as she crouched on her knees in her green khakis, yellow button-down shirt, sunflower apron, and gardening gloves, tending to the begonias and dwarf irises she had planted a couple of weeks ago.

I climbed out of my car and walked up to her. “Granny, what did I tell you about being on your knees on that hard-ass ground like that? The reason why I bought you that expensive-ass kneeling pad was so that you would be comfortable when you were out here working on your garden.”

She waved me off. “My mommy didn’t use one, and neither did my grandmother, so I’m not about to break with tradition because you young people don’t wanna do any hard work nowadays. I’ll never understand how y’all want everything to be done so easy but to come out looking like twenty years’ worth of work.” With the help of my arm, she rose up off the ground. “If you don’t remember anything I’ve ever taught you, please remember this one thing, Melonee. Nothing worth having comes easy. You have to work hard for what you want, in life and in love.”

“I know, Granny,” I said, then kissed her on her nutmeg-colored cheek. She’d been saying that to me ever since I could remember. “Where’s the munchkin at? She never misses the chance to help do the flowers with her Memaw.”

“She’s in the house, already eating.”

“Already eating? Granny, you know I bring her McDonald’s every Thursday. Why would you sit her down to eat them black-eyed peas and corn bread?”

“I didn’t feed her anything. Even though the homemade food I cook would be way better than that processed mess you like to bring her.” She gathered up all her little shovels and pruning tools. “Her daddy came about twenty minutes ago with some pizza and chicken wings from that place she likes so much.”

I rolled my eyes. This was the shit that got on my nerves about this muthafucka Proof. Whenever I would ignore this nigga’s phone calls or unexpected drive-bys, he would always bring his dumb ass over here and try to catch me slipping with that “spend time with my baby” bullshit. I wanted to hop back into my car and go straight home, but I knew my baby girl would be heartbroken since she looked forward to my Thursday visits. Looking at my granny with pleading eyes, I silently asked if she could go kick Proof’s ass out, because that was the only way he would leave, but when she started to slowly shake her head, I knew that request was a no go.

“Don’t look at me like that, Ms. Thing. I told your hot ass not to mess with the little nigga when he first started to sniff around you,” my granny fussed as she started walking to the front of her house. “To keep it quite honest, though, Mel, you might need to take a few lessons from him about certain things.”

“A few lessons like what?”

“Hard work being one. That boy worked his ass off to get you to finally give in to his advances. And look what happened when you did.”

When we walked into the house, Proof and Madison were sitting in the middle of the living room, having a princess tea party with her little friend from down the street and a few of her favorite stuffed animals. Yellow feather boas, tiaras, and pink bubble gum lip gloss were the attire for the event, and each one of the guests was in uniform, including Proof’s ass. As much I couldn’t stand my ex outside of our co-parenting of Madison, I couldn’t help but smile at the scene before me. Seeing this six-foot-four, 245-pound, athletically built man with a walnut complexion abandon his hard-core street persona mask and change into one of his daughter’s fashionably dressed, pinkie-pointing tea party guests, complete with clip-on earrings, did something to my heart.

Times like this were when I wished things between Proof and me had turned out better than they had. But after five years of being the main chick with side-chick benefits, I finally gave up on whatever it was you could say we had. Even with him looking like the exact replica of that model Don Benjamin, I couldn’t do it. Granny often told me that I had given up on my family too fast. I would always shake my head when she said that. If she knew how many other families this nigga had tried to start while we were together, she’d probably feel a lot differently.

“Mommy!” Madison screamed, grabbing my attention as she ran toward me, the clear beads at the end of her neatly braided hair hitting against each other and making that loud bead noise.

After kneeling down, I scooped my little munchkin into my arms and gave her a big hug. Because I was still dealing with some things related to Doug’s estate and business dealings in Florida, I hadn’t seen my baby girl in almost two weeks. Proof and I had both agreed some time ago that Granny should take care of Madison full-time. With the business that we were in, we didn’t feel that it was safe for either of us to keep her in the homes that we lived in. None of our marks knew about our real personal lives, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t find out, especially if they dug deep enough.

After kissing her all over her face and making her laugh, I placed her back on the floor. . . .