Animal 2 by K'wan

around heavy. The four of us were like family, which makes your beef with Shai so ironic. Y’all damn near kin.”
    â€œIt ain’t no beef. I’m trying to kill him, and he’s trying to stop me from killing him. That ain’t beef, that’s fact,” Animal said.
    â€œCall it what you want, Animal, but it still doesn’t change the fact that you’re my son and he’s the son of a man who was once my best friend, so your destinies are intertwined whether you like it or not,” Priest told him. “Like I was saying, Poppa was the new king, and I was his right-hand man. Shit was good for us, but to keep things good, we had to put in the work. Meand Poppa were always in the streets, so your mother and June occupied their time partying and spending money. I heard things about your mother, and some of them were not so nice. I was losing my lady to the same streets I was running in, and I needed to do something to get a handle on things. It was around then I suggested we have a kid. She already had Justice from that pretty nigga she used to run with, but you would be the symbol of our union.”
    Animal laughed. “And what a union that turned out to be.”
    â€œCall it what you want, but in the beginning, it was pure . . . beautiful,” Priest recalled. “When you were a baby, you spent more time with me than you did with your mother. You were my little soldier, and I was the happiest nigga north of 110th Street. Then a cat named Mobi came to town, and everything changed.”
    The name rang familiar to Animal. He could remember a few years before hearing Tech and some of the older heads talking about a dude named Mobi who was supposed to have been a real maniac. One story that stuck out was how he supposedly cut a kid’s feet off for accidentally stepping on his shoes in a crowded club.
    â€œMobi was what you would call a man without honor,” Priest continued. “Because of his family’s political status, he felt like he was entitled to whatever he wanted, and what he wanted was what belonged to Poppa Clark. So we went to war. We immediately saw what kind of man we were dealing with when Mobi went to Poppa Clark’s favorite little bakery and killed the baker and his wife because they refused to poison Poppa Clark’s morning coffee. Nothing was off-limits to him, including family. I had to protect you at all costs.”
    Animal could vaguely remember flashes of him and his mother always living in different places. She would tell him it was because his father was in the military and his job required them to move around, but none of the apartments was ever outside the five boroughs.
    â€œI tried to kick the real deal to your mom, but she was too caught up in the lifestyle to hear what I was saying, so I had no choice but to put some distance between us. For as much as it hurt me to be away from my son, I couldn’t run the risk of Mobi finding out about my family and paying y’all a visit. The only sure way to keep you out of harm’s way was to kill Mobi.”
    â€œJudging from the fact that you’re here telling me this story, I’m gonna assume you succeeded in killing Mobi. So what stopped you from coming back for us when he was dead?” Animal wanted to know.
    Priest hesitated before answering so that he could check the address he had written on a slip of paper against the dilapidated bar they’d just pulled up in front of. When he confirmed he was at the right location, he killed the engine, but he didn’t get out of the car yet. There was still much to be said between him and Animal, and he needed to get it off his chest as much as his son needed to hear it.
    â€œThe feud between Mobi’s crew and the Clarks went on for longer than any of us expected. It took me almost three years to finally corner him and kill him, and that came at a price. His uncle was a heavyweight in Africa. He was connected