It was not the task at hand that made me handle the hammer with vexation. It was what I had to do afterwards. My palms were sweaty, not from the weight of the metal, but from the heaviness in my heart. I was tired, but Nike would never take no for an answer, nor would she ever agree for us to do this together. 

She wanted her hands as clean as possible in case anything went wrong. That was her way. She made the plans, and I executed them. Well, I was hoping nothing did go wrong, because the last time I slept in a Police cell, I almost lost my other virginity.

I am the third child of my parents. We weren’t middle-class, nor were we lower-class. We were a family caught in the cracks of survival. That is, balancing between “managing” and “barely holding on.” My mother was the only steady pillar in the scheme of things. She ran a fabric shop in Apete market, one of the biggest in our part of town.

My father? The less said about him, the better. The man could barely keep a job longer than a week, but he never failed to return home drunk every evening, staggering in with the bitterness of his failures, his fists searching for someone to punish for his wasted life.

I was his regular victim. At first, it used to be my mother, her soft cries muffled under his heavy hands. But growing up, I couldn’t stand the sight of her bruised skin anymore. So, I began to step in, shielding her, daring him, sometimes begging him to hit me instead. And he did. He hit me until one night I decided I had had enough.

That night, rage boiled in me like a volcano, and I fought back. I beat him so bad that he spent four days in the hospital. I thought I had killed him. My mother was inconsolable, my sisters unmoved. For them, it was as if justice was finally served.

After rushing him to the hospital, I had to leave. My body trembled with both fear and relief, and I wandered through the dimly lit streets of Apete. It was during this walk that I met Nike.

They called her Big Mama, though she wasn’t big. She is like the skinniest person I know. Like a forty-year-old in an eight-year-old’s body. So, I found it amusing that she was ‘Big Mama.’ She was sharp-eyed and had the kind of voice that could command a room full of thugs without rising above a whisper. She saw me even before I noticed her, sitting on the bonnet of a rusted Volvo, cigarette smoke curling into the night.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, smiling in a way that made me both nervous and intrigued.

I didn’t answer. But she patted the car beside her, inviting me into her world. That was the first night I realised that strength wasn’t just about fists - it was about control, strategy, knowing when to act and when to stay silent.

Nike taught me all of that.

Fast-forward three years, and here I was, hammer in hand, sweat dripping, heart pounding. Nike had pulled me into a game far bigger than street fights and political battles. She was building an empire in the shadow of Apete - smuggling, laundering, running deals politicians wouldn’t dare touch.

And me? I was her loyal foot soldier, her fixer.

That night, the hammer wasn’t for building. It was for breaking. It was meant for the padlock of a warehouse that held goods we weren’t supposed to touch. Goods worth millions, the kind that could change the course of our lives forever, or maybe, ruin them in an instant.

I smashed the lock, my arms heavy with dread.

As the doors creaked open, the air outside thickened. Inside were crates, not of fabric or electronics as Nike had promised, but of guns. Dozens of them. Shiny, dangerous, and cold.

“This isn’t what you said,” I whispered, turning to her.

Nike’s smile was calm, almost serene. “Plans change. You either want to stay the boy who takes beatings from his father, or become the man who controls the beat of a city.”

Her words hit me harder than any punch I had taken from him. So, for a moment, I thought about my mother, about her fabric shop, about how she would look at me if she knew I was standing guard over weapons meant to fuel bloodshed. I thought about my sisters, who had already lost faith in men.

But I also thought about myself. I am the boy who volunteered to be his father’s punching bag. I am also the young man who had felt power for the first time when his fists finally made the monster fall.

I dropped the hammer, its clang echoing in the warehouse. “Let’s do this,” I said quietly, “there’s no turning back now.”

Nike stepped closer, her eyes glowing with that dangerous blend of ambition and madness. “Exactly.”

And that was the night I crossed the line, not because of what I did with the hammer, but because of what I agreed to do afterwards.