I sat back, feeling sick all over again.
“That explains why he was so angry,” Zahra offered as if that should heal the wounds his words had left.
But that didn’t erase what he had said to me, it didn’t make me less angry or his words hurt less. But knowing he had gone from finding out he had been played by Sienna to finding out I was pregnant with his baby in the same night made me feel guilty for telling him when I did.
I closed my laptop and pushed it aside. “This is about to get so much worse. Once Saint, Icon and Legend find out I’m having Reek’s baby and he doesn’t want anything to do with it, that’s going to be a whole other mess.”
Zahra waved me off. “I don’t think he’s going to completely dismiss the baby.”
I gave her a look. “Did you forget what he said to me?”
“Hear me out,” she pressed. “He may be angry. He may be acting like an asshole. But Reek respects Saint and the Cartiers way too much to fully turn his back on a child he’s having with Saint’s sister-in-law. That man has too much loyalty to the family to just say fuck the baby forever. Even if it’s forced. Even if it’s uncomfortable. Even if he hates how it happened.”
I didn’t want forced. I didn’t want obligated. I didn’t want a man showing up because family politics made him feel like he had to. I wanted what she had with Saint, what Livia had with Icon, what Aria had with Legend. I wanted warmth, love, and a man who looked at my pregnancy like it was something beautiful, not some punishment he got stuck with.
But I had not chosen that man. My womb had chosen Reek. Or at least I had chosen to keep his baby after knowing exactly who he was.
“Are you going to be okay with being at Thanksgiving dinner with him?”
I groaned and rolled my eyes. “Urgh. Why can’t he be with his own family on Thanksgiving?”
“He doesn’t have any damn family, remember? That’s why he doesn’t want any kids.”
I could only roll my eyes at her. “I’ll be fine, I guess. I don’t have a choice, obviously.”
Zahra rubbed her belly slowly and looked at me with that big-sister honesty she never softened just because I was hurting. “This is the hand you dealt yourself when you chose to keep the baby. So now you have to stand in that. If him being involved is awkward, then it’s awkward. If it’s uncomfortable, then it’s uncomfortable. But I don’t see him just disappearing from this.”
I swallowed and looked down at my hands.
“That doesn’t make me feel better,” I admitted.
“It’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to make you deal with it.”
We sat in silence for a minute, before she reached over and squeezed my hand. “You don’t have to like the situation, but you have to survive it…for your child.”
I nodded once, because that was all I had in me.
Then I looked back over at my laptop, at the orders, the money, the plans, and the little bit of freedom I was trying to build for myself. And I knew that no matter what Reek did or how ugly this got, I was going to have to carry myself through it. Because I wasn’t begging that man for love, excitement, or permission to be a mother.
TARIQ “REEK” HORTON
A few days later, the Feds found me on the block.
I had just pulled up and gotten out of my car when I saw a woman standing half a car length away like she had been waiting on me. She was wearing a dark coat and low heels. I knew exactly who she was even though we had never met.
Jamir had already dug into Sienna’s pending federal case and put a face to the name, Agent Mallory. He had shown all of us photos of her, along with everything else he could pull. So, when I saw her standing there looking too polished for my side of town, I already knew what kind of conversation this was about to be.
By then, Langford was fully convinced his daughter was missing and that something bad had happened to her. He was pulling every political string he had, leaning on cops, city people, private resources, and anybody else with access to cameras, records, or ears in the street, trying to find out where she was or who had last seen her. A worried father was one thing. An alderman with power, money, and panic in his blood was something else entirely. Langford was applying pressureeverywhere he could, and I knew that kind of pressure had a way of turning one bad situation into ten worse ones real quick.
I shut my driver’s door and watched Agent Mallory walk up to me.
She didn’t smile as she asked, as if she didn’t already know, “Reek?”
I leaned against my car. “Depends on who asking.”
“I’m asking.”
“And who the fuck are you?”
