“It’s my fucking house!” I snapped, my voice cutting through his bullshit. “I’ll fuck on the roof if I feel the need. You don’t like it? There’s the door.”
Syx laughed—that wild, reckless laugh that reminded me too much of the streets, too much of the kind of chaos that got people killed.
“Aight, aight,” he said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “My bad, big homie. Your house, your rules.”
I stared at him, my pulse still elevated, my hands still itching to grab him by the collar and throw him out myself.
But I didn’t.
Because underneath the anger, underneath the irritation, there was something else.
Concern.
I exhaled slowly, forcing myself to step back, to let the rage settle.
“You still going to that therapist?” I asked, my tone shifting.
Syx’s grin faltered. Just for a second. But I saw it.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice losing some of its edge. “I’m goin’.”
“That high-ass therapist I’m paying for?” I pressed. “The one in the Quarter? Dr. Melancon?”
“Yeah, man. I’m goin’.”
“How often?”
“Twice a week. Like you told me to.”
I studied him, looking for the lie. Syx was good at lying—really good. But right now, he wasn’t lying.
“The night terrors?” I asked.
His jaw tightened. “They still there.”
“How bad?”
“Bad enough.”
I nodded slowly, processing. The night terrors had been getting worse over the past year—waking up screaming, drenched in sweat, convinced he was back in that hole with his mama’s body.
I’d found him three years ago.
Priest got the call first—someone heard screaming coming from an abandoned lot off Claiborne. We thought it was a setup, a trap, something Rahsaan’s people had laid to draw us out.
But when we got there, we found Syx.
Buried alive.
Three feet down in a shallow grave, dirt packed tight around him, his mama’s corpse pressed against his side. She’d been dead for hours by the time we dug him out—shot twice in the chest because she owed money to a plug she couldn’t pay.
The plug didn’t just kill her.
He buried her son with her.
Syx was seventeen.
We pulled him out barely breathing, clawing at the dirt, his eyes wild and unseeing. Kaisen held him down while I cleared his airway. Priest called the cleaners to handle the body.
