Something hot and defiant flared in my chest.
“I don’t belong to anybody,” I said, my voice suddenly sharp. “I belong to myself.”
I didn’t care that he was Amai Landry. Didn’t care that he was powerful and dangerous and could probably destroy me with a phone call.
I’d spent two years belonging to Phillip—letting him control the money, the house, the decisions—and look where that got me.
I wasn’t doing that again.
Not for anyone.
Amai glanced at me.
His eyes were dark. Unreadable.
But there was irritation in them that made my breath catch, made my pulse spike, made every nerve in my body come alive.
“We’ll see about that,” he said quietly.
Four words.
Soft.
But they carried weight.
A promise and a threat wrapped together in a voice that made my stomach flip and my thighs clench and my heart pound so hard I thought he could hear it.
I turned back to the window, my jaw tight, my hands folded in my lap.
But I could feel the tension radiating between us.
Electric.
Dangerous.
Suffocating.
I didn’t know what scared me more—the fact that Amai Landry had just claimed me as his.
Or the fact that part of me wanted to let him.
We turned onto Claiborne Avenue, and the city shifted around us.
Garden District mansions gave way to corner stores with bars on the windows. Shotgun houses painted in fading pastels lined the streets—some with fresh coats of paint and flower boxes, others sagging under the weight of years and storms and survival.
This was my neighborhood.
My world.
And Amai Landry’s Mercedes looked like it had taken a wrong turn somewhere between wealth and reality.
“Next left,” I said quietly. “Then two blocks down.”
He didn’t respond. Just turned smoothly, his hands steady on the wheel, his eyes taking in everything—the people sitting on porches trying to catch a breeze, the kids playing in the street, the corner boys posted up outside the corner store.
I wondered what he saw when he looked at my neighborhood.
Poverty? Struggle? Something to pity or judge?
