Page 152 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

I relayed the order through the door, calling out to Raven that she needed to come in. Her response came quick. “Coming in,” and I heard her footsteps on the porch, the door closing behind her with a soft click.

“I’m fifteen minutes out,” Amai said. “Lock the door. Stay in the back of the house. I’m calling the detail now.”

The line went dead before I could say anything else.

By the time I got Honor and Saroya moved to the back of the house, away from the front windows, Raven’s face was carved into something hard and unreadable, gun still in her hand, though she’d dropped it to her side.

“Nobody out there,” she said. “No cars I don’t recognize. No footprints, no nothing. Whoever it was, they were gone before you even opened the door.”

“That’s not possible,” Saroya said. “Somebody had to carry that. Somebody had to walk up here, set it down, and knock.”

“I’m just telling you what I saw.” Raven’s jaw was set, her eyes still moving toward the window even from across the room. “Which was nothing.”

Amai arrived in under fifteen minutes, though it felt like an hour. Three black SUVs pulled up along the curb before he was even out of the first one. Priest was already moving toward the porch with two men flanking him, all of them scanning the street the way soldiers do, methodical, unhurried, terrifying in how calm they were about it.

Amai didn’t say anything to me at first. He went straight to the two men who’d been posted on my street for the last several weeks, out of sight like I asked. The conversation that followed was low, tense, and absolutely lethal in its restraint.

“Explain to me like I’m a fucking three-year-old,” Amai said, “how somebody walked up to that door, in daylight, and neither of you saw a face.”

“Mr. Landry, we were positioned exactly where you told us. A block back, out of sightline from the house so we wouldn’t spook her or draw attention.” The taller one—Desmond—kept his hands visible, his posture straight, a man who understood exactly how close he was standing to someone who could and would end his life over something like this. “That distance created a blind spot on the east side. Whoever it was could’ve come up through the alley behind the Guidrys’ fence and approached from that angle. We wouldn’t have had eyes on it.”

“You wouldn’t have had eyes on it,” Amai repeated.

“No, sir.”

He didn’t raise his voice. That was the part that unsettled me most—he never raised his voice, not once, and somehow that made it worse, made the air around him feel like it was compressing instead of expanding. “You had one job. One. And a man walked up to my—” he stopped himself, recalibrated, “—to her front door with a body part in a box, and you’re telling me the blind spot did that.”

Neither man answered. There wasn’t an answer that would have satisfied him.

“We’re restructuring the perimeter,” Amai said finally. “Tighter radius. Overlapping sightlines. I want eyes on every angle of this property, not half of it.” He turned away from them like the conversation was already over, like their fate was a decision he’d make later, in private, and walked up the steps to where I was standing in the doorway.

He looked at me for a long moment before he said anything. Something in his face had gone past anger into a stillness I hadn’t seen from him before—not calm, exactly, but still in a way that felt like a held breath.

“You can’t stay here,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Not tonight. Not until I know how they got that close.” His voice didn’t rise, but it didn’t bend either. “This isn’t a conversation, Truth.”

“This is my house.” I felt my whole body go tight with the refusal before I even finished the sentence. “I found it. I paid for it myself. I am not just packing a bag because somebody left a—” I couldn’t finish it. My throat closed around the word.

“Truth.” Saroya’s voice came from behind me, quieter than I expected. When I turned, she wasn’t backing me up the way I’d assumed she would. “He’s right.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not saying it because I like it.” Saroya crossed her arms, and there was something in her face—old, tired, the look of the sister who’d carried the weight of being oldest for longer than any of us had understood at the time. “I’m saying it because if you want to be with this man, if you want this life, you don’t get to pick and choose which parts of the danger you take seriously. This is one of them. You play by his rules when it comes to keeping yourself safe. That’s not him controlling you. That’s just what it costs.”

“This isn’t the time to be stubborn, Truth,” Honor added, and even Honor—Honor, who found humor in everything, who’d have a joke ready for anything short of a funeral—had nothing funny to say now. “Not with somebody’s ear on your porch.”

I looked at Amai. I wanted to argue anyway, some part of me needing to fight for the ground I’d claimed here, needing this to still be mine, even as the world proved it wasn’t safe.

“They’re not going to knock next time,” Amai said quietly, watching me like he understood exactly what I was losing in this moment and hated that he was the one taking it. “Victor. Rahsaan. Whoever sent that box—they don’t ask permission. They don’t wait for an invitation. Next time, it’s not a warning on your porch. It’s a bullet through that window while you’re standing in your kitchen.” He nodded toward the front room, toward the exact spot where I’d been that morning with my sisters laughing around me. “I’m not telling you to leave because I want to control you. I’m telling you because I can’t protect what I can’t see coming.”

The house went silent except for the hum of the refrigerator, and somewhere outside, one of his men’s radios crackling low.

“Fine,” I said finally. “I’ll go. But not without terms.”

Something flickered across his face—surprise, maybe, or the beginning of understanding that I wasn’t going to simply fold into whatever he decided. “Terms.”