Page 183 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

She looked at me.

“I told you if you gave me what I needed, I’d let you go. I keep my word.” I stepped back from the doorway. “Get up. Come with me.”

The room I brought Syx and Yahmaria to was plain and lit cleanly—a table, chairs, a duffle bag on the floor that I’d had packed before I left for the West Bank. Syx’s hand was at the small of Yaya’s back, the two of them moving with the careful coordination of people who had learned each other’s rhythms in a confined space.

Syx looked at the duffle on the floor and then looked at me.

“That’s yours,” I said. “Cash. Enough to move on, establish somewhere. Not New York or Chicago—those are too visible for what you need right now. Somewhere you can disappear comfortably.”

He didn’t pick it up yet. He kept his eyes on me.

I reached into my jacket and removed a folded envelope. “That’s the access information for your trust. The one Winston set up when you were seven, and I managed the investment side since you were fifteen.” I set it on the table. “There’s enough in it that so neither of you will have to work in any sense that would concern you for a long time. The portfolio is—” I paused. “It’s not a small number, Syx.”

He picked up the envelope. Opened it. Read the number. His eyebrows shot up.

“I’m going to tell you something,” I said, “and I need you to hear it without arguing.”

He looked at me.

“She has a pattern,” I said, meaning Yahmaria, not looking at her. “She’s not a bad person. I’m not saying that. But she has a way of moving through the world that costs other people more than it costs her, and she’s good enough at reading people to know exactly where the leverage is.” I paused. “You’re twenty years old, and you’re in love with her, and you’ve been through something that would break most men your age. That combination makes you vulnerable in a specific way.” I finally looked at Yahmaria. “I’m not trying to disrespect you. I’m trying to protect him the one way I actually can.”

Yahmaria met my eyes without flinching. She’d always been good at that. “You’re warning him about me.”

“I’m warning him to use his eyes. That’s all.” I stood. “I can’t protect him from himself. That’s not something I know how to do, and if I tried, it would just be another form of what I’m releasing him from. So, I’m putting it down here, in front of both of you, and whatever happens after you leave this building belongs to the two of you.”

Syx was quiet for a moment. Then, he said, “You’re not as cold as you want people to think.”

“I wouldn’t push on that.”

“I’m not pushing. I’m just saying.”

I picked up the duffle and set it on the table beside the envelope. “New Orleans is done for both of you. That’s not a request. Victor’s network is going to be in cleanup mode for the next several months, and your names are connected to him. You need to not be here.”

“We won’t be,” Syx said. He glanced at Yahmaria—a quick, private look that she returned in a way that told me everything about how far gone he already was. “We’ve been talking about where to go. We know where we’re headed.”

“Then go.” I moved toward the door. “Don’t call me unless someone is dying.”

“Amai.” Syx’s voice stopped me.

I turned.

He was standing with one hand on the duffle and the other in his pocket, twenty years old in a room in a facility no one was supposed to know existed, and he looked at me with the directness that had always been the best thing about him—no performance, no angle, just Syx.

“Ain’t nothing left for me here anyway,” he said. “Everybody worth staying for is either dead or leaving.” He paused. “The city’s just memories of death and ghosts.”

I held his gaze for a moment.

“Take care of yourself,” I said.

Then, I walked out of the Sanctum for what I intended to be the last time in a considerable while, and I drove north through the pre-dawn dark of the West Bank, across the bridge, back into New Orleans proper, and pointed the car toward the Garden District.

Truth was awake when I got home.

She was in the kitchen, which I’d known she would be—she woke early most mornings now, something about the second trimester and the way her sleep had shifted, and she’d taken to sitting at the kitchen island with her coursework and a mug of the tea Mama’s housekeeper had brought over. The kitchen light was on, and the rest of the house was dark. She was bent over her laptop with her reading glasses on—the ones she refused to acknowledge that she wore. She looked up when she heard me come through.

She read my face.

That was the thing about Truth that I had stopped being surprised by. She read everything. She’d been doing it her whole life, navigating rooms and men and situations that required her to know, quickly, the difference between fine and not fine. She looked at me now across the kitchen island, put down her pen, took off her glasses, and just looked at me.