Page 59 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

And now I had his mother.

Something settled in my chest that I hadn’t felt in weeks—not calm, nothing that soft. It was closer to the feeling right before you close a deal you’ve been chasing too long, when the numbers finally line up, and you know the thing is done, even though the ink isn’t dry yet.

“Who’s got eyes on the transport?” I asked.

“Teal and two of DeShawn’s people. Nobody’s touched her. She’s scared, she’s confused, but she’s not hurt. I made sure of that personally before I called you.”

“Good.” That mattered to me more than Priest probably realized. Not because I had any tenderness left in me for Rahsaan Boudreaux’s mother specifically, but because a woman who arrived already broken was less useful than one who still had something to lose. Fear worked better on people who hadn’t been pushed past the point where fear made sense.

“You want me to start anything before you get there?” Priest asked.

“No. Don’t touch her. Don’t talk to her beyond what’s necessary to get her processed and settled. I want to be the first one to question her.”

“Understood.” A pause. “Amai, she’s an old lady. Seventies, maybe. She was crying in the van, Teal said. Kept asking if she could call somebody to let them know she was okay.”

I heard what he wasn’t saying underneath what he was saying. Priest had been with me a long time, long enough that he didn’t need to spell out his discomfort. I could hear it in the careful, flat way he laid out the facts, like a man setting a table he didn’t want to eat at.

“She raised a son who helped kill my brothers,” I said. “She’s not a stranger to what her family does for a living. Women like that don’t get to be innocent just because they’re old.”

“I’m not arguing that.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Making sure you know what you’re walking into before you get there. That’s all. You asked me a long time ago to keep you honest. I’m keeping you honest.”

I let out a breath through my nose and rubbed a hand down my face. “I hear you. Get her settled. I’ll be there in an hour.”

“I’ll have coffee waiting. You’re gonna need it.”

I hung up and sat there a moment in the gray dark of the bedroom, phone still warm in my hand, the weight of what I’d just been handed settling into my bones like something I’d swallowed whole.

Rahsaan’s mother.

Six weeks of chasing ghosts, and I finally had something real to hold.

“You found her.”

Truth’s voice came out of the dark beside me, not sleepy at all, which told me she’d been awake through most of that call, whether I’d noticed or not. I turned my head and found her sitting up too, arms wrapped around her knees, the sheet pooled around the swell of her belly, watching me with an expression I’d learned to read carefully over the last several months. It wasn’t fear. It also wasn’t approval. It was somewhere in that narrow, complicated space between the two, where Truth lived most of the time when it came to me and what I did.

“You heard that?”

“I heard enough.” She pushed a loc back off her face. “Rahsaan’s mama. Baton Rouge. That’s what he said, right?”

I didn’t see a reason to lie to her. “Yeah.”

Truth was quiet for a second. I watched her turn it over in her head. Watched the calculation happen behind her eyes the way it always did before she asked me anything she suspected she wasn’t going to like the answer to.

“Are you gonna hurt that old lady?”

I looked at her steady, because she deserved that much, even when the truth wasn’t pretty. “Don’t ask me questions you don’t want to know the answer to.”

Her jaw tightened. “That’s not an answer, Amai.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting right now.”

“So that’s a yes.”

“It’s whatever it needs to be.” I got out of bed because staying in it while she looked at me like that felt like a lie all on its own. “I’m not doing this for fun, Truth. I’m doing it because our daughter needs Rahsaan gone from this earth, and this is the fastest way I know how to make that happen.”