Page 60 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“By threatening an old woman.”

“By using the only leverage that man has ever cared about in his whole life.” I crossed to the bathroom door and stopped there, hand on the frame, looking back at her. “Rahsaan don’t love money. Don’t love his crew. Don’t even love himself all the way. But his mama? That’s the one thing he’s kept clean this whole time. Kept her far from all of it. Which tells me exactly how much she’s worth to him.”

“And that makes it right?”

“I didn’t say it was right.” I said it flat, no heat behind it, because there wasn’t any heat left to spend on convincing her of something I wasn’t even trying to convince myself of. “I said it’s what’s gonna work.”

She looked away from me first, out toward the window where the sky was just starting to lighten up gray behind the curtains. I watched something close down in her face—not anger exactly, something quieter and more tired than that. I understood it. I’d been asking her to live inside that particular tiredness for months now, ever since the purge started, ever since the bodies started stacking up across the city with my name attached to them in every mouth that mattered.

I went into the bathroom and ran the shower hot, standing under it longer than I needed to, letting the water beat down on the back of my neck while my mind ran through logistics. Who needed to be at the Sanctum, what Priest already had in motion, how long it would take word to travel back to Rahsaan once his people realized his mother was gone. Because they would realize. Somebody in Baton Rouge would notice, would call somebody, and that call would move through whatever thin network Rahsaan still had left until it reached him wherever he’d buried himself.

I wanted that call to happen. I needed it to happen. That was the whole point.

I got out, dried off, and dressed quick—black jeans, black boots, a gray Henley that I pulled over my head without much effort because this wasn’t a day that called for a suit. Whatever I did at the Sanctum today, I wasn’t doing it dressed like a businessman. I strapped my watch on, checked my phone for anything else from Priest, and found Truth standing in the bathroom doorway when I turned around, arms crossed over her chest, robe cinched tight, watching me get dressed like she was watching a stranger.

“You could stay,” she said. “Let Priest handle the first part. You don’t have to be there for everything.”

“I do, though.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s my war, Truth. Started because of my brothers, and it’s gonna end because of what I’m willing to do to close it out. I’m not sending Priest to do the part that matters and staying home to keep my hands clean. That’s not who I am.”

“Who you are is starting to scare me.” She said it quiet, no drama in it, which somehow made it hit different than if she’d shouted. “Not you specifically. This. All of it. The bodies. The tally the streets are keeping. My mama’s neighbors asking her if she’s scared, living so close to a Landry. You understand what that’s like? Having people look at you different because of who you love?”

“I understand it better than you think.” I finished tucking the phone into my pocket and crossed the room to stand in front of her, close enough that she had to tilt her chin up to keep looking at me. “You think I don’t know what this costs? I know exactly what it costs. I’ve been paying it since I was seventeen years old, Truth. Since before you knew my name.”

“That doesn’t make it easier to watch.”

“I never asked you to watch it. I asked you to trust that I know what I’m doing.” My hand came up and cupped the side of her face, thumb brushing along her cheekbone. “This is the last big push. Rahsaan’s got nothing left but his mama and whatever pride is keeping him underground. Once I get to him, this is over. All of it. No more bodies. No more tally. No more looking over your shoulder wondering if today’s the day he tries something.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“I know I have.”

“And it’s never actually over when you say it is.”

She wasn’t wrong, and I respected her too much to pretend otherwise, so I didn’t try. I just stood there with my hand still on her face, feeling the tension in her jaw where she was holding something back, some larger accusation she hadn’t decided yet whether to let loose.

“This is the last one,” I said again anyway, because it was still true even if it didn’t fix anything between us in that moment. “I promise you that.”

“You don’t get to promise things you can’t control.”

“I control more of this than you think.”

Truth pulled back from my hand, not violent about it, but just enough to put a little distance between us, enough to make her point without needing to raise her voice. “You know what kills me about you? You’ll stand here and tell me you know exactly what you’re doing, and then in the same breath, you admit you can’t control whether this war actually ends when you say it will. Which one is it, Amai? Are you in control or are you not?”

“Both.” I said it simple because it was the only true answer I had. “I control what I do. I don’t control what Rahsaan does in response. Never have. That’s the whole reason this has dragged out as long as it has—because that man is harder to predict than most.”

“So, you’re walking into something today that you can’t fully predict either.”

“Every day I’ve walked into since this started has been that.”

She looked at me for a long moment, arms still crossed, robe pulled tight, belly rounding out beneath it in a way that still did something to my chest every time I really looked at it. Every time I let myself remember there was a whole person growing in there who was going to need this city to be safer than it currently was.

“I hate this,” she said finally. “I want you to know that. I hate that you’re about to go scare an old woman half to death because her son is a coward hiding wherever cowards hide. I hate that this is what our life looks like right now.”

“I know.”