Page 61 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“And I hate that some part of me still wants you to go do it, because I want him dead too. I want to stop being scared every time somebody knocks on this door. I hate that you’ve made me somebody who wants that.”

That hit different than anything else she’d said, because it wasn’t an accusation dressed up as a question. It was just the truth, ugly and honest, the kind of thing that cost her something to say out loud. I reached for her again, and this time she let me pull her in, let her forehead rest against my chest, even with the tension still sitting in her shoulders.

“You didn’t become that person because of me,” I said into her hair. “You became that person because somebody put a threat on your doorstep and made you understand what’s at stake. I didn’t create the danger, Truth. I’m just the one who’s willing to do what it takes to end it.”

“That’s a real convenient way to look at it.”

“Maybe. Don’t make it less true.”

She pulled back enough to look up at me, and there was something exhausted in her eyes that hadn’t been there a few months back, before the ultrasound, before the purge, before any of this had calcified into the daily weight it had become. “I need you to understand something,” she said. “I’m not asking you to stop being who you are. I gave up trying to change you a long time ago. But I need you to stop pretending this is clean. Stop pretending it’s simple. Because it’s not, and every time you try to make it sound simple, it makes me trust you less, not more.”

I held her gaze and made myself actually hear that, instead of moving straight past it the way I’d trained myself to move past most things that threatened to slow me down.

“It’s not clean,” I said. “I’ve killed people this month who didn’t personally touch my brothers. Men who just happened to be standing too close to Rahsaan when I decided close was close enough. I’m about to go put fear into a seventy-something-year-old woman who probably never held a gun in her life, because it’s the fastest way to drag her son out of hiding. None of that is clean, and none of it is simple. It’s ugly, and it’s necessary, and both of those things are true at the same time.”

Truth studied me for a long moment, like she was checking to see if the honesty was real or just another version of me managing her the way I’d learned to manage everyone else in my life.

“Okay,” she said finally. Just that. Not agreement. Not forgiveness. Just an acknowledgment that I’d told her something true, and she’d heard it.

“This is my world, Truth.” I said it low, steady, because it needed saying plain, no matter how many times we’d circled around versions of it before. “I didn’t build it to be pretty. I built it to survive in, and now I’m using every piece of it to keep you and my daughter safe. You can accept that this is part of who I am, or you can decide it’s more than you’re willing to carry. Both of those are real options. But I’m not gonna stand here and apologize for how I keep the people I love breathing. I did that once, tried to explain myself down to something smaller and softer, so it’d be easier for people to swallow. I’m done doing that.”

“I’m not asking you to apologize.”

“Then what are you asking me for?”

“I don’t know.” She looked away from me, out toward the window again. When she spoke again, her voice had gone quieter, more tired than angry. “Maybe I’m not asking you for anything. Maybe I’m just telling you how it feels on this end. You don’t have to fix it. You don’t have to explain it away. I just need you to know I see it. All of it. And it costs me something too, every single time.”

That, I understood completely, because it was the same math I ran every night before I let myself fall asleep next to her. Weighing what this life cost against what it protected, and never quite landing on an answer that made both sides balance clean.

“I see you seeing it,” I said. “That’s not nothing to me.”

“It’s not everything either.”

“No. It’s not.” I brushed my thumb along her jaw one more time. “But it’s what I got right now.”

She didn’t answer that. Just held my gaze a second longer, and then stepped back enough to let me finish getting ready. The moment between us settled into something unresolved but not broken—the kind of tension we’d learned to live inside without either of us pretending it wasn’t there.

I grabbed my keys off the dresser, checked my phone one more time—a text from Priest confirming they had her settled and were waiting for me—and turned back to Truth before I walked out.

“I love you,” I said. “That part’s not complicated, even when everything else is.”

“I know.” She wrapped her arms around herself, robe pulled tight against the morning chill coming off the window. “Go do what you gotta do. Just—” She stopped, swallowed whatever the rest of that sentence was going to be, and started over. “Just don’t let this turn you into something I can’t recognize anymore.”

“I’m already something most people can’t recognize.” I said it without any bitterness, just fact. “The only person whose recognition I care about is you. That hasn’t changed since the day I met you, and it’s not gonna change today.”

I crossed the room and kissed her, one hand cradling the back of her head, and she let me, but she didn’t melt into it the way she sometimes did. She kissed me back with something held in reserve, some part of herself she wasn’t willing to hand over this morning, no matter how gentle I was about asking. I understood that too. I didn’t try to force more out of the moment than she was willing to give.

“I’ll call you when it’s done,” I said, pulling back.

“Which part of it?”

“The part I can tell you about.”

She almost smiled at that, just barely, the corner of her mouth twitching before she caught it and pulled it back into something more guarded. “That’s the most honest thing you’ve said all morning.”

“I try to save the honesty for when it actually counts.”

“Get out of here, Amai.”