Page 62 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

I went.

The drive out to the Sanctum was the same, most of it through empty pre-dawn highway with the sky doing that slow bruise-colored shift from black to gray to the first hints of orange low on the horizon. I didn’t turn the radio on. I didn’t need the noise. My head was already full enough with everything Priest had told me, everything Truth said, everything I was about to walk into.

Rahsaan’s mother.

I thought about my own mother sitting at home, managing her own war with her own husband, carrying decades of complicated love for a man who’d never once made it easy on her, and I wondered what Odessa Boudreaux’s version of that story looked like. Whether she’d known what her son had become, whether she’d asked questions she didn’t want answered the same way Truth kept asking me questions she probably already knew the shape of.

It didn’t matter in the end. I wasn’t driving out there to understand her. I was driving out there to use her, plain and simple, the same way this whole city had been using people against each other since before I was born. Rahsaan had used my family’s grief as fuel for years, sustaining himself quietly on the secret of what he’d done to Elias and Silas. Now I was going to use his mother the same way—as fuel, as leverage, as the one crack in his armor wide enough to finally pull him out into the open.

The gates of the Sanctum came up on my left, set back off the road behind a stretch of trees that made the place look like nothing more than an abandoned lot if you didn’t know what you were looking for. I punched in the code, watched the gate roll back, and drove through onto the gravel drive that led to the compound itself.

Priest was waiting for me outside the main building, two coffee cups in his hands, his face doing that particular still thing it did when he had something serious to say and was deciding how much of it needed saying out loud.

“She’s inside,” he said, handing me one of the cups. “Room three. Teal is with her, keeping her calm best he can.”

“She talking?”

“Crying more than talking. But she said her son’s name three times without us asking. Once when we picked her up, twice since we got here. Whatever else that woman is, she’s scared for him, not for herself.”

I drank the coffee and felt the heat of it settle something in my chest that the drive out hadn’t managed to settle on its own. “Good. That’s the version of scared I need her to be.”

Priest studied me for a moment, the same way he always did right before he said something I might not want to hear. “You good?”

“I’m good.”

“Truth know?”

“She heard the call.”

“How’d that go?”

“About how you’d expect.” I finished the coffee and handed the empty cup back to him. “She’s not wrong to be tired of this. I’m tired of it too. I’m just more tired of Rahsaan still breathing.”

Priest nodded slowly, like that was an answer he could work with even if he didn’t love it. “He’s gonna find out fast. Baton Rouge people talk. Somebody’s gonna notice she’s gone within the day, and word’s gonna move.”

“That’s the plan.”

“You ready for what happens when it does?”

I looked past him, toward the building where Rahsaan’s mother sat somewhere inside, probably still crying, probably still saying her son’s name like it was a prayer that might pull him out of whatever hole he was hiding in to come save her.

I thought about Elias. I thought about Silas. I thought about six weeks of bodies and a city keeping a tally on a war it didn’t fully understand, and I thought about Truth standing in our bedroom this morning telling me she hated this and still wanted it to end the same way I did.

“I’ve been ready for this since the night Rahsaan told me what he did to my brothers,” I said. “Let’s go see what his mama’s got to say.”

I walked past Priest, toward the building, feeling the weight of what was waiting inside settle into my shoulders the way it always did right before something important was about to break open. Rahsaan had stayed hidden for months, patient and careful, smarter than most men I’d hunted.

But everybody had one thing they couldn’t stay hidden from forever.

I was about to find out if his mother was that thing.

The building held the kind of quiet that only came from good insulation and bad history. Syx crossed my mind, and I hoped Yaya wasn’t fucking over him, but that was something only time would tell.

I walked past the room where Priest had her settled. Didn’t look in the small window in the door. Kept moving toward the office at the end of the hall. I already knew what an old, scared woman looked like sitting in a chair too big for her. I didn’t need to see it again to know it was working.

My phone rang before I got the door closed behind me.

Unknown number. Baton Rouge area code, though. I knew Rahsaan hadn’t set foot in Baton Rouge in years—he had people call from anywhere but where he actually was. It was either him or one of his flunkies letting me know my message hit exactly where it was meant. I looked at the screen a second longer than I needed to, letting it ring twice more, letting him sit there and wonder if I was going to pick up at all.