Page 65 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“In the van. Two men on her.” Priest’s jaw worked, like there was something he wanted to say and was deciding against it. Then, he said it anyway. “You sure about this part, Amai?”

“I’m sure.”

“He’s gonna beg.”

“Let him.”

“It ain’t gonna feel the way you think it’s gonna feel.”

I looked at him. “You think I’m doing this for a feeling?”

Priest didn’t answer that. He just nodded once, short, and went back to his radio. I let the silence between us settle because there wasn’t a version of that conversation that ended anywhere useful. I already knew what this wasn’t going to feel like. I’d known it since the moment Priest called me about the mother in Baton Rouge, and I felt that flare of something almost like joy, quick and ugly. I wasn’t chasing satisfaction. I was chasing an ending. Those weren’t the same thing, and I’d learned the difference the hard way over the past month and a half.

The truck came down the road slow, headlights cutting through the gray afternoon light. I watched it the whole way in.

Rahsaan got out first. He looked different than the man from the warehouse—thinner, like six weeks of hiding had cost him more than sleep. His clothes were good, still expensive, the kind of shit a man wears when he wants to remind everyone he hasn’t been reduced to nothing, even while he’s being reduced to exactly that. He had two men with him, both of them keeping their hands visible, both of them looking like they already understood how this was going to end and were trying to figure out how to survive it anyway.

I stood at the end of the pier and let him walk to me. I didn’t move. I wanted him to feel the distance, wanted every step to remind him he was coming into my space, on my terms, because he’d run out of anywhere else to go.

“Amai.”

“Rahsaan.”

He looked around, at Priest, at Teal by the warehouse, at Brandon and DeShawn positioned where the road narrowed. He was doing math, and I let him do it, because the math wasn’t going to change the outcome no matter how he ran the numbers.

“This the part where you make a speech?” he said. “Tell me all the shit I done wrong? Because I already know. I lived it.”

“No speech.”

“Then what is this?”

“You know what this is.” I kept my voice even, unhurried. “Where are my brothers, Rahsaan?”

His face changed, just slightly. Not fear. Something closer to recognition—the understanding that I wasn’t going to let him talk his way around the center of this. That every road led back to the same two names, no matter how he tried to steer it. “In the ground,” he said. “Same place they been for years.”

“Exactly.”

“You already killed everybody I ever loved, everybody I ever fed, everybody who ever did me a favor. What’s left?”

“I want to hear you say what you did. Out your own mouth. Not through Victor. Not secondhand. You.”

Rahsaan’s jaw worked. Behind him, I heard the van door open, heard the sound of two men helping an old woman out onto the gravel. I watched Rahsaan’s whole body change the second he heard her voice.

“Baby, where—” Her voice was thin, confused, an old woman’s voice trying to make sense of a situation nobody had bothered to explain to her. “Rahsaan?”

“Mama.” He said it soft, and for a second, the man standing in front of me wasn’t a killer or a rival or the reason my brothers had been in the ground for over a decade. He was just a son, watching somebody bring his mother into a place she had no business being. “Mama, it’s okay. I’m here.”

“I don’t like it here,” she said. “Where are we?”

“It’s okay,” he said again, and his eyes came back to me. Whatever composure he’d walked in with was gone now, replaced with something raw and desperate. “Amai. Man. She ain’t got nothing to do with this.”

“She’s your mother,” I said. “That makes her have everything to do with this.”

“Come on, man.” His voice cracked. “I did what you wanted. I came. I’m standing right here. I ain’t running, I ain’t hiding—you got me. You don’t need her no more. I even got y’all money with me.”

“I don’t need her.” I let that land. “But I want her.”

“Why?” It came out of him like a wound. “Why, man? What she ever do to you?”