Page 67 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

The pier under my feet felt like walking across something already dying—boards giving under my weight in places that hadn’t given under anyone’s weight in years. Nails pulled halfway loose, whole sections tilted at angles that told me the structure was closer to collapse than anybody realized when I picked this location. Behind me, gunfire continued in short, controlled bursts. Priest and Brandon held the line while DeShawn dragged himself toward better cover, blood soaking through his shirt, but his eyes still sharp, still fighting.

Rahsaan reached the skiff and tried to cut the rope holding it to the piling, hands shaking too badly to manage the knife cleanly. I closed the distance fast, and when he heard my footsteps behind him, he turned with the knife raised, some last desperate instinct kicking in. The same instinct that had kept him alive and hidden for six weeks finally running out of places to hide.

“You already took everything,” he said, breathing hard, blood from a graze along his temple running down into his eye. “What else you want from me?”

“I want you to understand,” I said, “that this was never about the money. Never about the territory. This is about two boys who never got to be men because you and Victor decided their lives weren’t worth shit!”

“They was in the wrong place,” he said, and even now, even here, some part of him still couldn’t fully let go of the justification he’d built his whole life around. “Wrong place, wrong time, that’s all it⁠—”

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t say that to me. Not after everything.”

He came at me with the knife, a wild, desperate swing that had nothing behind it but panic. I stepped into it instead of away, caught his wrist, and used his own momentum to put him down hard against the pier boards. The knife clattered somewhere into the dark.

Behind me, the gunfire had thinned. I could hear Priest’s voice shouting something about the tree line being clear, could hear the specific quiet that comes after a fight when the people still standing are trying to figure out who’s not.

Rahsaan lay on his back, chest heaving, looking up at me with an expression that had finally, completely, run out of angles. “Just do it,” he said. “Get it over with.”

“You don’t get to rush this.”

“Why not? You already took my mama. Take the rest of it. Take everything. I don’t care no more⁠—”

“You should’ve cared eleven years ago.” I looked down at him, and something inside me that I’d expected to feel—that release Priest had warned me about, that satisfaction I’d been chasing through weeks of bodies—simply wasn’t there. There was only the flat, exhausted knowledge that this had to happen, that it was the only conclusion the last eleven years had been building toward. And once it was finished, I would still be a man whose brothers were in the ground, whose childhood had been carved apart by men who thought territory was worth more than blood.

I put two bullets in his chest.

He didn’t say anything else. His body jerked once and then went still against the pier boards. Above us, the sky stayed the same flat gray it had been all afternoon, indifferent to what had just happened beneath it. And the water kept moving the same patient, unbothered way it always moved.

Priest found me a few minutes later, standing at the edge of the pier, looking down at a dead man and a stretch of murky water that had swallowed a knife and would probably swallow whatever else got thrown into it before the day was done.

“DeShawn’s stable,” he said. “Teal’s shoulder is fucked, but he’ll live. We lost Dexter on the road. Took one to the neck before he even got behind cover.”

I nodded. That was a cost. Every war had costs, and Dexter’s name would go on a list I kept privately the same way Elias and Silas’s names sat somewhere quiet inside me, not forgotten, just carried.

“It’s done,” Priest said. Not a question.

“It’s done.”

He looked at the two bodies on the pier, Rahsaan and his mother, both of them still, both of them finished. And then he looked at me, waiting to see what I’d do with that stillness now that it finally existed.

I didn’t feel what I expected to feel. I’d spent six weeks telling myself that once Rahsaan was dead, once the debt for Elias and Silas was finally paid in the only currency that mattered, something in me would settle. Some door would close. Instead, I just felt tired, the particular tired that comes after holding your body rigid for too long. And underneath the tired, there was still the same absence that had been there for eleven years—two empty seats at every family dinner, two names Winston refused to say out loud anymore, two boys who should have been grown men by now with families of their own. And none of what happened on that pier was going to change that.

“You good?” Priest asked.

“I don’t know what good looks like right now.”

He didn’t push it. He just nodded, the way he had earlier, and turned to start coordinating the cleanup—the containers, the calls that needed to be made, the specific machinery of disappearing evidence that Victor had once run and that I’d learned plenty from watching. I let him handle it. My part in this was finished.

I walked back down the access road to my truck alone, past the warehouse, past the tree line where a body still lay tangled in brush that Priest’s men hadn’t gotten to yet. Past six weeks of retribution that had finally arrived at its last stop. The gray sky held steady overhead, no rain, no sun, just that flat New Orleans afternoon light.

I didn’t call Truth to tell her it was over. I didn’t call Winston. I didn’t call anybody. I just drove, windows down, letting the wet air move through the truck, letting the quiet settle into the space where weeks of adrenaline had lived. The quiet felt strange in a way I hadn’t expected. Not peaceful, just unfamiliar, like a room in your own house that you hadn’t been in for a long time.

By the time I pulled into my driveway, the sun was starting to go down, throwing long orange light across the front of the house. I sat in the truck for a minute before I went inside, running my hands over the wheel, trying to figure out what I was supposed to feel now that the thing I’d been chasing for over a decade had finally been caught.

I still didn’t know when I opened the front door.

Truth was in the kitchen; I could smell it before I saw her, something with garlic and butter, low music coming from her phone propped against the toaster. She looked up when she heard me come in, and whatever she saw on my face made her set the spoon down without a word.

“It’s done,” I said. That was all I had.