Page 171 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Then you go home to them,” I said. “You take that money you took from Victor, you take whatever legitimate businesses you got left, and you build a fence to keep the world out—not to keep Truth in.”

I looked right into my son’s dark, tortured eyes.

“Don’t you make your daddy’s mistake, Amai. Don’t you ever confuse keeping a woman with loving her. Love ain’t a cage, and it damn sure ain’t a contract. Love is what you’re willing to put down so the people you care about can breathe.”

Amai swallowed hard, his throat working. He looked down at our joined hands—mine trembling with illness, his stained with his brother’s life.

“It cost too much, Mama,” he whispered.

“I know, baby,” I said, pulling his head down until his forehead rested against my shoulder, letting his tears soak into my worn cardigan. “Love always does.”

Epilogue

The kitchen in the Garden District house sounded like a second line had collided with a Baptist revival.

“If you put that much cayenne in those green beans, Delphine, you going to have these children drinking milk straight from the gallon,” Odette said.

She was sitting at the breakfast bar in an embroidered lilac blouse, her hands—still stiff from the lupus, but steady—snapping the ends off fresh pole beans into a colander. Six months ago, Odette Landry wouldn’t have stepped foot in a kitchen that didn’t have twenty-foot ceilings and armed guards by the refrigerator. Today, she had flour on the cuff of her sleeve and a glass of sweet iced tea sweating against the marble.

“Odette, honey,” my mama replied without turning around from the twelve-quart stockpot bubbling on the Wolf range, “your people come from uptown money and boiled chicken. My people come from the Seventh Ward. We season our food until the ancestors tell us to stop, and then we throw in two more bay leaves for good luck.”

“Amen,” Raven called out from the dining room table, where she was currently losing an argument with a stack of baby flashcards. “Tell her, Mama. If my tongue ain’t burning, the food ain’t working.”

“Don’t you encourage her, Raven,” Honor yelled over the whir of the food processor. “I got kids in the backyard who think black pepper is from hell. Terrance brought them over here with clean shirts on, and if they start sweating out their Sunday clothes before two o’clock, I’m sending you the dry cleaning bill. You know my kids bad as hell.”

“Send it to Priest,” Raven shot back, smirking as she tossed an elephant card at my daughter. “He got that Landry direct deposit now.”

From the doorway of the sunroom, Priest didn’t even look up from his iPad, but the corner of his mouth twitched. He was leaning against the casing in a crisp white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, looking less like a hitman and more like a man who had finally figured out that letting Raven Renois yell at him was the most peaceful part of his week.

In the center of all that noise sat my daughter.

Trumai Delphine Landry was eight months old, twenty-one pounds of solid rolls and attitude, and currently wearing a bright yellow sundress with matching ruffled bloomers that Saroya had bought from a boutique. She had Amai’s midnight-dark eyes, my mama’s stubborn chin, and two bottom teeth that she used like weaponized ivory.

She took the plastic elephant flashcard Raven tossed her, looked at it with deep suspicion, and immediately shoved the whole corner into her mouth.

“Don’t eat the wildlife, Tru,” I said, walking in from the hallway with a laundry basket full of folded baby onesies resting on my hip.

Tru pulled the card out of her mouth, gave me a gummy, drooling grin that showed off those two brand-new teeth, and slapped both hands down on the tray of her highchair with a wet thwack.

“Ba!” she announced loudly.

“That’s right, baby,” Saroya said, walking in from the patio carrying a pitcher of fresh lemonade with mint leaves floating on top. “Tell your mama you do what you want on Sunday.”

“Don’t start that.” I laughed, setting the basket on the end of the long dining table. “She already thinks she runs this whole zip code. She woke up at five-thirty this morning, shouting at the ceiling fan like she wanted a fade.”

“She gets that from you,” a low, gravelly voice rumbled from behind me.

Two large, warm hands settled against my hips, pulling me gently back against a solid wall of chest and shoulder. I didn’t need to look to know who it was. The scent of sandalwood, clean cedar, and cold river air belonged to only one man on this earth.

Amai leaned down, pressing his lips to the soft curve where my neck met my shoulder. His beard was trimmed close, the wild, desperate growth from those months of hunting the water long gone, but the hard line of his jaw remained. He had his dark hair freshly braided, wearing a simple black shirt that stretched tight across his chest and dark denim that hid the faint scar on his thigh where his father had once shot him.

“She gets the shouting from you,” I murmured, tilting my head back against his collarbone. “I’m a peaceful woman.”

Every single woman in that kitchen stopped what they were doing and looked at me.

“Peaceful?” Honor snorted, dumping crushed garlic into the pan. “You punched a fertility doctor dead in her jaw. Ain’t nothing peaceful about you, Truth Renois.”

“I was standing up for my rights,” I said, fighting a smile.