Page 57 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

Normal. Ordinary. The city going about its business at eleven-thirty on a weeknight, completely unaware of the conversation happening inside a truck six feet from the curb.

“You want an honest answer?” I said.

“That’s why I called.”

“When Rahsaan comes to me himself.” I said it without heat, without raising my voice, the same way I would have answered a question about supply logistics or a personnel decision. Matter of fact. Already decided. “That’s when it’s enough. Every person who’s dropping right now, every name on that tally, is one less place he can hide, one less number he can call, one less door that opens when he knocks. I’m not chasing Rahsaan through this city—I’m making this city the trap. And the trap doesn’t close until he has nowhere left to go, and he knows it, and the only way that happens is when everybody around him is gone.”

“That’s not justice for Elias and Silas,” Priest said. “That’s a war of attrition. Those two things aren’t the same.”

“I know they’re not.”

“So, which is this?”

I drove two blocks without answering. The brass band on the radio had shifted to something slower, a second line feel without the crowd behind it. I turned it down until it was just texture under the conversation.

“Both,” I said finally. “It’s both. Justice is Rahsaan asking me himself. Everything before that is the road.”

“And everybody on the road⁠—”

“Chose to be on it,” I said. “Nobody I’ve touched this month was innocent in what they were part of. Some of them were more central than others, and some of them were further out, but every single one of them decided to put themselves in service of a man who helped kill my brothers and has been taking things from my family since before I knew his name. You want me to feel a certain way about that. I don’t.”

“I’m not asking you to feel guilty,” Priest said, and I heard something tighten in his voice that wasn’t anger exactly. More like the sound a man makes when he’s watching someone he respects walk toward something damaging and can see the trajectory clearly but can’t alter the physics of it. “I’m asking you to think about what you’re building. Because right now you are building a city that is afraid of you in a different way than before. And afraid in that particular way—widespread, anonymous, people who don’t know your name but know something is happening—that kind of fear doesn’t stay quiet. It talks. It spreads to people who have phones and cameras and city council contacts and federal hotlines.”

“Let it spread.”

“Amai—”

“Priest.” I said his name once, even, and let the weight of it do the work. “I hear everything you’re saying. I understand the exposure. I understand the risk profile. I have accounted for it.” I paused. “What I have not done, and will not do, is slow this down because the news has it or because the streets are counting or because some people who knew what they were involved in now have families who are grieving them. That is not the variable that changes my math.”

“Then what does?”

“Rahsaan, standing in front of me and asking me to stop.”

“And if he never does?” Priest asked. “If he buries himself so deep nobody can find him? If he just—disappears? What happens to all of this if the man you’re doing it for doesn’t come out?”

“Then I burn every structure he ever touched until there’s nothing left to come back to. Eventually, the weight of what he’s lost becomes too heavy to stay disappeared under.” I made the turn onto the block I needed. “That’s what happens.”

Priest was quiet long enough that I thought he might let it go. Might absorb what I’d said, file it in the place where he filed things he disagreed with but couldn’t change, and come back tomorrow, focused on operational logistics.

He didn’t.

“I’ve been your right hand for a long time,” he said. “And I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere. But I need you to hear me when I tell you that the version of this—the version you’re describing—is going to cost you things that have nothing to do with Rahsaan. Things you’ve worked for. Things that actually matter to you.”

“Like what?”

“Like Truth,” he said. “Like a woman who is pregnant and trying to build something that doesn’t look like what she grew up watching. Like a child who is going to arrive in this world in about twelve weeks and whose first understanding of who her father is will be based on what this city says about you between now and the time she’s old enough to have an opinion.”

I said nothing.

“The street tally,” Priest said, “is going to have a name attached to it eventually. Your name. And when it does, that name doesn’t stay in criminal circles. It goes to the regular people. The people who shop at the same grocery stores and go to the same churches and live on the same blocks as Truth’s mother and sisters. That’s a specific kind of weight to put on the woman you’re asking to build a life with you.”

“You done?” I asked.

He exhaled. “Yeah,” he said, and his voice was flat now, not angry, not resigned, just tired in the way a man gets tired when he’s said everything he could say, and none of it moved the object. “I’m done.”

“It ends when Rahsaan comes to me himself,” I said again. “That hasn’t changed.”

I hung up.