Page 58 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

The radio filled the truck back up, brass and bass and the tail end of a melody I half-recognized from a second line somewhere on Magazine Street a couple of summers back. Before any of this started, before the vault was empty and the twins were dead and Truth existed anywhere in my world. Just sound in the dark, the city still doing what cities do, indifferent and loud and alive in all the ways it stayed alive regardless of what men like me did to each other inside it.

I parked at the curb a half block from the house and sat there a minute.

Not because I was troubled by anything Priest had said. Not because the call had shifted anything. Because I had learned years back that the transition from the outside world to the space where Truth was required a specific kind of deliberate decompression—a few seconds of nothing, engine ticking, windows up, before I carried myself through that door. She noticed things. Not always consciously, not always immediately, but she noticed, and I had figured out that arriving to her with the full texture of my day still on me created friction she shouldn’t have to manage.

So, I sat.

I thought about Marguerite Fontaine’s hands.

I thought about Priest’s voice doing that thing it did when he was watching a trajectory he couldn’t alter.

I thought about twelve bodies—maybe thirteen, depending on how you counted—spreading across the news cycle on four different channels, and a street tally that people were running the same way they ran tallies for sports, for weather, for anything the city decided to track because it was happening too visibly to ignore.

None of it made me want to stop.

That was the thing Priest didn’t fully account for, even after all this time. He understood my logic. He understood my strategy. He understood that the purge was functional, that removing Rahsaan’s network was the correct tactical move, that bait worked better than pursuit against a man who had survived by refusing to be found.

What he hadn’t fully absorbed—what most men who hadn’t lost what I’d lost hadn’t absorbed—was that there was a component of this that wasn’t strategy. It was something older and simpler and entirely non-negotiable, the part of this that had nothing to do with logistics or exposure risk or what anyone would think about my daughter’s father when she was old enough to go to school.

Elias and Silas were just starting their lives.

They were young, and they were dead. Rahsaan Boudreaux had been eating, sleeping, running a network, accumulating money, and taking things from my family for years after the night he helped put them in the ground. Every morning he woke up was an extension of something that should have been finished a long time ago, and every person who made it possible for him to keep waking up was connected to that extension in ways that might vary in degree but did not vary in kind.

Priest wanted me to make distinctions I wasn’t willing to make.

I got out of the truck.

The night air off the river was thick and warm, the way it stayed even late into the season, and I could hear the neighborhood settling—a television through an open window down the block, somebody’s AC unit cycling on, and the specific ambient hum of a residential street doing nothing dramatic.

I walked to the front door.

Whatever Rahsaan was watching on the news tonight, whatever he was hearing through whatever channels still connected to him, I wanted him to understand one thing clearly: this was not going to fatigue itself into resolution. It was not going to slow down because the public was counting. It was not going to stop because a man with a legitimate business profile ended up on the six o’clock news.

It was going to keep moving until there was nowhere left to stand and only one way to make it stop.

Come out.

I put my key in the lock and went inside.

Chapter 9

AMAI

My phone went off at 5:52 in the morning, and I knew before I looked at the screen who it was, because only one person called me that early and lived to keep doing it.

I answered without opening my eyes. “Talk to me.”

“We got her.”

Two words. That was all Priest needed to say to snap every nerve in my body awake at once. I sat up in bed, careful not to jostle Truth too hard, and even that small movement made her stir beside me.

“Say that again,” I said.

“Rahsaan’s mother. Ms. Odessa Boudreaux. Baton Rouge, off Plank Road, staying with her sister under a name that wasn’t hers. Somebody clocked her at a pharmacy two days ago, and we been sitting on it, confirming before I brought it to you. It’s her, Amai. Confirmed. She’s in a van right now, twenty minutes outside the city, headed to the Sanctum.”

I sat there a second and let that land the way it needed to land, all the way down.

Weeks of bodies dropping across three parishes, weeks of Rahsaan’s whole network getting stripped down to nothing, and the man himself still hadn’t surfaced. He’d gone quiet the way roaches go quiet—not gone, just smarter about where he stepped. I’d started to wonder if I would have to burn this city down block by block just to smoke him out of whatever hole he’d folded himself into.