Page 66 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“It’s what you did,” I said. “I remember a lot of things, Rahsaan. I remember you standing across from me in that warehouse, telling me you helped put my brothers in the ground like it was something to be proud of. I remember you laughing while you said it.”

“I wasn’t laughing⁠—”

“You were laughing.” My voice didn’t rise. “Elias was seventeen. Silas was seventeen. You and Victor decided that was an acceptable price for territory. You never once, in all those years, thought that debt would come collect.”

“I thought about it every day,” he said, and something in his voice went hollow. “You think I slept good? You think I didn’t see they faces every time I closed my eyes?”

“Doesn’t matter what you saw. Matters what you did.” I looked past him, at the old woman standing between the two men who’d brought her, confused and frightened and completely unaware that she was standing in the last few minutes of her life. “Bring her closer.”

“Amai—” Rahsaan’s voice cracked open, all the way this time, no performance left in it. “Please. Man. Please. Not her. I’ll give you anything. I’ll give you the money, all of it, whatever Victor didn’t already spend. I’ll give you names. I’ll give you every fucking thing I got left. Just not her.”

“You didn’t give my brothers a choice.”

“This is different⁠—”

“It’s the same.” I finally let something into my voice, not rage, just weight, just the full measure of eleven years pressing down into three words. “It’s exactly the same.”

The old woman looked between us, still not understanding, still holding onto her son’s name like it was the only solid thing left in a world that had stopped making sense the moment men with guns pulled her out of her sister’s house in Baton Rouge. “Rahsaan, baby, what’s happening? Why these people got guns?”

“Mama, don’t look at them. Look at me.” His voice broke on the last word. “Just look at me, okay? Just keep looking at me.”

I drew my weapon.

Rahsaan lunged, not at me—he wasn’t stupid enough for that, not with four men holding line around us. He lunged toward her, arms out, trying to put his body between his mother and whatever was coming. He didn’t make it three steps before Teal and one of the other men had him restrained, arms locked, forced down to his knees on the pier boards while he screamed something that wasn’t words anymore, just sound, just a man’s voice breaking apart in real time.

“Amai, please! God, please don’t do this. She ain’t done nothing. She ain’t done nothing to nobody⁠—”

I looked at her. She’d gone still, finally understanding, her mouth open like she wanted to say something and couldn’t find it in time.

I thought about Elias laughing at something stupid Silas said. I thought about the two of them, seventeen, thinking they had their whole lives still coming to them.

I pulled the trigger.

The sound of it rolled out flat across the water. Her body dropped where she stood. The pier boards took the weight of her fall with a hollow, wooden thud that seemed louder than the gunshot itself. Blood spread dark and fast against the gray boards, running into the gaps between them, dripping into the water below in thin red threads that the current pulled apart almost as fast as they formed.

Rahsaan’s scream didn’t sound human. It came from somewhere underneath language, a sound I recognized because I’d made something close to it myself, years ago, standing over two coffins that were too small for what they were supposed to hold. Too final for what I was ready to accept. I watched him fold forward against the men holding him, watched something in him break clean through. No more performance, no more negotiation, just a man staring at the exact thing he’d made me feel years ago, finally understanding it from the other side.

“You killed her,” he said, voice raw and disbelieving, even though he’d watched it happen. “You killed her.”

“You killed my brothers.” I holstered my weapon. “We’re even now. Except I don’t feel even. Do you?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t get the chance.

The first shot came from somewhere behind the warehouse, but not from my people, from someone else entirely. Someone I hadn’t accounted for, someone Rahsaan must have kept in reserve in case his own surrender went sideways. It caught DeShawn in the shoulder and spun him hard into a stack of shipping pallets.

The whole pier erupted into motion at once.

“Cover!” Priest was already moving, already pulling me back from the open walkway toward the cover of a rusted shipping container that had sat abandoned on the dock for longer than any of us had been alive. Gunfire opened from two directions, the warehouse roofline and somewhere along the tree line past the access road, positions that hadn’t shown themselves until the exact moment they needed to.

I fired back toward the roofline and watched a shape stumble and drop. But the pier itself was working against us now, the old boards groaning under the weight of men moving fast across ground that hadn’t been built to hold that kind of traffic in twenty years. I heard the wood splinter under Teal’s foot before I saw it happen—his leg went straight through a rotted section near the edge. For one terrible second, he was suspended between the walkway and the water below, one hand grabbing at a piling that was itself half-eaten through with rot.

“Grab him!” I was already moving, already reaching.

Brandon got there first, hauling Teal up by the arm hard enough to pull his shoulder half out of socket, but he was up, he was moving, and that was what mattered.

Rahsaan used the chaos to break free. One of his own men, still fighting for him even now, tackled the guard, restraining him. That gave Rahsaan the half-second he needed to scramble toward the far end of the pier where an old aluminum skiff sat tied to a piling, half-sunk, probably useless, but it was the only direction that didn’t have gunfire pouring into it.

I went after him.