Page 69 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

Rahsaan’s whole body changed the second he heard her voice. I’d seen a lot of men break in a lot of ways in my life—most of them performing it for an audience, most of them calculating even in collapse—but this wasn’t that. This was a son hearing his mother’s confusion from thirty feet away and understanding, in real time, exactly what kind of trap he’d walked into.

“Mama.” His voice came through clear now, close enough to the receiver’s angle that the wind couldn’t take it from me. “Mama, it’s okay. I’m here.”

I felt something twist low in my stomach. Something I didn’t examine too closely because I already knew what it would look like if I did—recognition. Rahsaan loved that woman the way I’d loved my own mother before Winston had spent thirty years teaching both his sons that love was a weakness you learned to bury or a currency you learned to spend. I watched Rahsaan reach for her, watched two of Amai’s men restrain him before he could close the distance, and I told myself the discomfort I felt wasn’t sympathy. It couldn’t be sympathy. Rahsaan had killed my brothers. He deserved whatever was coming to him.

I just hadn’t decided yet whether his mother did.

“She ain’t got nothing to do with this,” Rahsaan said, his voice climbing now, cracking at the edges. “Amai, man. She ain’t got nothing to do with this.”

Amai’s answer came through in a fragment, calm enough that it didn’t even need volume to carry weight. “She’s your mother. That makes her have everything to do with this.”

I lowered the receiver’s gain and turned the dial, trying to catch more of it, trying to understand—really understand, not just witness—what kind of man made that argument and believed it. Because that was the thing about Amai that had always terrified me more than his violence: he had a logic. Every terrible thing he did came wrapped in a structure that made sense on its own terms, airtight and self-justifying, the same way mine did. I recognized the shape of it because I built things that way too. The difference, I told myself, was that my structures protected people. His destroyed them.

I didn’t examine that difference too closely either.

Rahsaan kept talking—pleading now, the performance completely gone, nothing left in his voice but the raw animal sound of a man watching his last leverage evaporate in real time. I caught pieces. I did what you wanted. Take everything I got left. And underneath all of it, running like a current, the specific desperation of somebody who’d finally understood that the man standing across from him wasn’t going to be reached by any version of himself that he knew how to perform.

That was the moment I understood something had actually changed in my brother, and it wasn’t growth. Growth implied movement toward something. What I was watching, through a lens and a distance and a receiver that kept losing the wind, was closer to erosion—something worn down to a shape that could still function, could still speak in complete sentences and make eye contact and negotiate, but had lost whatever mechanism used to stop a man before he crossed certain lines.

At the warehouse, Amai had crossed a line and then panicked at himself afterward. I’d heard, according to Priest, anyway, gone somewhere quiet and shaken by his own hands. This Amai wasn’t going to be shaken by anything. That absence of aftermath, the fact that whatever he was about to do wasn’t going to cost him a single sleepless night, was worse than the violence itself.

I thought about Truth sleeping next to that.

I thought about our daughter growing up in a house where the man at the head of the table operated on that kind of logic, dispensing love and violence from the same unshaken hand. Teaching a little girl by example that both were forms of the same thing.

This is the man who’s going to raise her.

I didn’t examine whether that was true. I’d stopped examining most of my conclusions about Amai a long time ago, mostly because examination had a way of leading places I didn’t want to go—toward my own choices, my own silences, the specific ways I’d built my own version of a lie and called it patience. It was easier to let the sentence sit unexamined, clean and simple, a fact instead of a theory.

Down on the pier, Odessa’s voice cut through again, higher now, panicked. “Rahsaan, baby, what’s happening? Why these people got guns?”

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

I watched Amai draw his weapon. Through the binoculars, the motion looked almost casual. No hesitation in it, no visible weight, the same economy of movement he used for everything from tying his shoes to ending a man’s life. Rahsaan lunged toward his mother, and I watched two of Amai’s men catch him before he’d covered half the distance. Watched them force him to his knees on boards that looked, even from this far out, like they were one bad step from giving way entirely.

I should’ve looked away. I told myself afterward that a better man would’ve lowered the binoculars before it happened. I didn’t lower them. Some part of me needed to see it—needed the confirmation, needed the specific weight of evidence for the account I was already building in my head, the one where Amai’s capacity for this kind of violence became the permanent, unassailable reason Truth needed rescuing whether she understood it or not.

The gunshot came through the receiver a half-second after I saw the muzzle flash. Odessa’s body dropped where she stood. The pier boards folded under her weight, something hollow and final traveling across the water toward me in the wind. Even from this distance, I could see the color spreading dark against the old wood. Thin lines of it soaking through the boards, spilling into the water.

Rahsaan’s scream didn’t sound like a word. It didn’t sound human at all to be honest. I’d heard men make that sound exactly once before, the sound of someone’s soul breaking so completely that language stopped being available to them. And hearing it now, carried across the water in fragments the receiver couldn’t fully capture, I felt my own spirit fall in a way I hadn’t expected.

I told myself it was shock. I told myself that what I felt was simple human response to violence, nothing more complicated than that. But underneath the shock, quieter, uglier, something else was moving—something that recognized, with a clarity that scared me, that I now had exactly what I’d been waiting for. Proof. Undeniable, first-hand, no-room-for-doubt proof of what Amai was capable of, delivered in a form Truth herself would never be allowed to witness, because Amai would never let her anywhere near this side of himself. He’d curate what she saw. He’d already been curating it for months—the version of himself soft enough to earn trust while this version, the one standing on a rotting pier with an old woman’s blood cooling on the boards at his feet, operated somewhere she’d never be allowed to look.

He’s going to keep doing this, and she’s never going to see it. She’s going to keep believing the version he shows her because that’s the only version he lets exist in her world.

The thought hardened something in me. I felt it happen, almost physically, like a joint locking into place.

The first shot that wasn’t Amai’s came from somewhere behind the warehouse. I watched one of Amai’s men—DeShawn, I thought, though the distance made faces hard to place with certainty—spin backward into a stack of pallets. And then the whole pier erupted at once, gunfire opening from two directions I could see and probably a third I couldn’t. Muzzle flashes stuttered against the gray afternoon light, throwing brief, ugly reflections across the water’s surface.

I adjusted the binoculars, tracking movement. For a few seconds, the scene fractured into pieces too fast to follow as a single narrative. Priest pulling Amai toward cover behind a rusted shipping container, Teal’s leg punching through a section of rotted decking near the edge of the walkway, his whole body pitching sideways before somebody’s arm caught him and hauled him back up. I’d walked that pier myself, years ago, scouting locations before I settled on the cove I was hiding in now. I remembered exactly which sections of decking wouldn’t hold weight reliably. I found myself in the middle of watching a firefight unfold, cataloguing which boards were about to give and which men were standing on them, an old habit from a life spent assessing structural risk in every room I ever walked into. It occurred to me, distantly, that some part of my brain treated this exactly like a business problem even now, even watching people die, and I didn’t know whether that said something damning about me or just something true.

Rahsaan used the chaos to break loose. One of his own men tackled the guard restraining him, buying just enough time for Rahsaan to scramble toward the far end of the pier, toward an old aluminum skiff tied off to a piling. I watched Amai’s old ass run after him, moving fast across boards. For a stretch of maybe thirty seconds, the two of them passed out of my clean sightline entirely, swallowed by the angle of the warehouse and the smoke starting to drift low across the water.

I stood there with the binoculars pressed hard against my face, waiting, my pulse loud enough in my own ears that I could hear it competing with the gunfire coming thin and delayed through the receiver’s speaker. If Rahsaan managed to shoot Amai’s ass, all my problems would be solved. He’d be out the way, and Truth and the baby would be mine. Who else would she lean on after such a loss?

A lot of things ran through my mind in a matter of seconds.

When they came back into view, Rahsaan was on his back near the edge of the walkway, and Amai was standing over him. I couldn’t hear most of what passed between them, but I saw the shape of it clearly enough. A man finished. A man refusing to rush the ending even now, standing there, letting the moment stretch the way he must have needed it to stretch. Some private ledger finally settling after eleven years. Amai would never admit it out loud, but a part of him got off on this shit.