YAHMARIA #3
Something almost like approval flickered across his face before he gestured for me to follow him back toward the interrogation room.
I looked at Syx one more time—he nodded, small, steady, a silent promise that he’d still be here, that this wasn’t goodbye—and then I made myself walk away, because staying wouldn’t change anything, and right now, moving forward was the only thing that might.
Back in the interrogation room, Amai didn’t sit this time. He stood at the edge of the table, arms crossed, studying me the way you’d study something you were still deciding the value of.
“Here’s where we are,” he said. “You’re still a prisoner. Nothing about that changes. But you’ve made yourself valuable, and valuable prisoners get treated differently than useless ones.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning you have a choice.” His voice was calm, deliberate. “You keep giving me what you know, you help me take Victor apart piece by piece, and you survive this. Or you decide you’re done cooperating, and you become exactly as disposable as your father already decided you were. Your call.”
I almost laughed at the absurdity of it—being offered a choice by the man who’d locked me in a cell, who’d threatened to kill me not twelve hours ago, who saw me as nothing more than a resource to be extracted and discarded once I ran dry.
“You think I’m choosing you,” I said. “You think this is me picking a side in your war.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No.” I stood, needing to meet him eye to eye, even though he had inches on me, even though he held every piece of leverage in this room.
“I’m not choosing the Landrys. I’m not choosing you.
I’m choosing Syx. I’m choosing to survive this instead of dying for a man who was never going to lift a finger for me.
And I’m choosing to make sure my father pays for deciding my life was worth less than his comfort. ”
Something shifted in Amai’s expression—not quite respect, but close enough to it that I recognized the shape.
“Then let’s make him pay,” he said. “What else do you have?”
I hesitated for only a second, weighing what was left, what I still had to give.
“There’s a protocol,” I said finally. “My father built it years ago, in case things ever went bad enough that he needed to disappear completely. A private airstrip outside Houma—small, unregistered, used mostly for crop dusters, but there’s a hangar he leases under another name.
He has a boat captain, too, works out of the marina near Grand Isle, someone he’s paid off for over a decade to be ready at a moment’s notice.
If things get bad enough, my father doesn’t run through the city.
He runs through water and sky, somewhere nobody’s watching. ”
Amai’s eyes sharpened, the same way they had when I’d first mentioned the logistics company, except this time, there was something more urgent underneath it—recognition, maybe, that this was the piece that actually mattered.
“He’d take Rahsaan,” Amai said slowly, thinking it through even as he spoke.
“If Rahsaan’s smart enough to stick close to him, yes. If not—” I shrugged. “My father’s never been loyal to anyone longer than it served him. He’d leave Rahsaan behind in a heartbeat if it meant getting out clean with the money.”
Amai was quiet for a long moment, and I could practically see the gears turning, recalculating everything now that this new piece had dropped into place.
“This is real,” he said finally. “Not speculation. You’ve seen this happen before.”
“Once. Years ago, when things got bad with a supplier who threatened to go to the feds. My father disappeared for two weeks. Came back like nothing happened.” I met his eyes, unflinching.
“He’ll use it again if he thinks the walls are closing in.
And after tonight, after everything with Rahsaan and the money and Winston—the walls are closing in. ”
Amai nodded slowly, already moving, already into whatever plan was forming behind his eyes.
“You understand what this means,” he said, glancing back at me before he reached the door. “If this is accurate, we might be able to catch him before he vanishes.”
“I understand exactly what it means.” I held his gaze, something cold and clarifying settling into my chest. “It means my father doesn’t get to disappear clean. It means he doesn’t get to walk away from what he did to me like it never happened.”
“And if we catch him,” Amai said quietly, “he won’t walk away from anything.”
“Good.” The word came out harder than I expected, harder than I thought I had left in me. “He stopped being my father the moment he told me sacrifices happen in war. Whatever happens to him now, that’s not on me. That’s on him.”
Amai studied me for one last moment, and then he turned and left without another word, already reaching for his phone, already setting the machinery of his revenge into motion.
I sat back down at the table, alone in that sterile room, and let myself feel the full weight of what I’d just done.
I hadn’t chosen Amai. I hadn’t chosen the Landrys, or their war, or anything about the life that had swallowed me whole since the moment Victor Baptiste decided his ambitions mattered more than his blood.
I’d chosen myself.
For the first time in longer than I could remember, that felt like enough.