TRUTH #2
“You don’t hear yourself,” he said. “You’re standing in my house, telling me you’re happy with a man who shot me. Who buried me alive. Who has more enemies than the parish has potholes, Truth. You think that’s a life? You think that’s safe for our son? For your daughter?”
“That’s not your call to make.”
“Somebody has to make it,” he shot back, and there was something underneath his voice now, something too calm, too certain.
“You think you chose him with clear eyes. You didn’t.
He’s had his hands on every part of your life since before you even knew his name.
He’s not protecting you—he’s managing you.
And one day you’re going to wake up and see it.
I just hope it’s not too late when you do. ”
“That sounds like something you tell yourself, so you don’t have to sit with the fact that I chose him,” I said, and I didn’t flinch saying it. “Not you.”
“You chose wrong.” His voice cracked—not from grief this time, but from something more dangerous, something that sounded almost like faith. “And when you realize it, I’ll still be here. I’m not going anywhere, Truth. I can’t. Somebody has to be the one who actually sees you.”
A chill moved through me that had nothing to do with the climate-controlled air of his glass fortress. Because he wasn’t posturing. He believed it. Every word.
Before I could answer him, a crash sounded from somewhere near the front of the house—glass, or maybe metal, something heavy hitting something else that wasn’t built to take it.
Then shouting. Then, more shouting, layered and overlapping, the kind of noise that only happens when men who are trained to be quiet stop caring about being quiet.
I was up and moving before I even decided to move.
“Truth—wait—” Kaisen struggled to push himself off the couch, his cane clattering against the floor, his face twisting as his body reminded him exactly how unfinished his healing was.
I didn’t wait. I couldn’t. My feet carried me down that sterile hallway faster than I’d walked in weeks, heart slamming against my ribs, the folder with the paternity results still clutched useless in my hand.
I hit the front door and threw it open.
The scene outside didn’t look real for a second—too violent, too fast, lit up in the cold white security lights like some kind of stage.
Kaisen’s men were scattered across the driveway, three of them already down, one crawling toward the gate with blood streaming from his nose.
More security vehicles than I’d ever seen at once were parked at odd angles across the lawn, doors hanging open, engines still running.
And there, cutting through the middle of it like the men swinging at him were nothing but static—
Amai.
He wasn’t even breathing hard. He drove his elbow into one man’s throat and didn’t slow down to watch him drop.
Another came at him from the side, and Amai caught his arm mid-swing, twisted it until I heard the pop from twenty feet away, and shoved him aside like furniture.
Behind him, more of his own men poured through the gate, matching violence for violence, but Amai wasn’t waiting for them to clear a path.
He was making his own.
His eyes found me standing in that doorway, and everything about him sharpened—the rage, the intent, the singular focus that had nothing left in it for anyone else in that yard.
He was coming for me.
He crossed the last few feet like the men still standing didn’t matter, like the whole yard had already emptied itself out for him. Up close, the violence on him was worse—blood on his knuckles that wasn’t his, a tear in his shirt sleeve, and eyes so dark they didn’t look like eyes anymore.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” His voice hit low and hard, vibrating in my chest before it even registered as words.
I lifted my chin. I wasn’t about to shrink just because he was pissed, and I wasn’t backing down regardless. “Trying to have a conversation. Since Kaisen was the one who actually had time for me.”
His jaw flexed. “So, that’s what this is.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“You called me. I told you I was in the middle of something that could end this war, and instead of waiting, you drove straight to my brother’s house.
” His voice climbed, tight and furious. “So, yeah, Truth—that’s exactly what this is.
I couldn’t drop everything the second you snapped your fingers, so you ran to him. ”
“Watch it.” My voice came out sharper than I meant it, but I didn’t care. “I don’t like what you’re implying.”
“If the shoe fits,” he said, low and mean, “put that muthafucka on and lace it up.”
Heat crawled up my neck. I knew what he was doing—turning my hurt into evidence, making this about my loyalty instead of his absence. He always did this. Made me the variable that needed explaining while he stood there covered in somebody else’s blood like that was just a normal part of his day.
“Get your shit,” he said. “We’re leaving.”
“I’m not going anywhere until I’m done talking to Kaisen.”
“You are done.” His eyes cut past me, toward the hallway, toward the man leaning heavy on his cane just out of the light. “Get your shit, Truth. Now.”
Behind me, Kaisen’s voice slid in, quiet and almost gentle, which somehow made it worse.
“I told you.” He didn’t even sound smug about it—just tired, like a man watching a prophecy fulfill itself.
“This is what happens when you color outside his lines, Truth. You feel the frame. The one you don’t see until you touch it.
” He shifted his weight off the cane, wincing.
“You better go. Before he decides the next place to lock you away is somewhere you can’t leave at all. ”
The words landed somewhere deep, somewhere I didn’t want them to. Because, for a second—one ugly, unwanted second—I could see it. The version of my life where Amai’s love came with walls I couldn’t measure until I hit them.
But I also saw Kaisen for exactly what he was in that moment—a man handing me fear like it was truth, hoping I’d mistake it for rescue.
I stood there between the two of them, blood on the grass, sirens threading somewhere far off in the night, and I made myself remember one thing clearly:
Whatever I did next, it was going to be my decision. Not his. Not either of theirs.
“I’m leaving,” I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. “Because I’m done. And I don’t want you doing anything else to him.”
Amai’s head tilted slowly, like he needed a second to make sure he heard me right. “So, you care about how I fuck him up?”
“He’s the father of my son.” I let that sit in the air between us, heavy and undeniable. “Of course I care, Amai.”
“What?” The word came out flat, confused in a way I’d never heard from him. Amai didn’t do confused. Amai did control, calculation, certainty. Not this.
“If you had listened when I called you,” I said, each word deliberate, “you would’ve heard me tell you that you’re the father of our daughter. But you were so fuckin’ busy handling your business that it went in one ear and came right out the other.”
His jaw worked. I watched the information land, watched him actually do the math for the first time since he’d come storming across that yard like a man possessed.
“So, we’re both the fathers.” It wasn’t really a question. It came out low, almost hollow, like the ground had shifted somewhere beneath the words.
“Yes!” I threw my hands up, done with both of them, done with the blood on the grass and the sirens somewhere far off, and the whole exhausting mess of my life. “Both of you. That’s what I came here to tell him before you showed up, acting like a damn animal.”
I looked between them—Kaisen leaning on that cane like it was the only thing holding him upright, Amai still simmering with violence he hadn’t fully let go of—and I felt something crack open in my chest, something that needed to be said whether either of them wanted to hear it.
“This bloodlust you got for him,” I said to Amai, “it has to stop. He’s not going anywhere. He’s the father of my son, Amai. And because of what Winston did to me, I’m carrying both of y’all’s children whether any of us asked for it or not. We have to make the best of this. All of us.”
Amai’s eyes cut to Kaisen. The glare didn’t soften—if anything, it sharpened, something ancient and unresolved passing between them that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with thirty-some years of being brothers in a family that taught them that love was a weakness to exploit.
“We need to leave,” Amai said finally, voice tight, “so we can talk.”
“Whatever.” I turned toward the Mercedes, exhaustion pulling at every part of me.
“You’re riding with me,” he said. “Security will get your car home.”
I didn’t even argue. I didn’t have it in me anymore—not after the doctor’s office, not after Delphine’s, not after watching two grown men try to beat each other bloody over something that was never theirs to fight over in the first place.
“Whatever,” I said again, and I stomped across the grass toward him, done with all of it, done with both of them, moving because I chose to move—not because either of them told me to.
The truck door hadn’t even shut all the way before Amai started.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” His voice was low, controlled in that way that scared me more than yelling ever could. “Coming to his house. Alone. After he showed his ass on your doorstep just the other day.”
“I was thinking I needed to talk to the father of my child.” I clicked my seatbelt like it was the last normal thing I could do with my hands.
“Stop calling him that.”
“That’s what the fuck he is, Amai.” I turned in the seat to face him. “The father of my son. You don’t get to erase that because you don’t like the sound of it.”
His jaw flexed, a muscle jumping under all that pretty brown skin. For a second, I thought he was going to put the truck in reverse and drive us both straight off a bridge, just to end the conversation.