AMAI #3
Victor’s expression didn’t change. That was the thing about men like him. They had spent so long treating their worst acts as logistics problems that the moral weight of them had stopped registering as weight at all.
“I didn’t know about that before I started working with him.”
“Bullshit. You treated people like cargo your whole life,” I said. “Your daughter. My brothers. Everyone who trusted you.” I stepped back. “So that’s how this ends.”
I gave the signal.
My men moved. Victor understood what was happening, and he was fast—faster than I’d expected for a man his age—but the building was sealed, and there were four of us and one of him. The gap between those numbers closed the way it always did, with the blunt finality of arithmetic.
The shipping container at the back of the facility was Baptiste Logistics stock—Victor’s own company name stenciled along the side in white letters, a detail that had cost me nothing because it was already there.
It was temperature-controlled, manifested under a priority routing code that would route it, according to Corinne’s activated protocol, to a destination that no longer had a receiving party.
We put Victor inside it.
I don’t need to say more than that. What I’ll say is this.
The cold was even, and the darkness was complete, and the last thing Victor Baptiste heard before the container sealed and the refrigeration system engaged was a recording—clear audio, Yahmaria’s voice from the Sanctum, saying the things she’d said to me in that room.
The things she’d said about being raised to understand what she was worth.
About being shown the emergency exit at sixteen, so she’d know what she stood to lose.
The recording was sixty seconds long.
Then, it was quiet.
And the container was loaded onto the truck that Trey’s replacement driver had been waiting to move for the last three hours, manifested as a priority medical-cold-chain delivery to a processing facility in Terrebonne Parish that Baptiste Logistics had used for years, that Victor had personally established, that existed inside his own system the way every part of his life had—efficient, sealed, and designed to make sure nothing left a trace.
He had built a machine for making things disappear.
I let the machine do what it was made for.
I got back to the Sanctum at five in the morning.
The building had its own particular silence at that hour—not peaceful, just suspended, like a held breath.
I walked down the long corridor past the observation rooms and stopped outside the two cells at the end where Syx and Yahmaria had been for the past several weeks.
I left instructions to bring Syx back next to her after she gave me the information I needed.
Syx was awake. He was always awake when I came at unusual hours, as if some frequency in him registered my approach the way an animal registered weather. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the clear wall, knees drawn up, looking at nothing. When he heard the door, he looked up.
I unlocked the cell. He didn’t move immediately.
“It’s done,” I said.
He read my face the way he’d learned to read things—quickly, completely, without asking for confirmation he could already see. His jaw worked once. He looked at the floor. “Yaya’s dad.”
“Yes.”
He was quiet for a long moment. “She know?”
“Not yet. I’m going to tell her now.”
He stood up slowly. He was twenty years old and had spent the last month imprisoned in a facility that most men twice his age had never had to see the inside of, and he stood up the way he did everything—without self-pity, without theater.
Just straightened up and became whatever he needed to be next.
I left him in the doorway and walked to Yahmaria’s cell.
She was lying on the platform, asleep, curled into a ball. She turned her head when I opened the door and looked at me for a moment without speaking, reading the same thing Syx had read.
“It’s over,” she said. Not a question.
“Yes.”
She turned to the ceiling. Her chest rose and fell once, slowly.
Whatever she was doing in that moment, I didn’t intrude on it.
There are kinds of grief that look like nothing from the outside and contain everything on the inside, and I knew better than to mistake stillness for the absence of feeling.
After a moment, she sat up. “What happens to us now?”
“You leave,” I said. “Both of you. Tonight.”
She looked at me.
“I told you if you gave me what I needed, I’d let you go. I keep my word.” I stepped back from the doorway. “Get up. Come with me.”
The room I brought Syx and Yahmaria to was plain and lit cleanly—a table, chairs, a duffle bag on the floor that I’d had packed before I left for the West Bank.
Syx’s hand was at the small of Yaya’s back, the two of them moving with the careful coordination of people who had learned each other’s rhythms in a confined space.
Syx looked at the duffle on the floor and then looked at me.
“That’s yours,” I said. “Cash. Enough to move on, establish somewhere. Not New York or Chicago—those are too visible for what you need right now. Somewhere you can disappear comfortably.”
He didn’t pick it up yet. He kept his eyes on me.
I reached into my jacket and removed a folded envelope.
“That’s the access information for your trust. The one Winston set up when you were seven, and I managed the investment side since you were fifteen.
” I set it on the table. “There’s enough in it that so neither of you will have to work in any sense that would concern you for a long time.
The portfolio is—” I paused. “It’s not a small number, Syx. ”
He picked up the envelope. Opened it. Read the number. His eyebrows shot up.
“I’m going to tell you something,” I said, “and I need you to hear it without arguing.”
He looked at me.
“She has a pattern,” I said, meaning Yahmaria, not looking at her.
“She’s not a bad person. I’m not saying that.
But she has a way of moving through the world that costs other people more than it costs her, and she’s good enough at reading people to know exactly where the leverage is.
” I paused. “You’re twenty years old, and you’re in love with her, and you’ve been through something that would break most men your age.
That combination makes you vulnerable in a specific way.
” I finally looked at Yahmaria. “I’m not trying to disrespect you.
I’m trying to protect him the one way I actually can. ”
Yahmaria met my eyes without flinching. She’d always been good at that. “You’re warning him about me.”
“I’m warning him to use his eyes. That’s all.
” I stood. “I can’t protect him from himself.
That’s not something I know how to do, and if I tried, it would just be another form of what I’m releasing him from.
So, I’m putting it down here, in front of both of you, and whatever happens after you leave this building belongs to the two of you. ”
Syx was quiet for a moment. Then, he said, “You’re not as cold as you want people to think.”
“I wouldn’t push on that.”
“I’m not pushing. I’m just saying.”
I picked up the duffle and set it on the table beside the envelope. “New Orleans is done for both of you. That’s not a request. Victor’s network is going to be in cleanup mode for the next several months, and your names are connected to him. You need to not be here.”
“We won’t be,” Syx said. He glanced at Yahmaria—a quick, private look that she returned in a way that told me everything about how far gone he already was. “We’ve been talking about where to go. We know where we’re headed.”
“Then go.” I moved toward the door. “Don’t call me unless someone is dying.”
“Amai.” Syx’s voice stopped me.
I turned.
He was standing with one hand on the duffle and the other in his pocket, twenty years old in a room in a facility no one was supposed to know existed, and he looked at me with the directness that had always been the best thing about him—no performance, no angle, just Syx.
“Ain’t nothing left for me here anyway,” he said. “Everybody worth staying for is either dead or leaving.” He paused. “The city’s just memories of death and ghosts.”
I held his gaze for a moment.
“Take care of yourself,” I said.
Then, I walked out of the Sanctum for what I intended to be the last time in a considerable while, and I drove north through the pre-dawn dark of the West Bank, across the bridge, back into New Orleans proper, and pointed the car toward the Garden District.
Truth was awake when I got home.
She was in the kitchen, which I’d known she would be—she woke early most mornings now, something about the second trimester and the way her sleep had shifted, and she’d taken to sitting at the kitchen island with her coursework and a mug of the tea Mama’s housekeeper had brought over.
The kitchen light was on, and the rest of the house was dark.
She was bent over her laptop with her reading glasses on—the ones she refused to acknowledge that she wore.
She looked up when she heard me come through.
She read my face.
That was the thing about Truth that I had stopped being surprised by.
She read everything. She’d been doing it her whole life, navigating rooms and men and situations that required her to know, quickly, the difference between fine and not fine.
She looked at me now across the kitchen island, put down her pen, took off her glasses, and just looked at me.
“Come sit down,” she said.
I sat across from her.
She waited.
“It’s done,” I said.