TRUTH #4
“Awww, hell nah.” She had the nine out and low against her thigh before I even registered she was carrying one. Her eyes swept the street—left, right, the parked cars, the hedges two houses down, the gap between my house and the neighbor’s fence. “Everybody inside. Now.”
“Raven—”
“Now, Truth.” She didn’t look away from the street as she said it, moving in a slow arc along the edge of the porch, staying low, staying against the wall where the angle gave her some cover instead of standing exposed in the open. “I got this. Go.”
Honor grabbed my arm and pulled me back through the door. Saroya was already inside, phone in hand, but I was faster—I had Amai’s number pulled up before either of them could ask, my thumb hitting the call button while my whole body shook in a way I couldn’t stop.
He answered on the first ring. “Hey—”
“Someone left a package on my porch.” My voice came out steadier than I felt, some part of me detaching from the moment even as I lived it. “There’s a finger in it. And an ear. There’s a note that says anything carrying Landry blood belongs in the war.”
Silence. A beat too long.
“Did anyone touch it?” he asked, his voice already shifting into something urgent.
“No. Saroya opened it but—”
“Good. Get your sisters away from the front windows. Now.”
I relayed the order through the door, calling out to Raven that she needed to come in. Her response came quick. “Coming in,” and I heard her footsteps on the porch, the door closing behind her with a soft click.
“I’m fifteen minutes out,” Amai said. “Lock the door. Stay in the back of the house. I’m calling the detail now.”
The line went dead before I could say anything else.
By the time I got Honor and Saroya moved to the back of the house, away from the front windows, Raven’s face was carved into something hard and unreadable, gun still in her hand, though she’d dropped it to her side.
“Nobody out there,” she said. “No cars I don’t recognize. No footprints, no nothing. Whoever it was, they were gone before you even opened the door.”
“That’s not possible,” Saroya said. “Somebody had to carry that. Somebody had to walk up here, set it down, and knock.”
“I’m just telling you what I saw.” Raven’s jaw was set, her eyes still moving toward the window even from across the room. “Which was nothing.”
Amai arrived in under fifteen minutes, though it felt like an hour.
Three black SUVs pulled up along the curb before he was even out of the first one.
Priest was already moving toward the porch with two men flanking him, all of them scanning the street the way soldiers do, methodical, unhurried, terrifying in how calm they were about it.
Amai didn’t say anything to me at first. He went straight to the two men who’d been posted on my street for the last several weeks, out of sight like I asked. The conversation that followed was low, tense, and absolutely lethal in its restraint.
“Explain to me like I’m a fucking three-year-old,” Amai said, “how somebody walked up to that door, in daylight, and neither of you saw a face.”
“Mr. Landry, we were positioned exactly where you told us. A block back, out of sightline from the house so we wouldn’t spook her or draw attention.
” The taller one—Desmond—kept his hands visible, his posture straight, a man who understood exactly how close he was standing to someone who could and would end his life over something like this.
“That distance created a blind spot on the east side. Whoever it was could’ve come up through the alley behind the Guidrys’ fence and approached from that angle. We wouldn’t have had eyes on it.”
“You wouldn’t have had eyes on it,” Amai repeated.
“No, sir.”
He didn’t raise his voice. That was the part that unsettled me most—he never raised his voice, not once, and somehow that made it worse, made the air around him feel like it was compressing instead of expanding.
“You had one job. One. And a man walked up to my—” he stopped himself, recalibrated, “—to her front door with a body part in a box, and you’re telling me the blind spot did that. ”
Neither man answered. There wasn’t an answer that would have satisfied him.
“We’re restructuring the perimeter,” Amai said finally.
“Tighter radius. Overlapping sightlines. I want eyes on every angle of this property, not half of it.” He turned away from them like the conversation was already over, like their fate was a decision he’d make later, in private, and walked up the steps to where I was standing in the doorway.
He looked at me for a long moment before he said anything. Something in his face had gone past anger into a stillness I hadn’t seen from him before—not calm, exactly, but still in a way that felt like a held breath.
“You can’t stay here,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Not tonight. Not until I know how they got that close.” His voice didn’t rise, but it didn’t bend either. “This isn’t a conversation, Truth.”