AMAI #2
Raven wasn’t performing for anybody. Honor wasn’t calculating what her joke would cost her later. They just existed, loud and unbothered, taking up space in a house that wasn’t theirs like it was the most natural thing in the world—because, with each other, it always would be.
I’d wanted a child. That’s where all of this started, if I was being honest with myself—a want so old and so buried, I’d stopped examining it.
Just a fact of my life; the way some men wanted power or money or a legacy with their name on it.
I’d wanted something of my own that Winston couldn’t touch, couldn’t own, couldn’t turn into another asset in his ledger.
Somewhere between that want and tonight, I’d ended up with a woman I’d put a bullet in my own brother over. And now, apparently, sisters I’d bury a body for without blinking.
That wasn’t nothing. That was everything, and it terrified me more than Victor and Rahsaan combined, because a man who has nothing left to lose is dangerous in a way a man with something to protect never is.
I understood, standing in my own kitchen, listening to four women laugh, that I had become the second kind of man.
And the war outside these walls didn’t care which kind I was.
Saroya asked Truth something about their mother, and Truth answered easy, no hesitation, the two of them falling into a rhythm that told me everything about how that family worked—no gatekeeping, no auditing each other’s loyalty.
Delphine had raised four women who defended each other on instinct, the way you’d pull your hand back from fire.
Nobody in that family had to earn the right to be protected.
You were born into it, and it never left.
I thought about what I’d have given, as a boy, for that kind of certainty. Not the house. Not the money. Just the guarantee that whatever room I walked into, somebody was going to fight for me without doing the math first.
Priest came in through the side door a few minutes later, having circled the property out of habit.
Raven caught him near the wine and started talking to him about something—I couldn’t hear what, only the shape of it, her animated and quick, him quieter, listening in that careful way he had.
They drifted toward the hallway together, still talking, and I watched them go with something between amusement and calculation.
Priest needed a good woman. He’d never say it himself, but I’d known him long enough to see the hollowed-out places where he’d stopped expecting one.
When I’d first run background on Truth, her sisters had come up in the periphery—financials, associations, anything that might connect back to Victor or Rahsaan or anyone else circling as an enemy.
I’d skimmed. Clean. No red flags, no ties to my enemies, and I hadn’t gone looking for more than that, because it wasn’t my business unless it became my business.
If Priest wanted more than a conversation in my hallway, I’d go deeper. Not to punish him. That’s just what I did for the people who mattered to me—made sure the ground under them was solid before they built anything on it.
Truth crossed the kitchen and stopped in front of me, snapping me out of it.
“You went somewhere,” she said.
“Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Come here.” I took her hand and led her out of the noise, down the hall to the formal sitting room I never used, the one with furniture too stiff for real living. I closed the door behind us, just enough to blunt the sound without shutting it out entirely.
“I didn’t think about the kids inheriting your enemies, too,” Truth said, sitting on the arm of the settee instead of in it, like she couldn’t fully commit to being comfortable in that room.
“I was so focused on surviving the pregnancy, the contract, the—everything. I didn’t think about what happens after.
That they’d be born into this. Automatically. Before they even take a breath.”
“I’ve been thinking about it every day.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m working to end it before they’re old enough to understand what it means.
” I sat across from her, close enough that our knees almost touched.
“Victor’s gone underground. Rahsaan too.
Neither of them leaves their property anymore.
They know I’m coming, so they’ve made themselves hard to reach. ”
“So, what happens now?”
“I have a plan to draw them out.”
“What plan?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
Her eyes narrowed, not with confusion but with the particular anger of someone being told no after being honest first. “You just told me you’re working on it every day. You can tell me that much, but not the plan?”
“Because the plan only works if it stays contained. The fewer people who know it, the fewer ways it can leak. And if Victor or Rahsaan ever got a hold of you—if they thought for one second you had something in your head worth extracting—that becomes a weapon against you. Against them.” I nodded toward the door, toward the sound of her sisters still laughing somewhere down the hall.
“I’m not keeping this from you because I don’t trust you.
I’m keeping it from you because I don’t trust what men like that would do to get it out of you. ”
“That’s not fair.”
“No. It’s not. It’s just true.”
She looked at me for a long moment, and I let her be angry, because she’d earned the right to be angry about a lot of things in her life, and I wasn’t going to be the man who told her she didn’t.
“I’m not asking you to believe I’ll tell you everything,” I said. “I’m asking you to believe I’m moving every piece I have toward ending this. That down the hall, right now—your sisters laughing in my kitchen—that’s what I’m fighting to keep. Not the money. Not the power. That.”
Truth was quiet, but something in her face changed, like she was recalculating what kind of trust this actually required.
“Okay,” she said finally. “But when it’s over—all the way over—I want to know everything. Every piece.”
“When it’s over,” I said, “you’ll know all of it.”
I meant it. And for the first time since I’d bought this house, I understood exactly what I was trying to keep it safe for.
Truth shifted on the settee, tucking one leg beneath her, and I felt the conversation change direction before she said a word. She had a way of doing that—going quiet in a specific way that meant she was choosing her next question carefully.
“What about Syx and Yaya?” she asked. “Are they still—”
“Still there,” I said. “Still being held.”
“Have you gotten anything out of her?”
I leaned back, studying her face in the low light. This was the part of my life I usually kept separate, sealed off in a different room of myself, but she’d asked, and I’d told her I wouldn’t lie to her about the shape of things, even when I couldn’t give her the details.
“Not yet,” I said. “But she’s holding something back. I know it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve sat across from enough people telling the truth and enough people managing the truth to know the difference.
She answers fast when she doesn’t care about the answer.
She slows down when it matters. There’s a specific hesitation—right before she talks about her father—like she’s deciding how much of the picture to hand over.
” I turned the memory over again, the way Yaya’s eyes had moved when I’d pushed her on Victor’s routes, his contacts, the machinery underneath Baptiste Logistics.
“She’s got something. A name, a place, a way in.
I don’t know what yet. But it’s there, and she’s protecting it. ”
“Protecting her father.”
“After he left her locked in enemy territory with her accounts frozen and no way out. Yeah.”
Truth’s mouth pressed into a thin line, not quite disagreement, something more complicated than that. “He’s still her father, Amai.”
“He abandoned her.”
“That doesn’t erase twenty-something years of him being the only parent she had left.
” She said it steady, no heat in it, just fact laid down like she was setting something heavy on a table between us.
“You don’t stop loving somebody the second they disappoint you.
If that’s how it worked, half the people in this city would’ve stopped loving their daddies decades ago. ”
I thought about Winston. About the version of him that used to teach me and Kaisen how to throw a punch in the backyard, patient in a way he never was again once we got old enough to be useful to him instead of just his sons.
That man didn’t exist anymore, if he ever had.
But some nights I still caught myself wanting his approval like a boy who hadn’t learned better yet.
“I know it doesn’t work like that,” I said, quieter than I meant to.
“Then don’t act surprised that she’s not just handing her father over because he stopped being convenient for you.”
“I’m not surprised. I’m frustrated. Those are different things.” I met her eyes. “She’s sitting on information that could end this faster. Could keep you safer. And she’s choosing loyalty to a man who threw her away like she was nothing.”
“Or she’s still figuring out how to survive losing him,” Truth said. “Those aren’t the same thing either.”
I didn’t have an answer for that right away. She had a habit of pulling threads I hadn’t examined closely enough, and this was one of them—the difference between what I needed Yaya to do and what it actually cost a person to do it.
“You haven’t met Victor,” I said finally.
“No.”
“You’ve met Winston.”
“Once was enough.”