Chapter Six: What the Car Left Behind

"Don't look at it," I told Chidinma, which was the single most useless instruction I had ever given anyone, because we were both already staring at it through the gap in the curtain.

"It's not moving." Her voice had lost every trace of the girl who'd climbed through a window twenty minutes ago for gist and suya. "Amara, it's not even pretending to be a normal parked car. Normal cars don't sit outside a gate with their engine running and their lights off."

I called Kelechi before I'd fully decided to. He picked up on the first ring, which told me he hadn't been asleep either.

"There's a car outside my house." I kept my voice flat, the way you do when you're trying to convince your own body you're calm. "Black. Lights off. It's been there since before Chidinma noticed it."

Silence on the line, and then, very quietly, "Do not go outside. I'm coming."

"You don't need to—"

"Amara." My name, said like a full stop. "I'm already in the car."

He arrived in eleven minutes, which I know because I counted every one of them standing in the dark sitting room with Aunty Ngozi gripping a rosary in one hand and, inexplicably, a frying pan in the other, muttering prayers that shifted seamlessly into threats against anyone who thought they could disturb her household at midnight.

The mystery car peeled away from the curb the second Kelechi's headlights turned onto the street, fast enough that it clipped the edge of our neighbor's gutter and didn't slow down to check. His driver gave chase for exactly two streets before Kelechi, standing now at our gate in a jacket thrown on over what were unmistakably pajama trousers, called it off.

"Let them go. We won't catch them and I'd rather have you safe than have a license plate." He turned to me properly then, and something in his face when he actually looked at me — really looked, taking in that I was standing there in one piece — cracked open for just a second before he visibly reset it. "Are you hurt?"

"No. Just—" I hadn't realized my hands were shaking until I tried to hold them still. "Just scared."

He crossed the distance between us without seeming to decide to, and his hand came to rest on my shoulder, steady in a way that made the shaking worse before it made it better, and for one long, stupid moment neither of us said anything at all. His thumb moved once, barely, against my collarbone — an accident, maybe, or not quite one — and I became suddenly, acutely aware of exactly how close he was standing, close enough that I could see the pajama trousers weren't the only evidence he'd left his house in a hurry, could see the actual fear that had been under the composed businessman voice on the phone.

"I should—" He stepped back first, clearing his throat, straightening a jacket that didn't need straightening. "I should check the perimeter."

"Right. Yes. Good idea." I crossed my own arms over the place his hand had just been, entirely too aware of it, and firmly decided this was adrenaline and nothing else, a decision I did not, even privately, fully believe.

Behind us, Aunty Ngozi lowered the frying pan an inch and studied us both with the specific, dangerous interest of a woman who had raised four daughters and recognized a moment when she saw one. She said nothing. She didn't need to. Her eyebrows said everything her mouth was choosing, for once, to leave alone.

His driver found it twenty minutes later, wedged under the loose gutter grating where the fleeing car had clipped it — not evidence of who they were, but something worse. A photograph. Recent. Me, leaving the market three days ago, taken from a distance with a long lens, my face circled in red marker like a name on a list.

Kelechi went very still looking at it.

"They're not watching the house," he said quietly. "They're watching you specifically. This isn't about proving a contract exists anymore."

"Then what is it about?"

"I don't know yet. But I know we don't find out faster by chasing two separate trails." He held the photograph out, not quite steady, and something in the gesture felt like more than evidence changing hands. "Your Okonji lead. My driver in Warri. We go after both, together, starting tomorrow."

"I thought we agreed we weren't doing this together."

"We agreed to a lot of things three hours ago, Amara, before somebody put your face on a target." His jaw tightened. "I'm willing to be wrong about most things. I am not willing to be wrong about this."

I looked down at the photograph again — at my own face, circled, watched, filed away by someone who had decided I mattered enough to track — and felt the last of my resistance to the word *partners* go quiet, even if neither of us said it out loud.

Aunty Ngozi, still holding her frying pan, finally broke her silence.

"Both of you should sit down," she announced, "before one of you faints. I'll make tea. Nobody investigates anything sensibly on an empty stomach."

Kelechi almost laughed. I almost

let him see that I noticed.

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FOLLOW UP FOR CHAPTER SEVEN