(Teaser Chapters) The Gunman's Wife... 🔫 - Jahlani Reign

🔫 Love harder. Bleed louder. She chose the gunman....

Chapter One: Blood and Bleach

The first time Rose had to wash his blood out of a shirt, she cried the entire time. Not because it was the first time she had seen blood, or even that it was someone else’s. But because she knew she would do it again.

And again.

And again.

The fabric was stiff with dried sweat, the collar still warm like it held the ghost of his neck. She scrubbed it in silence, her eyes burning as the water turned a cloudy red. That’s when the baby started crying. Again.

“Mek mi jus finish wash this, nuh?” she whispered into the zinc sink, her voice cracking. “Please, Kai... mi beg yuh.”

But the baby didn’t care about blood or guilt. The baby wanted milk.

She rinsed the shirt with one hand, unlatched her blouse with the other, and tried to soothe her son while her own chest ached with questions. Was he alive right now? Was he already killing again? Had someone’s mother started crying too?

Outside, the sounds of the ghetto rolled in through the slatted window. Babies wailing, dogs barking, cussin in the street, and a pan chicken man shouting "hot sauce free!" in the distance. This was not the life she was raised for.

Rose Pembroke had grown up in Cherry Gardens, where girls wore lace socks to church and the help brought cold drinks on silver trays. Where shame was something you wore like silk, quiet and invisible. Now, shame sat heavy in her front room, on plastic-covered furniture beside a baby cot and a 14-inch black-and-white television that only worked when you hit it.

She lived in a two-room board house in August Town, with zinc roofing that rattled like judgment whenever it rained. Devon had told her to leave him after she got pregnant. Not the first time, but the second.

“You don’t belong here, Rose,” he had said that night, knuckles bruised, his eyes full of something that wasn’t quite regret.

But where else was she going to go? Back to her father, who hadn’t spoken to her since she left university? To her mother, who thought heartbreak was something only poor people had time for? No. Here she stayed.

Because she loved Devon.

Because she feared him.

Because she needed him.

Because raising two boys alone in 1988, in a ghetto run by politics and powder and petty war, was not a life she could survive without a man like him. Especially not that man.

He was a killer, yes. But he was her killer. Her protector. Her nightmare. Her home.

The knock came at the back door. Three short, two long. She knew that pattern. It wasn’t a neighbour. It wasn’t police.

It was him.

Rose didn’t move right away. She stared at the wet shirt still floating in the basin, the water tinged pink. Her heart thudded against her ribs like it wanted to run. She tucked her breast back into her blouse, wiped her hand on a dishrag, and walked to the door without saying a word.

When she opened it, Devon stepped inside like a shadow. No greeting. No smile. Just heat and tension and the scent of gun oil and rum trailing behind him.

His white mesh marina was torn. There was blood on his jeans. Not a lot this time, but fresh. Bright. Still warm.

He dropped a brown paper bag on the counter.

"Bully beef, hard dough, likkle tin a condensed milk fi the baby,” he muttered, like he was reporting to someone.

Rose blinked.

“Is it yours?” she asked, voice low.

Devon looked at her, eyes hard. “Yuh asking questions mi nuh have answers for tonight.”

Rose opened the bag. Bread. Corned beef. Baby milk. She didn’t know what felt heavier, the guilt, the gratitude, or the fear.

Kai whimpered in the corner crib. Rose turned to tend to him, but Devon was already moving. He lifted the boy gently, kissed his forehead, and cradled him like something breakable.

“Mi soon done, yuh hear?” he whispered to the baby. “Mi a do dis so yuh never have to.”

Rose watched them, her throat thick. She didn’t cry anymore. Not in front of him.

She waited until he handed the baby to her, she lay him back in the crib then pulled Devon into the kitchen. She rinsed a fresh cloth and started wiping the blood from his knuckles. It wasn’t until she touched his skin that she smelled it properly the copper, the sweat, the smoke. Gunpowder clung to him like a second skin.

“Who was it?” she asked softly.

Devon looked away. “Don’t ask me dat, Rose. Jus clean mi hand.”

“I’m tired of cleaning your sins, Devon.”

“An mi tired of killin,” he snapped, his voice suddenly sharp. “But wi both doin what wi have to.”

Silence swallowed the kitchen.

A dog barked outside. Somewhere in the distance, a burst of gunfire cracked the air.

Rose flinched. Devon didn’t move.

“Dem come back through Tavern earlier,” he said. “Mi couldn’t wait. Had to deal wid it.”

She dropped the cloth. “You coulda died.”

“Mi always coulda die. That’s life now.”

Rose turned away from him. Her chest tightened. She wanted to scream. Throw the basin. Burn every bloodstained shirt. But she didn’t.

Because she loved him.

Because she feared him.

Because she needed him.

Devon stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her from behind. His breath brushed her neck. She felt the weight of his guilt and violence pressing into her back like the loaded gun in his waistband.

“You hate mi?” he asked.

Rose closed her eyes.

“No,” she whispered. “I wish I did.”

Chapter Two - Cherry Gardens Can’t Hold Me

Back then, Rose Pembroke didn’t know anything about powder, stray bullets, or what it meant to see a man killed in front of you and keep walking like nothing happened.

She was nineteen, bored stiff, and used to being told what to do.

Her father’s estate in Cherry Gardens was pristine, all ivory walls, cold wine, and quiet judgment. The kind of place where silence was currency and feelings were things you left folded in a drawer beside your pearls. Her mother didn’t cry. Her father didn’t yell. Everything was neat, orderly, and strangling.

Then she met Devon.

He was twenty-two, lean, sharp-eyed, and deadly without trying. He used to sweep the yard next door. Not their yard, of course. The old lawyer next door had a cousin in politics and brought in “one of the boys from the community” to help around the place. That’s how he was described. “One of them.” Devon.

Rose first saw him through the window, shirtless, sweating, and laughing with someone outside the gate. There was something about him. The way his body moved. The way his smile had no right being that bold with no money in his pocket.

She was drawn like a moth to bloodstained fire.

He saw her too. And he wasn’t afraid.

“You always stare so hard?” he called out one day, wiping sweat from his forehead.

She nearly dropped the curtain.

From that day on, she found excuses to walk outside.

Devon never had money. Not really. He would show up in the same creased jeans and dusty Clarks, but he moved like a man who owned the earth. He came from one of the most violent corners of the city, a place even downtown drivers avoided when rerouted.

Both his parents were shot dead in their own yard during the election war of '79. He was six. Grew up with cousins who were gunmen by fourteen and dead by twenty. Devon was smart enough to read, fast enough to run, and cold enough to survive.

He didn’t tell Rose any of that in the beginning.

He just asked her what her favourite book was. She told him “Pride and Prejudice.” He said, “Dat sound boring,” and she laughed so hard she thought she might never stop.

She started bringing him sandwiches. Books. A towel one day when it was especially hot.

Her parents noticed. Her mother warned her once.

Her father didn’t say a word.

So she started sneaking out.

It happened behind the old stables, on the edge of the Pembroke property. His mouth tasted like rum and smoke. His hands were calloused. His breath smelled like danger. She had never felt more alive.

He never brought condoms.

She never asked him to.

She got pregnant three months later.

She told Devon in the dark, under a streetlight near Half-Way Tree where no one would see them. He stood quiet for a long time, then whispered, “Mi can’t give yuh nutten but mi name, Rose.”

But he didn’t leave.

She never told her parents.

She packed two bags, took what money she could, and followed him down the hill into a life she never planned for. A life soaked in danger. And love. And blood.

Chapter Three - The First Night

The first thing that hit her wasn’t the heat.

It was the smell.

A mix of frying fish, burning plastic, baby pee, raw sewage, and cheap weed. It clung to the air like a curse. Thick. Unrelenting. A far cry from the eucalyptus oil her mother used to dot on pillowcases in Cherry Gardens.

Devon led her through a narrow pathway between zinc fences, past two mangy dogs and a woman plaiting her daughter’s hair under a crooked lamplight. Children ran barefoot through the dirt, chasing a flat football. Someone was shouting Bible verses two doors down. Bass-heavy dancehall thumped in the distance. Somewhere, a woman was crying.

Rose clutched her small suitcase and tried not to cry too.

“This it,” Devon said, pointing at a two-room board house with faded blue paint and a busted veranda railing. “Mi granny used to live here before she pass. Its not much, but a fi wi place now.”

She stepped inside.

The floorboards creaked with every movement. The walls were paper thin. There was one bed. One window. One broken fan spinning with the sound of a dying goat.

In the corner was a plastic basin, a cracked mirror, and a cardboard box holding a single pot, two plates, and a rusted spoon. A piece of curtain hung over the doorway to the second room. Devon called it “the kitchen,” but really it was just a hot box with a coal stove, an old kettle, and a lean-to cupboard full of dry goods.

The toilet was outside. Behind the house. Shared by four other families in the yard.

That part made her stomach turn.

She stood in the middle of the room and took it all in. Her back ached. Her feet were swollen. She was almost four months pregnant and suddenly unsure how she would survive one night in this place, let alone the rest of her life.

“You alright?” Devon asked, placing her bag down near the bed.

She nodded.

But she wasn’t.

She was tired. Angry. Scared. And ashamed of how shocked she felt.

She had read books. She had watched the news. But nothing prepared her for the way poverty smelled. The way it pressed against your skin. The way it swallowed sound and pride.

Devon pulled off his shirt and hung it on a nail in the wall.

“You hungry?”

“No,” she lied.

Truth was, she hadn’t eaten since that morning. But the lump in her throat was bigger than her appetite.

She sat on the bed and felt the spring bite into her thighs. Her legs shook. The baby shifted, and a dull cramp twisted in her side.

Devon came over and rubbed her back. Gently. Like he knew she was breaking but also knew he couldn’t fix it.

“I know it rough,” he said. “Mi know yuh nuh used to this. But mi wi try. Mi wi make it better. Just gi mi some time.”

She nodded again.

Outside, a gunshot rang out. One clean, crisp pop. Then shouting. Then silence

Rose didn’t flinch.

That scared her the most.

How quickly she was already going numb.

Chapter Four - Bread or Blood

The fridge made a soft humming sound, but there was nothing inside it. Just a half-empty jug of water, two limp limes, and a spoon of peanut butter Rose had been saving to rub on crackers they didn’t have.

She stood in front of the open door, hand on her swollen belly, sweat running down the back of her neck. The heat was different now. Not just outside, but inside her skin. Inside her patience. It made her chest tight and her vision blur.

The baby kicked.

“Mi know, baby,” she whispered. “Mi a try.”

Devon hadn’t been home in two days. No call. No message. He’d been coming and going like a man with too much to think about and not enough answers.

The rent was due. The shop had cut their credit. And Miss Pearline from next door had already whispered twice that it was time Rose "tek up herself and go back up di hill where she come from."

She hadn’t cried in weeks. But today her eyes burned.

At exactly ten past eleven, Devon walked through the door. Shirtless. Ash on his hands. Smelling of rum, smoke, and anger.

Before she could speak, he said it.

“Mi gone check Cousin Clive.”

Rose stared. Her mouth stayed closed, but everything else inside her screamed.

“No,” she said finally. “Devon, please. Not him.”

“Mi tired, Rose,” he snapped. “Mi tired a feel like less than. Yuh belly big, wi nuh have nutten inna di house, mi cyaan even buy a box a cornflakes fi yuh. Every man inna dis yard a watch mi like mi soft.”

“Yuh nuh soft,” she said. “Yuh just not wicked. Not like them.”

Devon sat on the edge of the bed, rubbed his face hard, then looked at her. “Clive tell mi fi link him dis evening. Him say mi have a way wid people. Say him can use mi.”

“Use yuh fi what?” she asked, even though she already knew.

He didn’t answer.

Because there was no good way to say it.

Cousin Clive ran August Town like a king without a crown. Guns, favours, votes, bodies, all of it moved through his hands. The police knew him. The pastors greeted him. The MP feared him. He was the kind of man that handed out schoolbags in September and coffins by Christmas.

Devon had avoided him for years. Proud. Determined. But pride didn’t put food on the table.

Rose walked over and touched Devon’s shoulder.

“Yuh sure this is the only way?”

Devon didn’t move. “Wi cyaan eat morals.”

She sat beside him, slow and heavy. Her belly pressed against his arm.

“I will stay beside yuh,” she said. “No matter what. But if mi see one bloodstain come through dis door...”

He nodded once. Silent.

And just like that, he was gone again.

She sat in the heat, alone, her hands cradling her belly. The baby shifted. She whispered to it, voice hoarse.

“Yuh father out there, making a deal with the devil to bring yuh a diaper. And mi nah stop him.”

Outside, the sound of a bike revved, loud and sharp.

Something had shifted in the air.

And she knew, deep in her bones, Devon wasn’t coming back the same.