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I almost laughed.

Yonas kept going, apparently deciding that if there really was a ghost in the room, the smartest thing to do was challenge the mothafucka.

“You can move shit, make noises, slam doors, write messages, whatever. I’m not leaving. So if that’s what you’re trying to accomplish, you wasting your time.”

Oh, word?

I pushed away from the wall and folded my arms.

When I was alive, I had been a man who believed in making a mothafucka eat his words. Apparently death hadn’t changed that part of me.

We’ll see how brave you are before this night over with.

His phone rang before I could decide how I wanted to respond, and the sound made him flinch just enough for me to catch it.

I grinned.

Don’t scare easily, huh?

Yonas pulled the phone from his pocket and looked at the name on the screen. Whatever he saw wiped the fake courage off his face. His thumb hovered over the answer button for several seconds before he finally accepted the call.

“Yeah?”

His voice had dropped.

That got my attention.

Back when I first died, hearing the person on the other end of a phone call had been impossible unless the call was on speaker or I was close enough to whoever was talking for some of that energy to bleed through.

Things were different now.

Having Lakelyn and Kaidence under my roof had strengthened me enough that certain barriers between me and the living world didn’t hold the way they used to. If somebody was standing inside my house with a phone pressed to their ear, I could hear both sides of the conversation as clearly as if the person on the other end was standing in the room with us.

One more perk of having my family home.

Yonas walked toward the bedroom door, cracked it open, and checked the hallway before closing it again.

Now I was definitely listening.

A man’s voice came through the phone. “You alone?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

Yonas looked toward the door again. “I said yeah, nigga. Everybody downstairs.”

Everybody living, maybe.

I moved closer.

The man sighed. “Then we need to talk because this shit is getting worse.”

Yonas’s jaw tightened. “What happened now?”

“They pulled another set of files. Compliance got copies of the vendor approvals, and somebody finally noticed the same names keep popping up on contracts that should’ve gone through competitive bids.”

Yonas closed his eyes.