Page 130 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

Unavoidable.

Rahsaan had become a liability.

His arrogance, his recklessness, his need to prove himself—it was going to get us both killed.

And if it came down to it, if I had to choose between my survival and his⁠—

I knew exactly what I’d do.

I always had.

I left Rahsaan’s mansion with the taste of his bourbon still bitter on my tongue and drove straight to Delacroix’s.

The lounge sat unassuming on a corner in the Warehouse District, no sign out front, just a brass plate on the door that read DELACROIX’S — MEMBERS ONLY. From the outside, a stranger might mistake it for another shuttered storefront in a city full of them. That was the point. Delacroix’s wasn’t for strangers.

The valet took my keys without a word, and I walked through the unmarked door into a world that operated by different laws than the rest of New Orleans.

Two men flanked the entrance, dressed in tailored black, earpieces barely visible. They didn’t pat me down—that would have been an insult—but their eyes catalogued everything about me in the three seconds it took to walk past them. Cameras tracked from angles I couldn’t see. Somewhere in this building, men were watching every table, every hand, every whispered word.

I nodded to the hostess and made my way to my usual leather chair in the back corner, beneath a portrait of some Creole aristocrat who’d been dead for a century.

A server appeared before I’d even settled. “The usual, Mr. Baptiste?”

“Please.”

She returned moments later with a Padron 1926 and a rocks glass of Pappy Van Winkle, neat. I clipped the cigar with the same care I gave everything—precise, deliberate—and let the flame catch before drawing that first pull deep into my lungs.

For the first time since the warehouse, I exhaled slowly and felt something close to peace.

Delacroix’s was the only place in this city where a man could exhale.

Everyone who mattered in New Orleans came through these doors eventually—judges, cartel men, politicians, killers with soft hands and expensive suits. Old money sat two tables from new blood, and nobody so much as raised their voice. The rule was simple, ironclad, absolute: no violence. No threats. Not a raised fist, not a bared blade, not so much as a hard shove.

Reginald Delacroix had built this place on that single promise thirty years ago, and he’d enforced it with a ruthlessness that made men twice his size flinch when he entered a room. Rumor had it Delacroix’s own blood ran through the Black Flame Mafia—cousins, maybe, or something deeper. Nobody asked. Nobody wanted to know badly enough to test the answer.

Because the Black Flame didn’t posture. They didn’t warn. They simply erased.

If Amai Landry was a storm, the Black Flame was the ocean that made storms.

So, even men who wanted each other dead sat within arm’s reach here, sipping bourbon, discussing business, pretending civility—because the alternative was a war none of them could survive.

I was three inches into my cigar, savoring the slow burn of tobacco and cedar, when the temperature in the room shifted.

I felt him before I saw him.

Winston Landry walked through the entrance like he owned the building, his cane tapping once against the marble floor, his eyes already locked on me from across the room. The guards at the door straightened, recognizing him, recognizing the danger radiating off him—but they didn’t stop him. He was a member. He had every right to be here.

He limped toward my table, lowered himself into the chair across from me without invitation, and stared at me with a hatred so pure it should have set the tablecloth on fire.

“Victor.”

“Winston.” I took another pull from my cigar, exhaled slowly, let the smoke curl between us. “You look like shit.”

“I got shot because of you.”

“You got shot because you brought a war to my doorstep.”

His eyes shot me a venomous look. His hand—I noticed—rested near his jacket, close to where a weapon would sit. But he didn’t move. Couldn’t. Not here.