Page 137 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

He looked up, and the relief that crossed his face when he saw me nearly broke me in half.

“Yaya.” His voice was rough, hoarse, but it was steady in a way that told me he was fighting to sound okay for my sake. “You alright?”

“Am I?” I laughed, and it came out wet, unstable. “You’re asking if I’m okay? Look at you.”

“I’m alive.” He said it simply, like that was the only metric that mattered anymore. “That’s more than I thought I’d get.”

I pressed my forehead against the glass, and for a moment, I just breathed, trying to hold myself together in front of Amai, who stood a few feet behind me, watching everything with that unreadable expression he always wore like armor.

“I called my father,” I said quietly, not looking away from Syx. “I told him where I was. I begged him to do something.”

Syx’s jaw flexed, but he didn’t say anything.

“He said sacrifices happen in war.” My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated it, hated how much it still hurt, even though I’d known—somewhere underneath all the denial—exactly what kind of man my father was. “He wasn’t coming, Syx. He was never coming.”

“I know.” He said it gently, no triumph in it, no cruelty. Just quiet understanding. “I tried to tell you. I wasn’t trying to be right. I just—I knew him. I knew what he was capable of not doing.”

“I should’ve listened.”

“You loved your father. That’s not something to apologize for.” He pressed his own hand against the glass, mirroring mine, and even through the barrier, I swore I could feel the warmth of it. “I just wish it hadn’t cost you this much to see it.”

I closed my eyes, and for a moment, the room around us disappeared—the Sanctum, the cells, the war neither of us had asked for—and it was just us, two people who’d found something real in the middle of everything false.

“He’s important to you,” Amai said from behind me, and I turned to find him watching not me, but Syx, with something almost thoughtful in his expression. “That much is obvious.”

“Yes,” I said without hesitation, because there was no point in lying anymore. “He is.”

“That works in his favor. For now.” Amai’s voice was even, just fact, laid bare the way everything with him always was. “His survival depends on your usefulness. That’s not a threat. It’s just how this works.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” He studied me for a long moment. “Because I need you to understand something else, too. I don’t care about your feelings for him. I don’t care about the history, the affair, any of it. What I care about is whether you’re going to keep giving me something I can use. That’s the only currency that matters here.”

“I know exactly what currency matters,” I said, meeting his eyes. “You’ve made that abundantly clear.”

Something almost like approval flickered across his face before he gestured for me to follow him back toward the interrogation room. I looked at Syx one more time—he nodded, small, steady, a silent promise that he’d still be here, that this wasn’t goodbye—and then I made myself walk away, because staying wouldn’t change anything, and right now, moving forward was the only thing that might.

Back in the interrogation room, Amai didn’t sit this time. He stood at the edge of the table, arms crossed, studying me the way you’d study something you were still deciding the value of.

“Here’s where we are,” he said. “You’re still a prisoner. Nothing about that changes. But you’ve made yourself valuable, and valuable prisoners get treated differently than useless ones.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning you have a choice.” His voice was calm, deliberate. “You keep giving me what you know, you help me take Victor apart piece by piece, and you survive this. Or you decide you’re done cooperating, and you become exactly as disposable as your father already decided you were. Your call.”

I almost laughed at the absurdity of it—being offered a choice by the man who’d locked me in a cell, who’d threatened to kill me not twelve hours ago, who saw me as nothing more than a resource to be extracted and discarded once I ran dry.

“You think I’m choosing you,” I said. “You think this is me picking a side in your war.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No.” I stood, needing to meet him eye to eye, even though he had inches on me, even though he held every piece of leverage in this room. “I’m not choosing the Landrys. I’m not choosing you. I’m choosing Syx. I’m choosing to survive this instead of dying for a man who was never going to lift a finger for me. And I’m choosing to make sure my father pays for deciding my life was worth less than his comfort.”

Something shifted in Amai’s expression—not quite respect, but close enough to it that I recognized the shape.

“Then let’s make him pay,” he said. “What else do you have?”

I hesitated for only a second, weighing what was left, what I still had to give.