Page 139 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

“You want to explain to me,” he said, “why your brother put a bullet in you on a residential street, in the middle of a war, over a woman?”

“Ask him.”

“I’m asking you.” His voice dropped, sharpened. “Because from where I’m sitting, my son just told the entire city he’ll shoot his own blood over a surrogate. That’s not a message about Truth, Kaisen. That’s a message about weakness. His. Yours. Ours. And we don’t need that shit right now.”

I closed my eyes, let the pain settle into something I could breathe around. “You didn’t come here because you’re worried about me.”

“I came here,” Winston said, standing now, moving to the window like the view was more honest than my face, “because you almost died over something that was never yours to fight for.”

“She’s not a thing, Winston. She’s not property you and Amai get to argue custody over.”

He turned back to me, and something in his expression made my skin go cold despite the morphine dulling everything else. “That woman wants Amai. She wanted him before she ever looked twice at you, and she’ll want him after you’re in the ground, trying to prove something to a brother who’s already won.”

“He hasn’t won anything.”

“He shot you in the back, and you’re lying in a hospital bed, talking like you still have a hand to play.” Winston’s voice rose, cracked with something almost desperate underneath the authority. “Leave her alone. Leave the baby—babies, whatever the fuck they end up being—leave all of it alone. Let Amai have what he’s going to take anyway. You’re not built for this kind of war, Kaisen. You never have been.”

The words landed exactly where he meant them to. They always did. Winston had spent thirty years learning precisely which parts of me to press to make me feel small, and even shot open on a hospital bed, that skill hadn’t dulled.

But something in me had shifted since the concrete hole. Since the water. Since I’d screamed myself raw in the dark and come out the other side with nothing left to lose.

“You don’t get to manage this,” I said. “This isn’t a business decision you get to make for me.”

“Everything in this family is a business decision. That’s how we’ve survived this long.”

“Then maybe that’s the problem.” I pushed myself up despite the pain screaming through my side, needing to meet his eyes level instead of looking up at him like a boy waiting for permission. “You spent our whole lives treating us like assets. Like pieces you move around a board to protect the empire. And now you’re standing here trying to tell me who I’m allowed to want, like that’s your call to make too.”

“I’m trying to keep you alive. You haven’t healed from him stabbing your ass, and now you’re lying there because he shot you. Let. This. Shit. Go. Ain’t no good gon’ come from it, Kaisen.”

“You’re trying to keep me controlled. There’s a difference, and you’ve never been able to tell them apart.”

Winston’s face did something complicated—anger, yes, but underneath it, something that almost looked like hurt, quickly buried the way he buried everything soft in himself. “This is between you and your brother. Fine. But I’m not going to stand here and watch him kill you over a woman who’s never going to choose you over him. That’s not love, Kaisen. That’s you refusing to accept you lost.”

“I haven’t lost anything.”

“He shot you.”

“He shot me in a place I could survive.” The realization hit me even as I said it out loud, something shifting into place with a clarity the pain had been keeping just out of reach. “He didn’t kill me, Dad. He could have. You know he could have. That man doesn’t miss.”

“Your point?”

I almost laughed. The movement pulled against the stitches, sending a fresh wave of fire through my side, but I let it happen anyway because it felt too true to swallow.

“My point is, he was careful,” I said. “He wanted me alive. He wanted me scared, sure, humbled, whatever—but alive. And you don’t do that for someone you’ve already beaten. You do that when you’re still worried they might win.”

“That’s not what that was.”

“Isn’t it?” I reached for my phone on the side table, wincing at the stretch, and unlocked it with a thumbprint that trembled more than I wanted it to. Amai’s message was still there, sitting at the top of my notifications like a wound that hadn’t scabbed yet.

Truth is off-limits. I’m sending your sample in with the rest for testing. Don’t make me remind you again.

I read it twice. Three times. And somewhere on the third pass, something cracked loose in my chest and came out as laughter—raw, disbelieving, the kind that hurt worse than the drain tugging at my side but felt too good to stop.

“Kaisen.” Winston’s voice had an edge of alarm in it now, the kind he probably hadn’t heard himself use since Elias and Silas.

“He shot me for a DNA sample he could’ve gotten a hundred easier ways,” I said, still laughing, tears mixing in with it now, whether from pain or something rawer, I couldn’t tell. “You understand what that means?”

“It means he’s efficient.”