Page 140 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

“It means he’s scared.” I looked at my father, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I didn’t feel small in front of him. “A man who’s already won doesn’t need to send a message like that. He shot me because some part of him isn’t sure how this ends.”

“Or,” Winston said slowly, carefully, like he was trying to talk a man off a ledge, “he did it because he’s dangerous, and he doesn’t need a reason beyond I can.”

“Maybe both things are true.” I set the phone down, my hand steadier now than it had been in weeks. “He’s dangerous. He’s terrifying. He might even be right that Truth wants him more than she’ll ever want me. I’m not stupid, Winston. I see the way she looks at him. I’ve seen what they have.”

“Then, why⁠—”

“Because nobody knows anything yet.” The words came out steadier than I felt, but saying them out loud made them feel truer, like speaking a thing into existence. “The results aren’t back. Nobody—not me, not him, not her—knows whose blood is in either one of those babies. And until somebody hands me proof that says otherwise, I’m not walking away from the possibility that they’re mine.”

“And if the results don’t give you what you want?”

“Then I’ll deal with that when it’s real.” I said it like I believed it, like the thought of Amai’s blood being the only blood that mattered wasn’t sitting somewhere in my chest like a stone I refused to look at directly. “But I’m not going to disappear just because you and Amai have already decided how this ends. No bullet Amai puts in me, no marriage he escapes, no contract Winston Landry drafted to keep his sons in line is going to make that decision for me before the truth even gets the chance to.”

Winston stared at me for a long moment, and I watched something shift behind his eyes—not respect, not yet, but the beginning of a recalculation. The moment a man realizes the piece he thought he understood has started moving in directions he didn’t predict.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” he said finally, quieter now.

“Maybe.” I lay back against the pillow, exhaustion pulling at the edges of the high the laughter had given me. “But at least I’ll die fighting for something instead of just existing inside whatever you and Amai decide is left over.”

Winston didn’t answer that. He stood there a moment longer, jaw working like he wanted to say something else, some final threat or warning, but nothing came. He turned instead, walked to the door, and paused with his hand on the frame.

“The bullet didn’t stop you,” he said, not quite a question.

“No,” I said. “It didn’t.”

He left without another word, and I lay there in the sterile quiet of the room, pain pulsing steady and vicious through my side, my father’s warning still hanging in the air like smoke that hadn’t cleared.

But underneath the pain, underneath the fear I wasn’t stupid enough to pretend I didn’t feel, something else had settled into place—something colder, more certain, more dangerous than anything Amai’s bullet had put into me.

I finally had something worth fighting for.

And I wasn’t going to let a bullet, a marriage, or my brother’s obsession take it away from me before I even knew what it was.

The silence he left behind was worse than my father’s voice had been. It gave the thoughts room to move, to stretch out and take shape, and once they started, I couldn’t stop them.

I kept coming back to the moment in the driveway. Truth standing on her porch, her arms crossed, telling me to leave. The way her voice had been steady, sure, like she’d rehearsed the words a hundred times before saying them to my face. I’d told myself that was anger. Betrayal talking. But lying here now, replaying it frame by frame, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something about her certainty had been too clean. Too smooth. Like a script she’d been handed rather than a truth she’d arrived at on her own.

That was the thing about Amai. He didn’t force people into cages with bars—he built the kind of cage you’d never think to check the locks on. Soft sheets. Warm food. A man who showed up bleeding and violent and then held you like you were the only fragile thing left in the world. That wasn’t devotion. That was architecture. He’d built her a home with his hands still slick from what he’d done to me, and she’d walked right into it and called it safety.

I closed my eyes and saw her face from the day at the fertility clinic, the horror bleeding into fury, the way she’d looked at both of us like we were equally guilty. That had been real. That had been her, unfiltered, unmanaged. But somewhere between that day and now, something had changed, and it wasn’t because she’d healed. It was because Amai had gotten to her before the wound could scar clean. He’d stitched himself into every open place before she’d had the chance to close on her own.

That’s what he did. He found what was broken and made himself the only person capable of fixing it.

I thought about her defending him after the shooting. He shot me in a place I could survive, I’d told myself with something like pride, like it meant Amai feared losing. But now, turning it over again, I saw it differently. She’d forgiven a man for putting a bullet in his own brother outside her house. She’d let him back inside afterward. That wasn’t love. That was conditioning. Somewhere along the way, Amai had taught her that his violence was proof of devotion instead of the warning sign it actually was, and she’d absorbed the lesson so completely she didn’t even recognize she’d learned it.

He’d sold her that. A dream stitched together out of exactly the things a woman broken by a bad marriage and a worse ex-husband would want most: safety, structure, a family that looked whole even if it was built on rot underneath.

And she’d bought it. Because how could she not? He’d made himself the only version of safety she had access to. He’d isolated her slowly, surrounded her with his men, his money, his name attached to hers in every legal document that mattered, until there was no room left for her to imagine a life outside of him. That wasn’t a relationship. That was a hostage situation dressed up in Egyptian cotton sheets and sonogram photos. And I had to tear all that shit down. It was all a lie.

I laughed a little, dry and humorless, and the stitches in my side protested.

She thought she chose him.

That was the part that ate at me the most—not that she wanted him, but that she believed the wanting was hers. That she’d stood on her porch and told me she was in control, that she’d built her own house, her own rules, her own independence, when the truth was, she’d never once stepped outside the perimeter Amai had drawn around her life. Every choice she thought was hers had his fingerprints on it somewhere. The house on Mimosa Ct he’d surveilled without her knowledge.

He’d given her the illusion of a cage door left open, knowing she’d never test how far she could actually walk before the leash snapped taut.

And she called that love.