Page 178 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

The Sanctum was never warm. That was by design—the temperature kept low enough that the body stayed alert whether it wanted to or not, the mind unable to soften into comfort or sleep. I’d built it that way deliberately, ten years ago, in collaboration with a contractor who had since relocated his family to Costa Rica on a generous, non-negotiable severance. The place existed outside of weather, outside of season. Whatever was happening in New Orleans above it—the heat and the Spanish moss and the second lines and the August storms—none of it reached this place. This place was its own country, with its own rules and no appeals process.

I stood outside Yahmaria’s cell for a moment before entering.

A week had passed since the jewelry store. Since Truth leaning against my shoulder in the dark, the second line fading outside. Since I’d closed the laptop on the ring I’d spent three months designing and felt something in my chest settle into a groove it had been looking for.

A week of ordinary mornings and borrowed peace while this other thing waited for me here.

I looked at her through the observation glass.

Yaya was sitting on the edge of the low platform they called a bed, her hands folded in her lap with the precise stillness of someone who had spent a long time learning to control the only thing left to them. She was thinner than she’d been when this started. The outfit I gifted for her signing the divorce papers had been replaced with clean clothes Syx had requested—gray sweatpants, a white shirt.

I opened the door.

She looked up at me, and I watched the instinctive calculation move through her expression—threat assessment, posture reading, escape mapping—before she pressed it all back down. She’d always been quick. That was the thing about Yahmaria Baptiste that her father had never properly used. She was the smartest person in the room and had spent her whole life being treated like furniture.

“Is it Thursday or Friday?” she said.

“Friday.”

She nodded like this confirmed something. “I’ve been losing days.”

“That happens here.” I pulled a chair to the center of the room and sat across from her, no desk between us, no equipment. Just conversation. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

“I know.” She looked at me without flinching. “You haven’t yet.”

“I need information about your father. The same information I’ve been asking about.”

“And I’ve been telling you I don’t have what you need.”

“You’ve been telling me you don’t want to give me what I need,” I said. “Those are different things.”

She was quiet for a moment. Outside the cell wall, somewhere deeper in the facility, I could hear the low mechanical sound of the ventilation system—the only evidence that air moved in this place.

“I still can’t believe what he said.” Her jaw tightened, and she looked down at her folded hands. “He said sacrifices are necessary during war. That was the whole conversation. He didn’t try to negotiate. He didn’t ask how I was. He just told me what I was and hung up.” She looked up. “You knew he’d do that.”

“I suspected.”

“Is that why you let me call him? So, I’d stop protecting him?”

“I let you call him, so you’d know the truth about where you stood.” I watched her face. “You already knew, Yaya. You’ve known for years. You just needed to hear him say it out loud.”

She didn’t answer that. There was nothing to answer.

“The money,” I said. “His money. Not the vault money—I know that’s gone. Rahsaan took it from him before either of us could touch it. I mean Victor’s money. His private fortune. The one that predates any arrangement with us.”

She exhaled slowly through her nose. “He kept it completely separate from anything Landry-connected. Always has. Said he learned from the best—” A short, humorless sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “He meant your father. Said Winston’s one mistake was keeping too much in one place.”

“Where does it move?”

She was quiet for a long moment. I waited.

“Baptiste Logistics,” she finally said. “The Metairie office on Veterans Boulevard, the one listed as a regional distribution management company. That’s the shell. Everything that looks like legitimate freight revenue is actually layered cash movement. The company files clean taxes, has real clients, real invoices. Victor makes sure of that. But the drivers—the ones Trey manages, not the regular fleet—those drivers are moving something else inside manifests marked as medical waste or disaster-relief supply chains.”

“Where does Trey sit in this?”

“He runs the off-book drivers. He’s been with Victor twenty-two years. Completely loyal.” She paused. “Was. I don’t know anymore. I don’t know how much of what I knew is still standing.”

“What about that Corrine lady you mentioned?”