Page 179 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

“She runs the front office like I told you. She’s the one who actually knows where everything is. Victor trusted her because she has too much of her own exposure to risk talking. She knows which manifests are real and which are clean-papered fiction.”

“Cold storage,” I said.

Yaya looked at me.

“He has a facility,” I said. “Or access to one. Something refrigerated, something he can use as a holding point before money clears into accounts. Somewhere the cash physically lives before it disappears into the layers.”

She was quiet for a beat too long.

“There’s an old parish cold-storage facility,” she said finally. “Ostensibly decommissioned. On the West Bank, off the river road. The county records show it as pending demolition, but Victor owns the LLC that manages the property. It’s been pending demolition for eleven years.” Her voice was flat. “He took me there once, when I was sixteen. Said he wanted me to understand how security really worked. That a man with no emergency protocol is a man who believes in luck.” She paused. “He said luck was for people who couldn’t afford to plan.”

“His emergency route.”

She inhaled. “If everything collapses—if he thinks federal agencies or rivals have moved in on the money—he activates a protocol through Corinne. One phrase. She doesn’t ask questions, she sends a message to Trey, and Trey repositions the last shipment manifest for a priority destination. That shipment is the money. It gets routed to the cold storage facility on the West Bank. Victor meets it there personally. He has a vehicle waiting, untraceable, with documentation under a different name. He’s out of Louisiana within four hours. The money follows through a separate channel two days later.”

I sat with that for a moment, the whole architecture of it becoming visible in my mind—the layers of it, the elegance, the vanity. Victor had built a system designed to outlast everyone he’d ever known. He’d included his daughter in that sixteen-year-old tour because he wanted her to admire it. Not because he intended to save her.

Yaya had told me about this before, but this time, she added more detail, which is what I hoped for.

“The fortune,” I said. “How much?”

She met my eyes. “More than you’re expecting.”

“How much more.”

“A hundred million.”

I kept my face neutral, but the number sat inside me for a moment, rearranging things. Rahsaan had the fifty million from the Landry vault, and that was its own war to be settled in time. But what Victor had accumulated separately—what he’d built over thirty years of operating in the margins of other men’s empires—was a different category of money entirely.

“He told you this,” I said.

“He showed me documents when I was twenty. He said he wanted me to know what the family was worth.” She looked at me with that steady, unblinking quality she had. “He was showing me what I stood to lose if I displeased him.”

The room was quiet.

“I’m not choosing you,” she said. “I need to be clear about that. I’m not doing this for you or because I owe you anything. I’m not your informant, and I’m not your weapon.”

“I know.”

“I’m doing this because he made me expendable. And if he can do that to me—” She stopped. “I’m just done protecting him.”

“That’s enough,” I said. “That’s all I need.”

I stood.

“Amai.” Her voice stopped me at the door.

I turned.

“Is Syx alive?”

“Yes.”

“Is he hurt?”

“No.”

She nodded once, quickly, and looked back down at her hands.