Page 181 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

“Victor Baptiste.”

He straightened. Still composing himself, even now. “Your father’s not with you.”

“My father’s not here tonight.” I walked toward him slowly, hands in the pockets of my jacket. “You and I are going to do this part ourselves.”

“What part is that?”

“The accounting.”

I stopped eight feet from him. That was where I wanted to be—close enough that nothing I said would need to be loud, and far enough that he understood the distance was deliberate.

“You know why you’re here,” I said.

“I’m here because someone compromised my operation. I’d like to know who.”

“You’re here because every route you had out of this city has been sitting in my hands since yesterday afternoon. Your Metairie office has federal attention it can’t survive. Your driver, Trey, was pulled over by the time you drove here—he doesn’t know why yet, but the search of the vehicle will take approximately four hours, and the manifest won’t hold up.” I watched his face. “Corinne sent you the activation signal an hour before. She’s been managing your paperwork for twenty-two years, and she made a judgment call.”

A flicker of disdain lit up his face.

“Your accounts,” I continued. “The ones in the layered corporate structure that your daughter described to me in considerable detail—those have been frozen. Not by federal authority. By someone with access to the appropriate banking relationships, which I have spent the last several days securing.” I paused. “The accounts are frozen. The money you came to collect is behind me, as I understand it. And every exit you planned for is managed.”

He said nothing.

“I want to tell you something,” I said. “Before we get to the part where we discuss access and transfer.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Your daughter called you from the Sanctum. You told her that sacrifices are necessary during war. You hung up.” I let that sit for a moment. “She gave me everything I needed to find you because you told her, in a single sentence, exactly what she’d been worth to you her whole life.” I watched his jaw. “She’s alive. She’ll stay alive. She’s leaving New Orleans tonight with the one person in this city who gave a damn whether she ate. And you, Victor—you’re standing in a building you own, trying to breathe cold air, because you raised a daughter and treated her like inventory.”

“She made her choices.”

“She made the choice to survive when you made it clear you wouldn’t help her do it any other way.” I took my hand out of my jacket pocket. “I want the account access. Routing numbers, confirmation codes, and the backup protocol. All of it.”

“And if I refuse?”

“You don’t leave this building. The money doesn’t leave with you either way—I want you to understand that. The only thing you’re negotiating right now is whether you do the next several hours in comfort or not.”

He looked at me with those careful, experienced eyes, and I could see him turning it over—every remaining possibility, every angle not yet exhausted. A man who had operated for thirty years inside other people’s systems didn’t stop looking for the exit until there genuinely wasn’t one. I respected that, in an abstract way, the way you respected a lock that made you work for it.

“The vault money,” he said. “The Landry money⁠—”

“Rahsaan took it from you. I know. That’s a different conversation, a different settlement.” I held his gaze. “What I’m here for tonight is what belongs to you. Your money. Thirty years of it.”

A long moment passed.

Then, Victor Baptiste reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and removed a folded card that held the account information I’d asked for, and he handed it to me.

I gave it to Priest without looking at it.

“Verify,” I said.

Priest worked for seven minutes on his phone while Victor and I stood in the cold storage facility and did not speak to each other. The refrigeration units hummed. Outside, beyond the corrugated walls, the river moved past in the dark the way it always did—indifferent, unhurried, carrying everything south toward the gulf.

“Confirmed,” Priest said.

I looked at Victor.

“On the West Bank,” I said, “in a city you worked in for thirty years, you helped kill two of my brothers. Elias and Silas.” I kept my voice even. “They were seventeen. They were in the wrong place because they were following in my footsteps. I’ve carried that for fifteen years.” I paused. “You helped the man who did it, and then you kept his secret, and then you sat at my father’s table, ate his food, and shook his hand for a decade and a half.”