Page 182 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

Victor’s expression didn’t change. That was the thing about men like him. They had spent so long treating their worst acts as logistics problems that the moral weight of them had stopped registering as weight at all.

“I didn’t know about that before I started working with him.”

“Bullshit. You treated people like cargo your whole life,” I said. “Your daughter. My brothers. Everyone who trusted you.” I stepped back. “So that’s how this ends.”

I gave the signal.

My men moved. Victor understood what was happening, and he was fast—faster than I’d expected for a man his age—but the building was sealed, and there were four of us and one of him. The gap between those numbers closed the way it always did, with the blunt finality of arithmetic.

The shipping container at the back of the facility was Baptiste Logistics stock—Victor’s own company name stenciled along the side in white letters, a detail that had cost me nothing because it was already there. It was temperature-controlled, manifested under a priority routing code that would route it, according to Corinne’s activated protocol, to a destination that no longer had a receiving party.

We put Victor inside it.

I don’t need to say more than that. What I’ll say is this. The cold was even, and the darkness was complete, and the last thing Victor Baptiste heard before the container sealed and the refrigeration system engaged was a recording—clear audio, Yahmaria’s voice from the Sanctum, saying the things she’d said to me in that room. The things she’d said about being raised to understand what she was worth. About being shown the emergency exit at sixteen, so she’d know what she stood to lose.

The recording was sixty seconds long.

Then, it was quiet.

And the container was loaded onto the truck that Trey’s replacement driver had been waiting to move for the last three hours, manifested as a priority medical-cold-chain delivery to a processing facility in Terrebonne Parish that Baptiste Logistics had used for years, that Victor had personally established, that existed inside his own system the way every part of his life had—efficient, sealed, and designed to make sure nothing left a trace.

He had built a machine for making things disappear.

I let the machine do what it was made for.

I got back to the Sanctum at five in the morning.

The building had its own particular silence at that hour—not peaceful, just suspended, like a held breath. I walked down the long corridor past the observation rooms and stopped outside the two cells at the end where Syx and Yahmaria had been for the past several weeks. I left instructions to bring Syx back next to her after she gave me the information I needed.

Syx was awake. He was always awake when I came at unusual hours, as if some frequency in him registered my approach the way an animal registered weather. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the clear wall, knees drawn up, looking at nothing. When he heard the door, he looked up.

I unlocked the cell. He didn’t move immediately.

“It’s done,” I said.

He read my face the way he’d learned to read things—quickly, completely, without asking for confirmation he could already see. His jaw worked once. He looked at the floor. “Yaya’s dad.”

“Yes.”

He was quiet for a long moment. “She know?”

“Not yet. I’m going to tell her now.”

He stood up slowly. He was twenty years old and had spent the last month imprisoned in a facility that most men twice his age had never had to see the inside of, and he stood up the way he did everything—without self-pity, without theater. Just straightened up and became whatever he needed to be next.

I left him in the doorway and walked to Yahmaria’s cell.

She was lying on the platform, asleep, curled into a ball. She turned her head when I opened the door and looked at me for a moment without speaking, reading the same thing Syx had read.

“It’s over,” she said. Not a question.

“Yes.”

She turned to the ceiling. Her chest rose and fell once, slowly. Whatever she was doing in that moment, I didn’t intrude on it. There are kinds of grief that look like nothing from the outside and contain everything on the inside, and I knew better than to mistake stillness for the absence of feeling.

After a moment, she sat up. “What happens to us now?”

“You leave,” I said. “Both of you. Tonight.”