Page 184 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

“Come sit down,” she said.

I sat across from her.

She waited.

“It’s done,” I said.

She was quiet for a moment. Her hands were flat on the surface of the island, her face composed in that way she had when she was absorbing something and not letting it move her until she understood it completely. She was wearing one of my shirts, and her hair was loose, and she was the most grounded person I had ever known.

“Victor?” she said.

“Yes.”

She inhaled slowly through her nose. “Is he⁠—”

“Yes.”

She looked down at her hands. “How.”

“I’m not going to tell you that part,” I said. “Not because I’m hiding it from you. Because you don’t need to carry that picture.” I paused. “You asked me once to not hide from you. I’m not hiding. I’m keeping something from you because you deserve to not have it in your head forever. Those are different things.”

She looked at me for a long moment. I held it.

“The money,” I said, because she deserved the full accounting. “I need you to understand something about what I took from him. The fifty million that was stolen from our vault—that’s Rahsaan. That’s still outstanding, and that’s a different reckoning that hasn’t happened yet.” I watched her face. “What I took from Victor tonight is Victor’s money. His own fortune. Thirty years of building something separate from any Landry arrangement, from any partnership with Rahsaan. It’s not our vault money, and it’s not money I have any ambiguity about. It belonged to him, and it’s mine now.”

“How much?”

I told her.

She blinked once.

“That’s—”

“Yes.”

She looked at me. “What does that do to the war?”

“It ends the Victor chapter of it.” I folded my hands on the table. “Rahsaan is still out there. He has money that belongs to my family, and he has the blood of my brothers on his hands. That has not been settled.” I paused. “But that’s a separate thing. That’s not tonight.”

She looked at her hands again. I didn’t fill the silence. I’d learned that Truth’s silences weren’t invitations—they were her doing something, processing something, working through something that she needed to complete before she could speak again. I sat across from her, letting the kitchen be quiet, and watching the sky outside the window begin to change, the darkness thinning, the particular New Orleans pre-dawn blue starting to show at the edges.

“I used to think,” she said finally, “that when I found out something like this, I’d fall apart. That it would—that it would just hollow me out.” She looked up. “I don’t feel hollow.”

“What do you feel?”

She thought about it honestly. “Tired,” she said. “And something else that I don’t have the right word for yet.” She paused. “Is Yahmaria⁠—”

“Gone. Both of them. I kept my word.”

She nodded slowly.

“Syx has his trust, has money, has somewhere to go.” I watched her face. “He’ll be alright. He’s stronger than he looks.”

“Did you—were you kind to them? When you let them go.”

I considered the question honestly. “I was as kind as I know how to be.”

She looked at me for a moment with those eyes that read everything—the version of me that had walked through that facility tonight, and the version sitting across from her now, and whatever distance existed between those two things and whether it was a distance she could live inside. She’d always seen both. That was the only reason any of this had been possible.