Page 45 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

“Think about it,” Syx said quietly. “But don’t think too long. Because time is running out. You have me. I got you.”

I looked at him.

Amai had made his move.

Now I had to make mine.

The question was: did I trust my father’s promises?

Or did I trust the boy who’d just offered to throw away his entire life to save mine?

I didn’t have an answer yet.

But I knew one thing for certain.

I was running out of time.

“Hold on,” he said.

He disappeared upstairs without another word and came back down with a Goyard duffle bag. He set it on the coffee table and unzipped it. The money was packed so dense, the zipper caught. He had to work it free with both hands.

“My mama’s life insurance,” he said. “Never touched it. I’ve just been sitting on it because I didn’t know what to do with it, and spending it felt wrong.” He looked up at me. “I know you think I’m young as shit and fucked up in the head, but I ain’t no dummy. I didn’t spend a dime of the insurance money from my mama’s death. It’s just been sitting. We can have a life together Yaya. I’ve known you for years. The good, bad, and ugly and I know what I’m getting into.”

I looked at the money.

I looked at him—his mother dead, a bag full of grief he’d been carrying around waiting for a reason to put it down.

“They will find us Syx.”

“Then we go somewhere they don’t know to look.”

“That’s not—it’s not that simple.”

“I know it’s not simple.” He didn’t flinch. “I’m asking if it’s possible.”

I didn’t have an answer. But for the first time in a long time, the question felt like it was mine to answer. Not Victor’s. Not Amai’s.

Mine.

I picked up the bag and looked inside it—the clean, dense weight of it, the absolute realness of it—and something in my chest shifted a centimeter toward something I didn’t have a name for yet.

The front door slammed open.

The sound detonated through the house.

I dropped the bag and spun around, my heart already in my throat before my eyes caught up.

Amai.

He stood in the doorway, Priest a half-step behind him. The energy that came in with him was different from his usual cold—this was colder, the kind that lived past anger on the far side of something more dangerous. Priest moved to one side of the entry and stayed there, taking in the room without a word.

Something was wrong.

Something was catastrophically wrong.

Amai’s eyes locked on mine.

“Amai—”