Page 51 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

He stepped back. Slowly. His jaw worked.

The guards stopped us in front of two doors in the east wing, side by side.

They took Syx first.

He turned in the doorway and looked at me. His face was swollen on one side, his lip split, his eye going purple, and he looked at me like none of it mattered.

“I love you,” he said.

The door closed.

The lock engaged—a heavy electromagnetic clunk that sounded like something ending.

Then, they put me in the room on the right.

I don’t know how long I sat on the cot.

Long enough for the panic to exhaust itself. Long enough to stop crying. Long enough to start thinking again, which was worse, because thinking meant sitting with the smell of myself and the bare concrete and the knowledge that I had no access. No lawyer who would take a call from this compound, and a father who’d had the chance to promise me protection and passed.

When the door opened, I expected a guard.

Amai came in alone, then stepped aside. A woman followed him—navy pantsuit, hair back, a leather portfolio under her arm, and the expression of someone who had made a very specific calculation about what she could and couldn’t afford to see today.

I understood immediately.

Behind them, a guard set a folded set of clothes on the floor. Clean jeans, a white tee, underwear still in packaging. A towel. A bar of soap.

I stared at it.

“You’re signing the divorce papers,” Amai said.

“Here.” My voice didn’t shake. I was proud of that. “You’re doing this here.”

“You sign, you get those.” He nodded toward the clothes. “You get a few minutes and a sink. You get to be a person again.”

I looked at him.

He looked back at me with a face that had nothing in it—no satisfaction, no cruelty for its own sake, just a man closing a transaction that had cost him more than he’d planned for and he wanted receipts.

“How am I supposed to wash in front of all these men?” I asked.

“That sounds like a personal problem. I doubt there’s a man in Louisiana who hasn’t seen that little pussy anyway.”

The words were designed to cut, and they did their job. The notary shifted beside him, her eyes going to the middle distance, her face careful and blank in the way of someone being paid enough to not have opinions.

She could see I was under duress. She could see exactly what this was. She was going to notarize it anyway because the alternative was being somewhere in this compound without Amai’s goodwill, and that math was simple.

I stood up.

Crossed to the table.

Picked up the pen.

I looked at Amai over the stack of documents—the Petition for Dissolution, the property settlement, the pages and pages of a dismantling I had been half-trying to reach for years.

“I never had a problem signing this,” I said. “Don’t make it something it’s not.”

I signed.