Page 131 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

My voice came out ragged, scraped raw from weeks of shouting orders into phones and days of suffocating silence, low and broken against the microphone.

“Daddy coming,” I whispered into the dark.

The speaker threw the words back at me, thin and tinny against the empty walls.

Daddy coming.

I let go of the button, pulled the monitor against my chest, and closed my eyes against the floorboards, letting the dark swallow me whole.

“You look like a corpse that crawled out of the swamp, Amai.”

Priest stood in the archway of the nursery, a paper bag from the corner market in one hand and a stack of printed toll-road manifests in the other. He didn’t come inside. Nobody came inside the nursery anymore. It had become a tomb, and Priest respected the boundary the way a man respects the edge of a minefield.

I didn’t answer him. I didn’t look up from the floor.

I had caught my reflection in the full-length mirror behind the door three days ago, and for a second, I hadn’t recognized the man staring back.

I had dropped twenty pounds in four weeks. My jawline, usually sharp and clean, was sunken and obscured beneath a thick, ragged beard streaked with dirt and silver whiskers I hadn’t known I possessed. My eyes were sunken into bruised, purple hollows, bloodshot and feral, carrying the dead, manic glaze of an animal that had been run through the brush until its lungs tore.

I was wearing the same charcoal-gray thermal shirt and black cargo pants I’d had on since Tuesday. The knees were stained with grease from inspecting the undercarriage of a seized van in Kenner; the cuffs were stiff with dried mud from an abandoned hunting camp in St. Tammany Parish.

I didn’t shower unless Priest physically dragged me toward the bathroom. I didn’t eat unless Delphine sent over containers of white beans and cornbread with Raven, and even then, I only chewed enough to keep my heart pumping blood to my hands.

The jewelry showroom on Magazine Street—the multi-million-dollar empire I had built from the ground up, the custom diamonds, the luxury clientele, the vaulted display cases—was completely dark. The iron security shutters hadn’t been raised in twenty-eight days. I hadn’t looked at a ledger. I hadn’t signed a payroll check. I hadn’t answered a single supplier call from Antwerp or New York.

The street corners, the distribution routes, the gambling houses, the Landry name that made grown men in this city drop their eyes when I walked into a room… it was all ash. It was garbage. It was a pile of dry leaves waiting for a match.

None of it could buy back one second of the moment Kaisen walked out of my house with my family.

My personal phone buzzed on the floor beside my boot.

It wasn’t the burner. It wasn’t Priest.

The screen illuminated with an unlisted landline from the Garden District estate.

Winston.

I stared at the vibrating glass for four long rings before I reached down and swiped the green icon with a thumb caked in dried engine grime. I put it on speaker and dropped it back onto the hardwood between my boots.

“What.”

A heavy, rattling breath came through the receiver. It sounded wet, like air being dragged through fluid and gravel. When Winston spoke, his voice lacked the booming, theatrical arrogance that had terrorized my entire childhood. It sounded thin. Brittle. Old.

“You’ve been off the grid for a month, Amai,” Winston rasped, pausing to let out a short, wheezing cough that shook the microphone. “The Boudreaux remnants are trying to reorganize territory on the West Bank. The Colombians are asking why the distribution hubs in Metairie haven’t moved product in three weeks. The family business is bleeding from five different arteries, and you’re running around the South like a stray dog.”

“Are you calling to tell me where my brother is?” I asked, my voice flat, completely devoid of inflection.

“I don’t know where Kaisen is.” Winston coughed again, the sound ragged and deep in his chest. “If I knew, I would have dragged his ass back by his collar myself. But you are letting the Landry name disintegrate over a situation you can’t control.”

“Shut the fuck up, Winston.”

“Listen to me, boy,” Winston said, trying and failing to muster his old commanding growl. “I can’t… I can’t be in the streets right now. I physically can’t do it. My body is failing me.”

I didn’t flinch. I didn’t blink.

“For four months, my legs have been giving out under me,” he continued, the admission sounding like it was tearing his pride into ribbons. “The doctors at Ochsner don’t know what the fuck is wrong. My kidneys are throwing abnormal counts. My bloodwork is toxic. I can barely make it down the goddamn stairs without Odette holding my elbow. The organization needs a head, Amai. You are the head. If you don’t take the seat, everything we built gets carved up by scavengers.”

He stopped, his breath whistling through the speaker, waiting for his son to step up. Waiting for the Landry blood in my veins to override the agony in my chest.