Page 136 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Yes!” Hector cried out immediately, desperate to deliver the answer. “Yes, señor! She was alive! She was healthy, she was angry, she was fighting him every single day!”

A massive, invisible fist unclenched inside my chest. The breath I had been holding for seven hundred and twenty hours tore out of my throat in a ragged, silent shudder.

Alive.

She was alive.

“And my daughter?” My voice cracked slightly on the word. “The baby?”

“The little girl is good, señor,” Hector said, his voice trembling with sincerity. “She cries loud, she eats, she breathes good. The mother… she never lets the baby out of her hands. Never. Only when he forces her to sleep or when she is too tired to stand. The baby is alive. I swear it on the Virgin.”

I closed my eyes for two seconds. Just two seconds.

I let the knowledge wash over the raw, bleeding parts of my brain. Truth was alive. Trumai was alive. My family was breathing air on this earth right now.

When I opened my eyes, the relief was gone, replaced by a cold, surgical focus.

“Tell me everything from the beginning,” I said. “How did Kaisen find you?”

Hector swallowed hard, licking his dry, cracked lips. Priest stepped forward, uncapped a bottle of water, and held it to Hector’s mouth. The man drank greedily, coughing on the swallows before leaning his head back against the chair.

“Two months ago,” Hector began, his English broken but clear, spoken with the desperate precision of a man fighting for his life. “Maybe ten weeks. I was working day shifts at the commercial marine dry dock near Algiers. A man approached me. Tall. Very clean clothes. Expensive watch. He had a deep voice, very polite, very quiet. He walked with a small limp, like his side was hurting him.”

“He offered me three thousand dollars a week in cash,” Hector continued. “Clean hundred-dollar bills. He said he owned a private riverboat that he had been remodeling for almost a year. An old casino boat—one of the steel-hull paddlewheelers from the late nineties that used to run out of Lake Charles before the storms hit.”

“What was the name on the hull?” Priest asked sharply.

“The Freedom,” Hector replied immediately. “The registration numbers on the bow were scraped off. He had the boat moored in a private industrial slip off Ptolemy Street, behind an abandoned gravel depot where nobody goes.”

My mind raced. Ptolemy Street. That was less than three miles from Winston’s old distribution yards. Kaisen had hidden a two-hundred-foot vessel right under our noses while we were fighting Rahsaan.

“Describe the inside,” I demanded. “What did he build in there?”

“It’s not a boat anymore, señor,” Hector said, his eyes distant as he recalled the layout. “It’s… it’s like a mansion. The main casino floor is gutted. He turned the middle into a giant living room with leather furniture, expensive rugs, and big screens. The windows are all replaced—thick, double-pane glass, tinted black from the outside. You can see out, but nobody can see in. On the upper deck, there is a master bedroom with a king bed, custom closets full of women’s clothes, makeup, perfume… and a nursery.”

“A nursery,” I repeated, my teeth grinding together.

“Yes. A white crib. Pink blankets. Stuffed animals. Hundreds of boxes of formula, diapers, baby wipes, medical supplies. There is a whole room with industrial refrigerators, backup diesel generators, and a reverse-osmosis water filtration system. That boat doesn’t need to touch a dock for three months. It makes its own power and its own clean water.”

“Engines?” Priest asked. “What’s moving that much steel?”

“Twin Caterpillar marine diesels,” Hector said without hesitation. “Old, but completely rebuilt. New fuel injectors, new cooling lines. She doesn’t go fast—maybe eight, ten knots max against the current—but she carries twelve thousand gallons of marine diesel in the auxiliary tanks. She can run from here to the Mexican border and back without stopping for fuel.”

I leaned in, my voice dropping lower. “Tell me about the night he brought them aboard.”

Hector’s eyes filled with fresh panic. “It was late. Middle of the night. A month ago. He told me to have the engines warmed up and the lines ready to cast off. When he arrived, he carried the baby in a car seat with one hand, and he was dragging the woman with the other.”

The visual hit my mind like a physical blow. A violent, suffocating pressure built behind my temples.

“Did she fight him?”

“She was screaming, señor,” Hector said softly, looking down at his lap in shame. “She was fighting like a tiger. She bit his forearm. She tried to grab the gangway railing to pull herself back toward the dock, but he overpowered her. He got her inside the main salon and locked the outer hatch with a keypad. I was up in the wheelhouse. He keyed the radio and told me to get us underway immediately, heading south down the river.”

“Why didn’t you stop him, Hector?” I asked, every syllable laced with murder.

“Because I was terrified!” Hector shouted, tears streaming down his face again. “He had a gun under his jacket! He had money, he had men on the dock who threw the lines, and I didn’t know who she was! I thought… I thought if I tried to help, he would shoot me in the back of the head and throw my body in the river!”

“When did you talk to her?” Priest interjected, keeping me from wrapping my fingers around Hector’s windpipe.