Page 16 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Kill Delores, I take one safehouse and give that granddaughter a reason to come looking for revenge one day. Strip the house, take every burner, every dollar, every document, make sure Rahsaan knows he can never use this address again—I get the same result without creating another problem.”

Priest studied me.

“That’s your line?”

“That’s the math.”

Not mercy.

Not hesitation.

Precision.

We didn’t touch Delores.

But when we left an hour later, the house had been stripped of anything useful.

Cash hidden inside a hollowed-out Bible in the hallway closet.

A burner phone taped beneath the kitchen sink with three numbers saved in it.

A shoebox of documents in the attic that traced two more properties we hadn’t known about.

The house itself stayed standing.

The granddaughter stayed standing.

The baby stayed untouched.

Delores stood in her doorway, watching us leave, understanding that her nephew had one less place in the world where he could safely knock and expect somebody to let him in.

“That’s three major pieces of his infrastructure gone in one day,” Priest said in the car afterward. “Message drop. Money laundering. Family safehouse.”

“If you’re one of his soldiers hearing about all three, what you thinking?”

Priest stared out the window.

“That nowhere’s untouchable anymore.”

“Exactly.”

Back at the command room that evening, the whiteboard had transformed into something closer to a map than a list—names crossed out in red, new names added in black, lines connecting properties and people and money in a web that had grown far past the original eleven.

“So, what’s the actual endgame here?” Priest asked, dropping into his chair heavily. “You want his territory? Money? You want a meeting where y’all sit down and hash this out like grown men?”

“None of that.”

“Then what?”

“I want him standing in front of me.”

I looked at the board.

“This war doesn’t end with territory changing hands or money getting split up nice and even. It ends when Rahsaan understands there’s no more running, no more hiding behind other people’s loyalty, and he comes to find out for himself what’s happening to everybody who ever mattered to him.”

Priest was quiet.

“You’re not negotiating.”