Page 167 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

The casino floor was silent except for the slot machine’s cheerful, mechanical celebration.

I dropped his heart onto his chest.

Turned.

And walked away.

Behind me, the lights kept flashing.

The bells kept ringing.

And Kaisen Landry died alone in the fantasy he’d built.

Just like he deserved.

Chapter 31

ODETTE

My knuckles were swollen from the damp. Every time the rain blew in off the river and settled into the oak trees outside the bedroom windows, my lupus reminded me that my body was an old house with bad wiring. But I didn’t sit down. I stood at the mahogany sideboard with the silver spoon between my fingers, stirring honey and dark chicory tea into the porcelain cup until the surface was smooth and dark as swamp water.

I didn’t rush. I’d spent forty-two years rushing for Winston Landry—running downstairs when his voice rattled the chandeliers, running to the hospital when one of his wars caught up with him, running to clean up the blood he left on hardwood floors so the boys wouldn’t have to look at it before breakfast.

Forty-two years of moving fast.

Tonight, I moved like Sunday morning.

Behind me, the bed gave a dry, papery creak. Winston tried to sit up, his breathing coming in thin, rattling whistles that got caught in the base of his throat. He’d lost thirty-five pounds in six weeks. The broad shoulders that used to block out the light in every doorway were sharp bones pushing through gray linen. His skin had that dull, ashen cast men get right before the undertaker comes for them—the kind of gray that don’t rub off with a washcloth.

“Odette,” he rasped. His voice sounded like gravel being kicked down a concrete alley.

I turned with the saucer resting steady in my palm. My joints throbbed, but my fingers didn’t shake. Not a tremor.

“I’m right here, Winston.”

I walked over to the four-poster bed—the one we’d bought thirty years ago, when he took over the docks and told me I was going to sleep like a queen whether I liked the crown or not. I set the saucer on the nightstand beside his gold watch, his brass ring with the Landry seal, and the three prescription bottles the private doctors had left behind when they couldn’t figure out why his liver was failing and his stomach wouldn’t hold water.

Winston reached for the cup with fingers that jerked like strings were tied to his knuckles. He couldn’t lift it. He dropped his wrist against the duvet, chest heaving from the effort of moving eight ounces of hot liquid.

“Something’s… wrong with the legs,” he muttered, staring down at his blanketed shins like they belonged to somebody else. “Can’t get no purchase on the floor. Hands shaking since four this morning. Stomach burning like lye.”

“I know,” I said gently. I pulled the high-backed chair close to the mattress and smoothed my skirt down over my knees.

Winston stared at me. His eyes were yellowed around the rims, bloodshot and sunken, but the cunning in them hadn’t died yet. You couldn’t take sixty years of being a predator out of a man just because his organs were giving up.

He watched my hands. He watched how I sat—back straight, feet flat on the Persian rug, hands folded in my lap like a woman waiting on the choir to finish the prelude.

No tears. No frantic calls to Dr. Beaumont’s replacement. No ice packs. No prayers whispered into the collar of his nightshirt.

Just quiet.

The house was so still you could hear the grandfather clock downstairs dropping each second into the dark like a lead sinker into the bayou.

“You ain’t called nobody,” he said, the words dragging across his tongue. “You ain’t asked the doctors to come back out from Metairie.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

Winston’s brow furrowed. He looked at the cup on the nightstand. Then he looked at the glass of water beside it. Then back to my face.