Page 169 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

His chest rose once.

Sank.

And didn’t come back up.

The grandfather clock struck two in the morning downstairs, its deep chimes rolling through the empty hallways of the estate.

I stood over him for five full minutes, watching the stillness take him over until his face smoothed out into the blank, hollow look of cold wax.

Then I reached into my cardigan pocket, pulled out my reading glasses, and dialed my son.

The phone rang four times before Amai picked up. When he did, his breathing was heavy, jagged, and full of river wind.

“Mama,” he said, his voice raw, stripped down to bone and gristle. “I can’t talk right now. I’m at the docks. Priest is getting Truth and the baby into the truck, but⁠—”

“Amai.”

The tone of my voice cut through his panic like a butcher knife through warm lard.

He went quiet. “What happened? Winston send somebody else?”

“Your daddy ain’t sending nobody nowhere, baby,” I said, looking down at the corpse in the bed. “He’s gone.”

Silence stretched over the line—thick, heavy, and full of things that couldn’t be said over a cellular tower.

“What do you mean he’s gone?” Amai’s voice got dangerously low. “Did Rahsaan’s people⁠—”

“Get in your truck and come home, Amai,” I said. “And don’t bring Priest. Don’t bring your security. Come by yourself.”

“Mama, I got Kaisen’s⁠—”

“I said come home.”

I hung up before he could argue.

Hours later, headlights swept across the ceiling of the master bedroom. Gravel crunched outside as the Bentley pulled up the circular drive too fast, tires throwing stones against the boxwood hedges. A door slammed. Heavy, uneven footsteps took the front stairs three at a time.

The front door opened. The floorboards in the foyer groaned under his weight.

“Mama?”

“Up here, Amai.”

He appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, and my heart cracked right down the middle.

My oldest boy looked like he’d crawled out of the bottom of the Mississippi River. His black shirt was torn open at the shoulder, soaked through with sweat and somebody else’s blood. His knuckles were split to the bone, swollen purple and dripping onto the hardwood floor. His face was gray with exhaustion, his eyes bloodshot, wild, and haunted by something he’d just done in the dark.

He smelled like gunpowder, engine grease, and stale river water.

Amai took one look at the bed.

He saw Winston lying there, head tilted back against the pillows, eyes half-lidded and staring at nothing. He saw the teacup on the nightstand. He saw me sitting in the high-backed chair with my hands folded in my lap.

Amai stopped dead in the center of the room. The breath went out of him all at once, his big shoulders dropping like somebody had cut the cables holding him up.

“What did you do?” he whispered.

“What I should’ve done before you was old enough to hold a gun,” I told him.