Page 170 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

Amai took two slow steps toward the bed. He looked down at Winston’s face—the man who had terrified him, broken him, trained him, and ruled him for thirty-four years. He reached out with a bloody hand, touched Winston’s wrist, felt for a pulse he already knew wasn’t there, and let his hand drop.

“How?” Amai’s voice shook. Not with grief—with the sheer, terrifying weight of the world shifting under his feet. “He was fine months ago. He was barking orders at the warehouse⁠—”

“He was dying since the day he decided his sons were collateral,” I said. “I took my time with it. A little in his morning tea. A little in his broth. Just enough to look like his kidneys giving out from the sugar and the years.”

Amai spun on me, his eyes wide and furious. “You poisoned him?!”

“I did.”

“Why the fuck would you do that now?!” he roared, the sound tearing out of his chest and rattling the windowpanes. “Do you have any idea what just happened tonight?! Do you know where I just came from?!”

“I know where you came from,” I said softly, looking at the blood on his hands. “You smell like blood, Amai.”

That hit him like a physical blow. Amai staggered back half a step, his jaw locking tight, a muscle jumping violently in his cheek. His chest heaved, but no words came out.

“Kaisen is dead, ain’t he?” I asked, though my soul already knew the answer. A mother feels it when her children leave the earth; she feels the room get colder, feels the light dim behind her ribs. “You killed him.”

Amai looked at the floor. The fury drained out of him, leaving only the hollow, shivering wreckage of a boy who had just slaughtered his own blood.

“He wouldn’t let them go, Mama,” Amai whispered, his voice breaking into small, jagged pieces. “He took Truth. He took Trumai. He locked them on that damn casino boat and built this crazy-ass fantasy in his head that they belonged to him. He was out of his mind. He told Truth she chose him… and she looked him in his face and told him she chose survival.”

A single tear cut through the dirt and soot on Amai’s cheek.

“I had to do it, Mama. I had to rip his heart out right beside that roulette wheel. If I didn’t, he was gonna keep coming. He was gonna keep trying to steal my life.”

I stood up from my chair. My joints screamed, but I crossed the space between us and reached up. I put my hands on both sides of Amai’s face—my small, swollen, aching hands against his hard, bloody jaw.

“I know, baby,” I whispered. “I know.”

“Then why did you kill Winston tonight?!” Amai grabbed my wrists, his grip tight, desperate, begging for logic in a world that had gone completely insane. “If you’d done this two months ago—if you’d done this before Winston gave Kaisen that damn idea about the sperm—Kaisen wouldn’t have gone crazy! He wouldn’t have kidnapped Truth! I wouldn’t have had to put my hands inside my own brother’s chest!”

Tears spilled over my eyelids then—hot and bitter, carrying thirty years of grief that had finally rotted through my ribs.

“You think I don’t know that?” I cried, my voice breaking against his chest. “You think I don’t lay awake in this bed every night, calculating the days?! I stayed quiet too long, Amai! I thought enduring that man was protecting you! I thought if I absorbed his blows, if I took the humiliation, if I kept this house standing, you boys would have a chance at something normal!”

I shoved his chest—hard enough to make him step back, hard enough to make him feel the fury of a mother who had lost everything.

“It’s called endurance, Amai! And it was a lie! It was cowardice! If I’d shot that man thirty years ago when he brought the first bag of dirty cash into my kitchen, Elias and Silas would be with us right now! Kaisen would be building businesses instead of floating prisons! And you… you wouldn’t have blood on your soul that’ll never wash off!”

Amai stared at me, his chest rising and falling in violent hitches, the tears running freely into his beard now.

“I started giving him those drops the night he shot you my foyer,” I told him, wiping my face with the back of my trembling hand. “I didn’t do it to save Kaisen. It was already too late for Kaisen—Winston had already twisted that boy’s head until he couldn’t tell love from spite. I did it because I saw Winston looking at your little girl. I saw him getting ready to do to Trumai what he did to you.”

The room went dead silent again. Outside, the rain finally began to fall—a heavy, steady Southern downpour that drummed against the roof like a million tiny hammers.

Amai looked back at Winston’s corpse.

He looked at the man who had shaped his hands to hold a gun, who had told him a Landry man doesn’t feel pain, who had taught him that love was a transaction where the strongest man takes everything and leaves nothing behind.

“He’s really dead,” Amai said quietly.

“He’s dead,” I replied. “And tomorrow, we’ll call the coroner. We’ll tell them his liver gave out from the stress of the war. They won’t look too hard. Nobody in this city wants an autopsy on Winston Landry—they’ll just be glad the devil finally went back to hell.”

Amai turned back to me. He looked older. He looked like a man who had lived three lifetimes in the dark and was finally stepping out into the gray light of morning.

“What do I do now, Mama?” he asked, sounding like the eight-year-old boy who used to hide behind my skirts when thunder shook the house. “Kaisen’s gone. Winston’s gone. The empire is mine… but I don’t even want this shit. I just want my girl. I just want my baby.”

I reached out and took his bloody, torn hand in mine. I squeezed it until my swollen knuckles ached, anchoring him to the earth.