Page 172 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“You was acting like a Renois,” Mama said, pointing the wooden spoon in my direction before tapping it against the edge of the pot. “Which means you got sense, but you don’t take no shit. Now, Amai, take your big self out from under that girl’s skirts and go check that brisket in the smoker. If you burn fifty dollars’ worth of beef, you can go sleep at the jewelry shop.”

Amai didn’t flinch. Six months ago, a threat like that from an outsider would have ended with three men in shallow graves. Today, he just nodded with quiet respect.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

He kissed my temple one more time—soft, lingering, the kind of kiss a man gave when he wasn’t checking the perimeter or watching the clock—and stepped past the table toward the patio doors. As he passed Tru’s high chair, his massive hand reached out and gently cupped the back of her tiny head. Tru immediately squealed, dropping her flashcard and grabbing two of his long fingers with both of her fists, trying to drag his knuckles toward her mouth.

Amai stopped. The ruthless, terrifying predator who had torn New Orleans apart from the bayous to the Gulf went completely still, his dark eyes softening into something so tender it made my ribs ache.

“Not for eating, mama,” he whispered, carefully untangling his fingers and substituting a chilled silicone teething ring from the counter. He waited until she had a firm grip on the rubber before he tapped the tip of her button nose. “Be good for your mama.”

Tru babbled something incoherent and went to work on the teether.

Amai caught my eye on his way out the French doors, giving me a slow, quiet look that made the heat rise between my legs. It was the same look he’d been giving me since the night he carried me off that casino boat—a look that asked, You good? without needing a single syllable.

I gave him a small nod. I’m good.

He slid the glass door shut, stepping out into the Louisiana heat where Honor’s three boys were chasing a soccer ball across the grass under the shade of the live oaks.

I leaned back against the table, watching him walk toward the smoker.

It was strange how ordinary the world could feel after it burned down.

When we buried Winston Landry six months ago, there were no cameras, no city councilmen, no second lines rolling down St. Charles. Just a private plot out in Metairie, a closed casket, and people standing in the rain while a preacher who didn’t ask questions read twenty-third Psalms. Odette hadn’t cried. She had stood beside me under a black umbrella, her arm linked through mine, looking at the fresh mound of red clay like a woman who had finally paid off a mortgage on a house she hated.

The city papers said Winston’s heart had given out after a long illness. Nobody dug deeper. In New Orleans, when a king dies quietly in his sleep, the streets take the gift and move on.

Kaisen didn’t even get a grave with his name on it.

Amai had handled that himself. He never told me where the ashes went, and I never asked. Some ghosts didn’t belong in the ground where people brought flowers; some ghosts belonged to the water that swallowed them.

“You quiet today, Truth,” Odette said softly, pulling me out of my head.

She had finished the beans and was wiping her hands on a linen towel, looking at me with those perceptive, heavy eyes. There were days when looking at Odette felt like looking at a mirror thirty years in the future—a woman who had loved dangerous men, survived dangerous choices, and carried the weight of it in her bones. But there was no fear in her anymore. The silence that used to choke her had been replaced by a slow, deliberate grace. She hadn’t had a lupus flare since we buried Winston.

“Just thinking,” I told her, picking up the stack of onesies and beginning to fold them again. “My shift starts at University Medical next Monday. Twelve-hour shifts on the trauma floor.”

“You ready for that?” Mama asked, turning the heat down to a low simmer.

“I’m ready,” I said, and for the first time in two years, the words didn’t feel like a wish. They felt like stone. “I took the NCLEX practice exam yesterday. Scored in the ninety-fourth percentile.”

Raven let out a high, piercing whistle that made Tru jump and giggle. “Look at the nurse! Put some respect on my sister’s name! You hear that, Tru? Your mama about to be saving lives while your daddy pays off the hospital wings.”

“She’s saving lives because she worked for it,” Odette said, her voice firm, cutting through Raven’s teasing. She looked right at me, her gaze steady and full of fierce, motherly pride. “Amai didn’t buy those grades. He didn’t sit through those midnight study sessions while that baby had the colic. You did that, Truth.”

My throat tightened, a sudden, hot rush of emotion catching behind my ribs.

“Thank you, Mama Odette,” I whispered.

She gave me a short, elegant nod and picked up her tea. “Don’t thank me. Just make sure when you get that white coat, you come check my blood pressure first. These Renois women keep my sodium too high with all this damn garlic.”

“Watch your mouth about my garlic, Odette,” Mama yelled, but she was smiling into the steam.

I walked the laundry basket down the hallway toward the master suite at the back of the house.

The house had changed since the night I came back. The heavy, dark draperies that used to keep the Garden District sunlight out had been replaced with sheer white linen that fluttered in the breeze off the courtyard. The reinforced security was still there—the cameras hidden in the cornices, the bulletproof glass, the silent panic buttons wired beneath the moldings—but the doors inside the house stayed unlocked.

I walked into Tru’s nursery—the pale pink and cream room that Amai had rebuilt with his own hands while I was sleeping off the exhaustion of that first week home. Beside the crib sat a small, polished wooden box on the bookshelf. Inside was a single silver rattle engraved with the letter E—the only thing we kept from the nursery that was supposed to hold two.