Page 25 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

My phone buzzed once against the console. Priest. Three words, nothing more.

He’s moving again.

I looked over at Truth, at the quiet rise and fall of her breathing, and I didn’t answer it right away. I let the truck carry us both home first, let this last hour of borrowed peace stretch out a little longer before the rest of the city remembered whose war it still was.

There would be time for Rahsaan tomorrow.

Tonight, I’d earned this.

Chapter 5

KAISEN

Winston’s study smelled like it always did—cedar and old paper and the particular dust that collected in rooms nobody actually lived in. Bookshelves lined one wall, spines unbroken, purchased by the linear foot, knowing damn well he wouldn’t read shit. I sat across from him with a glass of bourbon I hadn’t touched, watching him sign something with the kind of unhurried precision that made every man who worked for him nervous. He’d always had that talent—turning stillness into a weapon, making you wait long enough that whatever you’d come to say lost its urgency in his presence.

“Amai went to Sunday dinner again,” Winston said, not looking up from the page. “Third week in a row, apparently. That woman’s mother cooks for him now. I’m shocked he made time the way he’s putting belt to ass with Rahsaan and got Victor off the board.”

He said it the way he might mention a shipment had cleared customs. Just information. A fact filed alongside a hundred other facts he tracked because tracking things was what he did. Winston didn’t gossip. He collected. He thrived on it. He loved holding his nuts on a nigga just because he could.

“I know,” I said, though I hadn’t known the exact count until he said it out loud. Two dinners, I’d registered. Three landed different. Three sounded like a pattern instead of an accident. Like he was becoming a regular or something.

“You know.” Winston set the pen down and finally looked at me, that assessing look he gave everyone, like he was deciding what a person was worth converting into. “Interesting reaction. You don’t sound like you know. You sound like you’re doing math.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’ve got that face. The one you had when you were nine, and I gave your brother the bigger room.” He leaned back in his chair, the leather groaning under him, and folded his hands over his stomach like a man settling in for a show. “Some things don’t change, Kaisen. You’ve always kept score of what he gets that you don’t.”

“That’s not what this is.”

“No?” He tilted his head. “Then tell me what it is. Because from where I’m sitting, you’ve been quieter than usual since the hospital. Quieter since the ultrasound. A man doesn’t get quiet like that over nothing.”

I didn’t answer that. There wasn’t a version of the answer that wouldn’t confirm exactly what he was implying, and I’d learned a long time ago that giving Winston confirmation of anything was a mistake you paid for later, in ways you didn’t see coming until they arrived. He collected weaknesses the way other men collected watches—not to wear them, just to know he owned them.

“You sent something to that girl’s house,” Winston said, watching me now instead of the papers. “Weeks back. Before all this. I heard about it after the fact—your brother doesn’t tell me things anymore, you understand, but people still talk to me. A package. Something with pieces in it.”

My jaw tightened. “It was a message.”

“It was a mistake.” He said it flatly, no heat in it, which was worse than if he’d yelled. “You wanted her scared enough to run from your brother’s world. That’s not how fear works on a woman like that, Kaisen. Fear either breaks a person or it teaches them to survive no matter the cost. You taught her where his walls were, and she decided to live inside them instead of outside.”

“I didn’t ask for your analysis.”

“No, but you’re getting it anyway, because apparently, nobody else in this family tells you the truth until it’s too late to use it.” He picked the pen back up, turned it once between his fingers like he was deciding whether the conversation was worth finishing. “You wanted her to see the blood on him and run. Instead, you handed him a reason to prove he could keep her safe from everyone, including you. Now look. Three Sunday dinners. Wine and dessert and flowers, probably, knowing him. That’s not a man losing a woman. That’s a man being adopted. And your dumb ass probably ain’t even tasted the pussy yet.”

“It’s not about that with Truth.”

“Whatever it’s about, you need to let that shit go before Amai takes a body part your ass needs to survive. Her family was willing to adopt a fucking monster into their family than advocate for your no pussy getting ass. Boooy, she put that pussy on you, you’d probably kill all our asses, wouldn’t you?”

The words landed harder than I wanted them to. Adopted. Like Amai had been taken in somewhere warm while I stood outside in the cold, looking through a window that used to have my name on it.

My mind was already moving somewhere else, somewhere Winston’s comment had shoved it. I thought again about the package—the finger, the ear, wrapped the way you’d wrap something you actually cared whether it arrived intact. The warning I’d meant to plant in Truth’s mind like a seed that would grow into fear, into distance, into her finally understanding what kind of world Amai actually lived in and running from it the way any sane woman would. I’d wanted her to see the blood under his fingernails no matter how good his suits looked. I’d told myself it was protection dressed up as cruelty, the kind of ugly necessary thing a man does when gentler methods have already failed. Truth forced my hand.

Instead, she’d moved into his house.

Instead, she was sitting at her mother’s table with him three weeks running, and from what Winston was describing—casually, like it meant nothing—Delphine wasn’t running him off her porch either. Delphine, who I’d met, who’d looked at me with the specific suspicion Southern mothers reserve for men who talked fast and smooth. I remembered thinking, even then, that I hadn’t fully passed whatever test she was running on me, that her eyes had done a slow inventory of my shoes, my watch, the way I’d stood too straight in her living room, like a man performing comfort instead of feeling it. I’d told myself I had time to fix that impression. And now Amai—Amai, who didn’t do warmth, who didn’t sit still for family dinners, who I genuinely couldn’t picture holding a fork at a crowded table without looking like he was about to kill all they ass—Amai was in that woman’s kitchen every Sunday like he belonged there.

“You’re somewhere else,” Winston said.

“I’m listening.”