Page 29 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Was about to head out.” I stood, keeping my voice easy, normal, the same tone I’d used the whole visit. “Wrap holds for a day, maybe two, before you’ll need to redo it. Don’t let it get infected. I don’t want to hear your mouth about I fucked you up or some shit.”

“Since when do you care if I get a infected?”

“Since I’m still your brother,” I said, and for a second, the words weren’t a lie, weren’t a performance, weren’t anything except true.

That was the part that made what I’d just done feel less like betrayal and more like insurance. I was still his brother. That didn’t have to change just because I was also preparing for a future where I might need proof of things nobody wanted to give me honestly.

“Yeah,” Amai said, quieter than I expected, looking at the fresh wrap on his hand. “You are.”

For a moment, neither of us moved. The war room was quiet except for the hum of the overhead lights and the distant sound of the city outside. I felt something old and uncomplicated pass between us—not forgiveness, exactly, and not trust either, but something adjacent to both. A leftover warmth from a childhood that had mostly burned down around us.

“Tell Ma I’ll come by this week,” I said, mostly to have something to say that wasn’t about the gauze folded against my ribs.

“She’d like that.”

I left before that softness could turn into something else—before he could ask why I’d really come by, before I had to answer a question I hadn’t fully answered for myself yet.

As soon as I left, I drove back to the river boat to secure Amai’s sample. It was dark and deserted the way it should be. I still scanned the perimeter to make sure I wasn’t being watched.

The lab’s cold-storage unit hummed at a steady, low frequency that I’d learned to find almost soothing, a sound with no urgency in it, just patience. I stood in front of it that evening with the folded gauze in a small, sealed bag I found in my car, turning it over once in my hand before I labeled it.

I took a label maker from the drawer beneath the counter and typed two words. Then I watched the small machine spit out the strip and pressed it onto the bag’s surface, smoothing it flat with my thumb.

A. LANDRY.

I sat with it a moment before sealing the door, running through the justification again like a man checking his math before submitting it for a grade. This wasn’t theft. Theft implied I’d taken something that belonged to someone else without any right to it, and a brother’s blood, given freely in a moment of trust, wasn’t the kind of thing that could be stolen in any sense that mattered. This was diligence. The same diligence that made a man carry insurance he hoped never to use, or keep a spare key to a house he trusted his family in.

I locked the storage unit and stood there for a moment, telling myself the same thing I’d been telling myself since the idea first surfaced back at the war room—that this wasn’t deception.

Amai owned clinics. Amai owned doctors, or owned the debts doctors carried, which amounted to the same thing. If there was ever a question—if Truth ever doubted, if some detail in the original paternity results didn’t sit right, if I needed to prove something to a court or to her or to myself—I would have an independent sample.

That wasn’t manipulation. That was just a man being smart enough to protect what mattered to him.

I climbed the narrow stairs up to the nursery one more time before I left the boat that night. As I stood in the doorway, looking at the single crib in the moonlight coming through the reinforced windows, I took the ultrasound picture out of my jacket pocket and held it up beside the empty space where the second crib used to be.

“You’re still ours,” I said quietly to the photograph, to the room, to whatever version of the future I was still building in the dark. “Whatever they tell you. Whatever he thinks he’s proven. You’re still ours.”

The essential systems became operational in a week, while finishing work/lab/interior details were still being completed. A home no one else knew about. A sanctuary built with my own hands and my own money, for a family that existed whether or not the people it belonged to had agreed to it yet.

I closed the door behind me, walked the length of the finished hallway, and stood on the deck for a long moment, looking out over the dark water at the lights of the city glittering somewhere beyond the trees, thinking that Truth would understand eventually. Not now, maybe. Not while Amai still had her convinced that danger and love were the same thing, and that all the brutal shit he did was somehow the safer choice.

But, eventually, when she was finally ready to see clearly, when the fog of whatever hold he had over her finally lifted, I’d be here. Everything ready. Everything waiting.

All I had to do was be patient and prepared, and reasonable.

I was good at all three.

Chapter 6

TRUTH

Three months had passed since I’d been in the exam room when Kaisen found out he’d fathered a son who no longer existed. Three months of Amai dropping bodies all over the city, trying to smoke Rahsaan out, and the man still hadn’t surfaced. Which meant I still couldn’t go home.

I sat in Dr. Broussard’s waiting room with my hands folded over the top of a belly, which had gotten genuinely enormous, flipping through a parenting magazine I wasn’t reading, and I let myself be annoyed about it for a second. Not at Amai. At the situation. He’d taken out half of Rahsaan’s network—I knew that much, even though he tried to keep the worst details from me—and the man was still ghosting around out there somewhere, which meant Priest still had eyes on my old house, and I was still living out of a room in the Garden District that wasn’t technically mine, in a life that wasn’t technically mine either.

I was getting closer to Amai. Closer than I’d planned, and closer than made sense given everything. Some days, it felt like the best thing that had happened to me all year. Other days, it scared me, the way I could feel myself learning his rhythms, needing his voice on the phone, and missing him when he wasn’t in the room. I didn’t want to lose myself in him. I’d already lost myself in one man before, and rebuilding had taken everything I had. I didn’t know how to be close to somebody without disappearing a little into them. Nobody had ever taught me that part.

My daughter kicked, hard, right under my ribs. I put my hand there and rubbed slow circles until she settled.