Page 33 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

It wasn’t loud, wasn’t pointed. It just settled into the room the way a closing door settles.

“Absolutely.” Kaisen took a small step back. “Y’all have a good night.” He looked at me one more time.

I held his gaze without softening anything, because softening things was not what this moment needed. Kaisen had to understand that our ties were severed the day our son ceased to exist.

He walked toward the front door. As he passed me, I caught it—his hand, hanging at his side, the fingers curled in. The nails pressing into his palm. A single drop of blood rolled over the knuckle of his middle finger, moving slow.

He didn’t look down at it. He didn’t acknowledge it.

He pulled the door open and walked out.

The door closed behind him.

I stood there for a second. Then, Amai’s hand was on my back—not controlling, not pulling—just there, warm through the satin.

“Hey.” His voice was low. “You good?”

“Yeah,” I said.

He turned me toward him, and I let him. He pulled me in slow and held me for a minute without saying anything else. I rested my forehead against his chest. My daughter kicked once, light, and I took that as a small endorsement.

“Kaisen asked about the baby things,” I said.

“I know.”

“I don’t want to think about it tonight.”

“Then don’t.” He pressed his mouth to my forehead. “Come on.”

His car was in the driveway, already running, one of his guys holding the passenger door. I’d stopped being surprised by the small formalities Amai had around his vehicles and properties—the way things were just handled, quietly, before he needed to think about them. I climbed in with help I didn’t particularly want but accepted anyway, because the dress, heels, and the baby made it a practical choice rather than a surrender.

Amai got in on his side, and we pulled out.

For a few minutes, neither of us said anything. The city moved past the windows in the particular low-gold way it did after dark in certain parts of New Orleans—wrought iron, old wood, porch lights, someone’s television through a half-open window. I watched it and let the evening reset itself in my chest.

Then music came through the speakers, low at first and then a little fuller. I recognized the opening of “So Easy” before the vocals came in. Olivia Green’s voice was the kind of voice that didn’t ask anything of you—it just moved around you until you were inside it.

I settled back against the seat.

Something released in my shoulders that I hadn’t known I was holding.

I thought about Kaisen’s hand. The blood on his knuckle. I thought about how he’d said our son like the words cost him something, and they probably did. I wasn’t going to pretend they’d cost him nothing. But I also wasn’t going to carry that weight into the rest of my night, and I wasn’t going to apologize for not carrying it.

Kaisen was the father of a baby I’d lost before I ever got to hold him. That was real. That grief was real. But it was grief that Kaisen and I would have to figure out in a different time and a different room, not in Amai’s foyer when I was wearing satin and about to go somewhere.

And Amai was—whatever Amai was to me. More than I’d planned. I’d stopped pretending otherwise sometime in the last few months, quietly, without making an announcement. I wasn’t going to feel guilty about that. I’d tried feeling guilty about it, and it hadn’t changed anything except making me tired.

The song ran its length, and then another started. We didn’t talk. And that was fine too.

I smelled the water before I saw it.

That particular river-salt-and-still-night smell that meant we were close to something large, and then the pier appeared. Amai turned and drove us down alongside it, and I saw the yacht.

“Amai.”

“Mm.”

“That is a boat.”