Page 42 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Alright,” I said, clapping my hands together once, sharp, because sitting in that quiet any longer was starting to feel like standing too close to a stove that ain’t lit but you can smell the gas anyway. “We got actual business to discuss, and I didn’t call you two over here to sit around and have a therapy session. Lord knows there ain’t enough hours in the day for that, and I ain’t equipped for it regardless.”

“When have you ever been equipped for anything that required feeling something?” Amai dryly said.

I let that one go because he wasn’t entirely wrong, and there was no point in arguing a true thing just ’cause it stung a little.

“I’m equipped for keeping this family alive,” I said. “That’s the only equipment that ever mattered in this house. Feelings are for people who can afford ’em. We couldn’t afford ’em when I was your age, and we sure as hell can’t afford ’em now, not with Rahsaan’s people dying in the streets and half the city watching to see whether the Landrys are still the Landrys or whether we done gone soft chasing women and grief.”

“Nobody’s gone soft,” Amai said. There was an edge in it now, quick, the kind of edge that told me I’d stepped somewhere he didn’t want me stepping.

“No?” I looked at him. “You spent the better part of two months redecorating your whole operation around one woman’s comfort. That ain’t soft, what do you call it?”

“I call it having something worth protecting,” Amai said. “Which is more than you ever gave your own wife credit for having.”

That landed. I’ll give him that. My boy always did know exactly which door to kick when he wanted a reaction, same as his mother, God help me. And I had to sit there a second and let the sting of it pass through me before I answered, because a man who answers too quick after a hit like that shows you he’s still bleeding from it.

“Your mother,” I said, “is alive, healthy, and still sleeping in my bed every night, thirty-some years running. Ain’t a lot of men in this city can say that about the women they married in this business. So, watch how you throw that around like it’s an insult, boy, ’Cause from where I’m sitting, it looks a whole lot like a résumé.”

Amai didn’t answer that. Just looked at me with something that wasn’t quite respect but wasn’t quite contempt either—somewhere in that gray space where my sons had lived with me their whole lives, never all the way on my side, but never all the way off it.

Kaisen hadn’t said a word through any of that. Just sat there, hands still folded, watching the exchange between me and his brother like it was happening on a television screen and not six feet in front of him in his own family’s business.

That bothered me more than the argument did.

“Fine,” I said, pulling the folder Amai had brought toward me across the desk and flipping it open. Because if the room wasn’t going to talk to me straight about feelings, we were damn sure going to talk about money, and that’s a language every single person in my family understood, even when they pretended they didn’t want to. “Where we at with Rahsaan?”

Amai straightened some in his chair, and I watched the shift happen in him—the personal falling away, and the operational sliding into place, like a man putting a jacket back on after he’d been standing outside in the cold, arguing with somebody he loved. That was a thing my son did well. Better than his brother, if I’m being honest, and better than I did at his age, if I’m being more honest than that.

“We’ve hit eleven properties in three weeks,” Amai said. “Two stash houses, a laundering front on Tulane, three of his lieutenants’ personal residences, a strip club he was running money through, and a funeral home.”

“A funeral home,” I said.

“Marguerite Fontaine’s place, on Elysian Fields. She’s been handling the bodies for anybody in his network who dies—no questions, no paperwork that means anything, and she’s been doing it for years. We shut that down. Told her she does it for us now, or she doesn’t do it at all.”

“She take that well?”

“She’s still breathing,” Amai said, which was his way of telling me she’d said yes, because in this family, still breathing after a conversation with my son is generally considered a yes.

“And Rahsaan himself? We got eyes on the man, or we still chasing rumors and secondhand gossip from people scared enough of you to lie just to get you off their doorstep?”

“He’s underground,” Amai said. “Deep. He’s not moving money the normal ways, not sleeping anywhere twice, not using anybody who’s got a history with him that we could trace. He’s smart about it. Smarter than I expected, honestly, for a man his age who I figured had gone soft sitting on territory for a decade.”

“Man survived thirty years in this business. He learned that lesson about softness a long time before you did,” I said. “Don’t underestimate him just ’cause you’re winning right now. Winning early’s the easiest way to get killed late.”

“I’m not underestimating him,” Amai said, some heat back in it. “I’m the one who’s been in the street every night doing this. You’ve been sitting in this study.”

“I sat in this study while your granddaddy was still alive and running this whole city off a folding table in a back room on Rampart, so don’t talk to me about sitting in studies like it’s the same as doing nothing. A general who’s still alive at my age didn’t get there by standing in the mud, getting shot at. He got there by knowing which mud to send other men into.”

Amai didn’t answer that, which I took as a point in my favor, small as it was.

“What about the money?” I said. “The purge is costing us. Every man we take off the board, every property we burn, every route we shut down—that’s money not moving, not just money spent. How deep in the hole are we?”

“We’re fine,” Amai said.

“Fine ain’t a number.”

“We seized more from Victor’s operation than the vault theft cost us in the first place,” Amai said with quiet, specific satisfaction, the way a man talks about a debt he’s already collected on rather than one still hanging. “Enough to fund the purge for a long while without touching legitimate revenue.”

“And the fifty million from our vault? The actual money Rahsaan and Victor stole from us in the first place?”