Page 43 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

A muscle in Amai’s jaw ticked. “Still out there. Rahsaan moved it before Victor died, best we can tell. We’re working leads.”

“So, we’re funding a war off recovered money from a dead man’s fortune, while the actual theft against this family sits unresolved, and the man who orchestrated half of it is still breathing somewhere in this city.” I sat back. “That’s not a victory, son. That’s unchecked disrespect.”

“It’s progress,” Amai said.

“It’s progress,” I agreed, “which is a different thing than winning, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t confuse the two in front of me, ’cause I’ve watched men confuse the two right up until the day it killed ’em.”

We went back and forth like that for a while longer—personnel, who we could trust and who we couldn’t, which of Rahsaan’s old lieutenants were showing signs of switching sides now that the writing was on the wall, whether we needed to bring more soldiers in from the Baton Rouge operation or whether that would spread us too thin. Amai answered every question sharp and specific, numbers, names, dates, the way a man answers when he’s actually been doing the work instead of talking about doing the work, and I gave him that, silently, the way I give my sons credit, which is to say I noticed it and didn’t say a word about it out loud, because praise makes men lazy. I never had the patience to find out whether that was actually true or just something I told myself so I wouldn’t have to say something kind.

Kaisen sat through all of it without contributing a single word. Not one. Didn’t ask a question, didn’t correct a figure, didn’t do the thing he used to do where he’d interrupt his brother just to prove he’d been paying closer attention. Back then, the two of them used to compete over every scrap of my approval like dogs fighting over one bone, even when there was a whole butcher shop behind me.

That silence sat wrong on him. Wronger than the calm had, if I’m honest, because at least the calm had words attached to it that I could push against. The silence was just absence, and absence don’t give you nothing to grab onto.

“Kaisen,” I said, finally cutting Amai off mid-sentence, which he didn’t appreciate, judging by the look he gave me, but I didn’t care. “You got anything to add to any of this, or you just here to take up a chair?”

Kaisen looked up slowly, like he was surfacing from somewhere a good deal deeper than the room we were sitting in.

“I’ve been listening,” he said.

“Listening ain’t the same as contributing. I got a whole wall of security cameras that listen. I need my son to think.”

His eyes flickered—quick, there and gone, and if I hadn’t spent seventy years reading rooms for a living, I might’ve missed it entirely. Not hurt. Not anger either. A private, cold amusement, like he’d heard a joke nobody else in the room was in on.

“You want me to think,” Kaisen repeated.

“That’s what I just said, yeah.”

“Alright.” He sat forward for the first time since he’d walked in, elbows on his knees, and for a second—just a second—I saw a flicker of the son I recognized, the one who used to lean into a problem like it owed him money. “If Rahsaan’s smart enough to stay off the routes we’ve already burned, and smart enough not to use anybody with a history that traces back to him, then he’s using somebody new. Somebody without a file. Somebody who’s never worked for him before and has no reason for us to be watching them.”

Amai went quiet. I noticed the shift in him—the slight lean forward, the way his eyes narrowed just a hair, the attention a man pays when his brother’s said a point worth hearing instead of just filling silence.

“Go on,” Amai said.

“Marguerite Fontaine’s funeral home,” Kaisen said. “You said she’s still handling bodies for his network. If she’s scared enough of Amai to say yes to working for us now, she’s the kind of person who hedges. People who hedge don’t fully commit to one side. She’s probably still passing information back to Rahsaan’s people, just quieter now, just careful about it. If I were him, I wouldn’t trust her either—but I’d use the fact that everyone assumes she’s neutralized. That’s exactly the kind of blind spot he’d exploit. Watch her a while longer before you fully trust the yes she gave you. See who visits her that doesn’t have a reason to.”

Nobody said anything for a second.

I sat there looking at my son—this new, quiet, unbothered version of him, delivering a piece of actual strategy calm as you please. No fire in it, no need to be praised for it, no glancing at me to see if I approved the way he used to, hungry for it, back when hungry was the whole engine that ran him. A cold thread crawled up my spine that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Because it was good. It was a good read. Better than good—sharp, specific, the kind of thinking that comes from a man who’s spent a great deal of quiet time lately turning problems over in his head with nobody watching, nobody to perform for, nobody he needed to convince of anything.

That should’ve pleased me. A son thinking clearly, contributing, back in the fold, exactly what I’d told him to do not twenty minutes before.

It didn’t please me.

Because the boy who said it wasn’t fighting for my approval anymore, and a Landry man who’d stopped fighting for approval had generally stopped needing it. And a man who’d stopped needing anything from you is a man you can’t steer no more, not with fear, not with money, not with blood, and not with a single tool I have spent my whole life learning how to use.

“That’s good,” Amai said slowly, still looking at his brother like he was trying to work out the same math I was working out. “That’s actually good.”

“I told you I’d suck it up,” Kaisen said, and there it was again, that tight pull at the corner of his mouth, gone as quickly as it came.

I looked at him for a long moment. Cigar gone cold in the tray. Folder still open on the desk between us, full of numbers that suddenly felt less important than they had five minutes earlier.

“Alright,” I said finally, because there wasn’t nothing else to say that wouldn’t have shown my hand more than I was ready to show it. “Go check on Fontaine. Both of you. Together.”

“Together,” Amai repeated, like the word tasted strange in his mouth.

“You heard me.”