Page 49 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Coffee ain’t food.”

“It’s what I had.”

I reached over without asking, popped the console, and pulled out a protein bar I kept in there for exactly this kind of stubbornness. Dropped it in his lap. “Eat that.”

“I’m not hungry, Amai.”

“Nigga, I’m not asking.” I kept my voice even. “You not about to sit in my truck, starving yourself. I’ve lost people too, Kaisen. Grief don’t stop a man from eating a damn protein bar.”

He looked at it in his lap like he was over it, then tore the wrapper and ate it anyway, mechanical, distant, not a single word of complaint. Old Kaisen would’ve made a joke about me mothering him. This one just did what I told him, and that obedience put me on edge.

“Talk to me,” I said. “For real. Not the version you give Winston. The version you’d give me if we wasn’t beefing over my woman.”

“There’s nothing to give you. My son is gone. I’m supposed to be happy about that? What do y’all want from me? Damn!”

“Nobody said happy. I’m asking if you’re hiding something from me. ’Cause if you are, you need to tell me now, while it’s just us in this truck. Not later, when it’s a problem I gotta clean up after the fact.”

“I’m not hiding anything.”

“I hope not.” I let that hang a beat longer than comfortable, same way I would with anybody else I was testing. “’Cause I’ve buried enough people I love this year already. I ain’t got room to bury another one behind you being too proud to say you need something. I’ve been on your ass, but you know you deserved that shit for crossing boundaries.”

He didn’t answer, but I caught his jaw tightening and watched his hand go still against his knee where it had been tapping a second before. Small crack. I couldn’t see all the way through it yet, but it was there.

“Whatever you dealing with,” I said, “you dealing with it with me. Not by yourself. Not off doing something stupid ’cause you think it proves something. You hear me? At the end of the day, you still my brother, and that’s the only reason I ain’t killed your ass. You know I’ve killed men for less, Kaisen.”

“I hear you.”

“That ain’t the same as agreeing.”

“It’s what you’re getting, Amai. Now stop fucking with me.”

I let it go because pushing too hard on a grieving man is like pushing on a bruise—you’ll get a reaction, just not the one you want. I turned my attention back to the road, and after a minute, I brought it back to the thing that had gotten us in this truck together in the first place.

“Tell me about Fontenot’s,” I said. “I want to hear more about what you think they have going on.”

That was the door Kaisen still walked through faster than any other, even now. I felt him shift, settle into the part of himself that still worked right—the part that solved problems and saw patterns other people missed. Whatever the last two months had taken from him, they hadn’t touched that.

“Marguerite Fontaine runs it,” he said. “Family business, three generations, been serving the Seventh Ward and half the Ninth since ’61. Legitimate as hell on paper. Good reputation, fair prices, nobody’s got a bad word to say about her.”

“And?”

“And in the last eight months, she’s handled four funerals for men who worked Rahsaan’s corners. Low-level guys—the kind who don’t usually get a real sendoff. No obituary, no big church service, quick turnaround. Buried or cremated within seventy-two hours, every time. That’s fast. Faster than normal, even for a family trying to save money.”

“People rush funerals for all kinds of reasons.”

“I know that.” He wasn’t defensive about it, which told me he’d already run through every objection I could throw before I threw it. Kaisen never brought me half a theory. Only whole ones, load-tested. “But it’s not just the speed. It’s the timing. Every one of those four funerals landed within a week of something we know Rahsaan needed handled—moving product after we hit the warehouse on Tchoupitoulas, relocating after the vault got emptied, going dark after Victor. Same window every time. One of his people gets buried quietly through the same funeral home.”

I turned that over, thinking about refrigerated storage nobody questioned, embalming rooms most people never saw the inside of, hearses that came and went at all hours without anybody blinking twice. That was the whole business—nobody clocks a funeral home moving a body at two in the morning. That’s the perfect cover, and Rahsaan was desperate enough to use whatever was lying around.

“That’s cold,” I said. “Even for him.”

“Desperate men use what’s available. Refrigerated units big enough to hold a body can hold a lot of other things too. Product. Cash. Weapons, if you package it right. Records room in the back logs every service, every vehicle that comes and goes—if he’s moving through there, there’s a paper trail somewhere, even if it’s not a sloppy one.”

“You think Fontaine knows what she’s sitting on?”

“I think she might not have a choice. Family like that, three generations built on a reputation, somebody leans on you the right way, you do what keeps the lights on. Doesn’t mean she’s dirty. Might just mean she’s scared.”

“And if she’s complicit?”