Page 52 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

I reached into my jacket and set a card on the shelf beside her. Plain. Just a number.

“And if I find out later that you knew,” I said, “if I find out you were a willing part of this and you stood here and played confused—I will come back here, and I won’t knock. There will not be a conversation.”

I stepped back.

“I’m not going to ask you to tell me anything tonight,” I said. “I don’t need you scared into lying. You think about what I said. You figure out which situation you’re actually in. And then you decide what kind of woman you want to be when this is over.”

She looked at the card on the shelf. Then back at me.

“He said if I told anyone, he’d burn it down,” she said. “With me inside.”

“He’s running out of people to carry his threats,” I replied. “Think about that.”

I nodded to Kaisen, and we walked out the back.

The drive back uptown took twenty minutes. Kaisen sat quietly, looking at the photographs on his phone—the ledger pages, the supply log, the hearse bay documentation. Organizing them without being asked. Filing them somewhere in his head alongside everything else he’d been filing for weeks.

I pulled through the gate at Winston’s estate and stopped in the driveway.

“She didn’t do it willingly,” Kaisen said, not looking up from his phone.

“No.”

“But she knows more than she gave you.”

“She’ll talk.” I put the truck in park. “She just needed tonight to decide she’s more afraid of what he’ll do if she stays quiet than what I’ll do if she doesn’t.”

Kaisen scrolled to the last photograph and locked his phone. He sat there another second, his hand flat on his knee.

“You want me to reach out to Priest about cross-referencing the ledger against the other hits?” he asked.

“Send me the photos. I’ll handle it.”

He nodded and got out. Closed the door without slamming it. Walked toward the house without looking back, and that was the whole thing right there—old Kaisen would have had three more points to make and an opinion about the drive home. This one just walked.

I watched him reach the front door and go inside. Then, I pulled out of the driveway.

I decided to stop and check on Delphine before linking with Priest. She was cool as hell, and I appreciated have someone real around who would tell me I’m fucking up.

Delphine’s porch light was on.

It was always on after dark, which I had learned not because she told me but because I had been here enough times at enough hours to notice. I parked at the curb behind a car and got out.

I had a bag from the hardware store in the passenger seat. Water heater pressure valve, the kind her water heater had been missing based on the sound it made the last time I was here—a vibration and a low knock that meant the unit was working too hard, and the valve had corroded to the point of uselessness. I’d noticed it three Sundays ago. I’d bought the part a week later. I was here now because I had the part and forty minutes to get her water heater running.

I knocked.

She took a minute. Then the porch light shifted, and I heard her voice through the door.

“Who is it?”

“Amai.”

A pause. “Truth ain’t here.”

“I know.”

Another pause, longer, and then the door opened. She had on a housecoat and slippers and the same reading glasses she wore pushed up on her forehead at Sunday dinner. She looked at me, then at the bag, then back at me.