Page 64 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“You a demon, man. Straight demon.”

“Maybe so. You just remember that while I’m here with your mama.”

He didn’t say anything to that. I heard something that might have been a fist against a wall, might have been him just breathing rough through his nose, and then the call went dead.

I set the phone on the desk and looked at it for a second, waiting to see if he’d call back right away, desperate the way scared men sometimes were. He didn’t. That told me something too—that he needed room to pace, to think, to weigh out just how much his mother was worth against whatever survival instinct had kept him buried for six weeks.

I already knew the answer. A man who loved his mother the way Rahsaan clearly did wasn’t built to sit still while she sat in a room with people like me. It might take him an hour. It might take him a day. But he was coming.

“You better hope your son show up, or I’ma make an example out of you.”

“Please don’t hurt me.”

“That’s up to your son.”

I stood, straightened my shirt, and walked back down the hall toward the room where Priest was waiting.

Whatever Rahsaan decided next, I’d finally done what six weeks of bodies hadn’t managed to do.

I’d made him choose.

Rahsaan didn’t fight the meeting once he decided to have it. That’s what I noticed first—how fast his voice changed from the night before, from that shaky, cursing man on the phone to something quieter and more businesslike when he called back three hours later to confirm. Like he’d made peace with something. Or like he thought he had a play left.

I gave him the pier off Almonaster, the old one past the abandoned grain elevator where the shipping traffic used to run before the company that owned it went under sometime in the nineties. Nobody had touched that stretch of waterfront in years except scrappers and a few homeless men who used the warehouse shells for shelter. Half the pilings were rotted through. The boards on the walkway sagged in the middle like a mouth missing teeth. I picked it because it was isolated, because there was only one real road in, and because a man trying to run had nowhere good to run to. Water on three sides, open ground on the fourth, and my people already there before he showed up.

Kaisen didn’t like it.

“Why there?” he’d said the night before, standing in my kitchen with his keys still in his hand like he hadn’t decided if he was staying long enough to sit down. “Pick somewhere else. Anywhere else.”

“Why you care where?” I asked.

I wasn’t even looking at him. I was checking rounds, breaking down and reassembling a piece I hadn’t touched in a few days, letting my hands do something while my head worked through the logistics.

“I don’t care,” he said too fast.

That was the first thing that struck me as off. Kaisen didn’t rush his lies usually. He’d let a silence sit and make you wait for it. Make you think he was choosing his words carefully. This time he just threw it out there. “I’m saying, pick somewhere with better lines. That pier’s falling apart. You want your people standing on rotted wood during a shootout?”

“My people can handle rotted wood.”

“I’m just saying⁠—”

“You said it.” I set the slide back into place and heard it click home. “Noted.”

He didn’t push it further, which was strange too, now that I think back on it. Kaisen usually pushed. If he had an opinion, he rode it into the ground, made you sick of hearing it before he let it go. This time he just stood there another minute, teeth clenched, and then he left without saying much else. I remember thinking it was odd—too immediate, too invested for a man who claimed not to care—but I had a hundred other things pulling at my attention that night, and I filed it away instead of chasing it.

Wrong move, maybe. But at the time, it felt like nothing. Everything Kaisen did lately felt like something I didn’t have room to examine. Because the war was almost over, and I wasn’t going to let my brother’s mood swings slow down the only thing that mattered to me—putting Rahsaan Boudreaux in the ground before he could put anyone else’s brother, son, or mother in there first.

I got to the pier an hour early. Priest was already there, walking the perimeter with Teal while Brandon and DeShawn set up on the warehouse side with a clean line on the approach road. I stood at the edge of the walkway and looked out at the water—brown, sluggish, moving the way it always moved along that stretch, patient and indifferent—and I let myself feel it. Not rage. Not the thing that took me over at the warehouse when Rahsaan opened his mouth about the twins.

This time I felt something colder. Something with an ending built into it already.

“Truck’s coming down the access road,” Teal said into his radio, low enough that I heard it secondhand through Priest’s earpiece before Priest repeated it to me out loud, force of habit, like I needed the translation.

“I heard him,” I said.

Priest looked at me for a second too long. “You good?”

“I’ve been good since I woke up.” That wasn’t entirely true, but it was true enough for what he needed to hear. “You got the mother?”