Page 68 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

She didn’t ask for details. She didn’t ask how many, or who, or what it looked like. She crossed the kitchen and put her arms around me, and I stood there in my own house with blood I hadn’t fully washed off still under my nails. For the first time, the noise in my head went quiet.

Not gone. Just quiet.

I held onto that because it was the closest thing to peace I had.

Chapter 10

KAISEN

The boat sat low and quiet in a cut of water most people didn’t know existed, tucked behind a bend where the grain elevator’s shadow fell across the river until noon, and after that, the sun did the rest of the work, throwing enough glare off the water that anybody looking from the pier would see nothing but light.

I’d chosen this spot for exactly that reason. Nobody came out here. Nobody had a reason to. The old shipping company that used to run barges through here had died along with everything else on that stretch of waterfront, and what was left behind was rot and rust and the kind of silence that made men uncomfortable if they stayed too long.

I wasn’t uncomfortable. I’d made peace with silence a long time ago, mostly because nobody ever gave me a choice.

I tried to get Amai to choose a different location for obvious reasons. The last thing I needed was for him to see my casino boat. Amai is the type to notice something and store it for later. Eventually, it would be a thread he kept pulling until my plan unraveled.

I stood on the upper deck behind the reinforced glass—one-way, tinted just enough that from outside it looked like nothing but dark windows on an abandoned hull, the kind scrappers left alone because there was nothing left inside worth stripping. From inside, I could see everything. That had been the whole point of the design. I told the crew I wanted privacy. What I actually wanted was the ability to watch without being watched. If I was being honest with myself, and lately, I tried to be, at least in the quiet moments when nobody could hear me talking to myself like a man losing something slow, that was the story of my whole life. Watching. Never being seen the way I needed to be seen. Not by Winston. Not by Amai. Not, in the end, by Truth, though I still believed, in the part of me that hadn’t yet caught up to what I was about to do, that she would see me eventually. That she’d look up one day and finally understand who’d been standing next to her the whole time, patient, careful, real.

The binoculars were military grade, the kind that adjusted for glare and distance without me having to fight the settings. I had them trained on the pier a half mile out, my elbows braced against the deck rail to keep my hands steady. Beside me, on a folding table that I’d bolted down myself because I didn’t trust anybody else’s hands on this project, sat a directional receiver I’d taken from a surveillance kit Priest didn’t know was missing from inventory two years back. It caught sound in narrow cones from long distances, filtered out wind noise better than anything you could buy retail, and it had been sitting in a drawer in my security room collecting dust until this morning, when I remembered exactly what it was for.

I’d known where Amai was sending Rahsaan the second he said the word, “pier.” I didn’t say anything else about it after the first push—pushing twice would’ve made him look, and looking was the one thing I couldn’t afford. So, I let it go. Told myself the odds were low he’d ever find out what sat forty feet off that same shoreline, camouflaged, dormant, waiting for me to finish the last of the work.

The work was finished now. Had been for about a week.

Down below me, past the casino floor I’d left half-preserved—the felt tables reupholstered, the chandeliers rewired, a low hum of ambient light I kept on sometimes just to remind myself the place could still feel like something other than a hiding spot—there was a nursery with two windows that caught the morning sun just right. And in that nursery, there was one crib made up with sheets I’d picked out myself, gray with little clouds stitched into the corners.

I thought about that crib more than I probably should’ve. I thought about it the way another man might think about a scar—something permanent, something that ached in specific weather, something you learned to live around instead of learning to heal.

The pier came into focus.

Rahsaan’s truck was already parked at the mouth of the access road, two men flanking him, both keeping their hands loose and visible the way men do when they already know the math isn’t in their favor. Amai stood at the far end of the walkway with Priest a few feet behind him. Teal and the others were positioned the way I’d have positioned them myself if this had been my operation instead of his—clean lines, no wasted movement, professional in the specific way that made me swell with pride every time I watched my brother work. Because, for all the ways I hated him, I never once doubted his competence. That was the thing nobody outside the family understood about Amai. He wasn’t dangerous because he was wild. He was dangerous because he wasn’t. Not anymore.

I adjusted the receiver, angled it toward the pier, and Rahsaan’s voice came through in pieces, thinned by distance and wind but audible enough.

Static. A gap where the wind picked up and swallowed whatever Amai said back.

I didn’t need the words to know the shape of the conversation. I’d grown up watching Amai negotiate, threaten, and perform calm right before he stopped performing it. I knew this particular silence—the kind he used right before he asked a question he already knew the answer to. He was going to make Rahsaan say it. Out loud. Elias and Silas. He was going to force the man to put those two names in his own mouth before he killed him, because that was the only kind of justice Amai understood. The kind you extracted syllable by syllable, the kind that required somebody else’s voice to make it feel earned.

I found that I didn’t disagree with the impulse. I understood it in my bones, actually. In a way that unsettled me more than I wanted to admit. What I disagreed with—what I’d come out here half-expecting and was now watching confirm itself in real time—was the theater of it. The performance. Amai standing at the end of that walkway like a man delivering a eulogy for two boys he’d let die years ago because he’d been too powerless to stop it. Using that grief now as the engine for something that had stopped being about Elias and Silas a long time ago and had become, plainly, about Amai needing an audience for his own righteousness.

I’d expected him to lose it. That was the man from the warehouse who no longer knew the difference between justice and appetite. I’d been braced for that man to show up again, because that man was easier to understand, easier to hate cleanly. Instead, the receiver kept picking up fragments of a voice that didn’t rise, didn’t crack, didn’t do anything except stay level in a way that felt less like control and more like something had been removed from him permanently.

“—remember a lot of things, Rahsaan,” his voice came through, flat, almost bored. “I remember you sitting across from me in that warehouse⁠—”

Static swallowed the rest.

I lowered the binoculars for a second and pressed the heel of my hand against my eye. When I looked again, I told myself something I’d been telling myself for weeks now, quiet and steady: This is the man raising her. This is the man Truth trusts to keep our daughter safe.

Not our daughter. Hers and his. I knew that. The DNA had said as much. But in the version of the story I’d built for myself—the one that let me sleep some nights, the one that had let me spend the better part of the last few months pouring money and labor into a boat nobody else knew existed —she was still, in every way that mattered, part of a family I intended to have. Kids didn’t need to share blood to be yours. I believed that the way other men believed in God, unshakeable, immune to evidence.

The wind shifted, and through the receiver, I caught a woman’s voice, thin and frightened, cutting through everything else on that pier like a blade through wet paper.

“Rahsaan, baby, where⁠—”

I put the binoculars back to my eyes fast enough that my hands shook doing it.

They’d brought her out. Odessa. I recognized her from the file Priest had circulated weeks ago. An old woman with gray hair pulled back neat despite everything, wearing a housedress that looked like it had been picked for church instead of whatever this was. Two of Amai’s men walked her out from a van parked near the warehouse, and even from this distance, I could see the confusion on her face. The way she kept turning her head like she was looking for something familiar to hold onto and finding nothing.