Page 7 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“I hear you.”

“Good.” She picked her spoon back up like the sermon was officially over, and just like that, the weight in the room lifted half an inch. Mama had a way of doing that—saying the hardest thing plainly and then moving on before it could calcify into something heavier than it needed to be.

We ate in easier quiet after that. She asked about the house, made Amai walk her through two of the rooms like she was appraising it for resale, told him the countertops were nice but the guest bathroom needed better lighting, “Unless you want everybody looking ashy in your house, and I know you don’t.” Amai actually laughed at that, low and surprised, like he hadn’t expected to laugh today either.

By the time she was rinsing bowls in the sink, refusing my help, refusing Amai’s help, insisting she raised four girls and could handle a sink full of dishes without assistance from anybody, the kitchen felt like a kitchen again instead of the inside of a wound.

“I ain’t forgot,” she said, drying her hands on a dish towel that definitely wasn’t hers either, “about that Sunday dinner I demanded.”

I looked up.

“This Sunday. Bring that crazy motherfucker with you.”

I laughed. It came out of me before I could stop it, the first real laugh since the ultrasound, surprised and a little watery around the edges, but real. It felt strange in my chest, like a muscle I’d forgotten I had.

“I heard you, Ms. Delphine,” Amai said.

“Good.” She hung the towel on the oven handle, satisfied, already gathering her purse. “Bring wine.”

She hugged me one more time on her way out, held on a second longer than the first time, and told me to call her tonight even if I didn’t have anything to say, especially if I didn’t have anything to say. Then, she was gone, the Crock-Pot tucked back under her arm, off to wherever mamas went when they’d finished doing the only thing they knew how to do with grief that wasn’t theirs to carry but that they carried anyway.

The house felt different once she left. Not fixed. Just softer around the edges, like she’d sanded something down on her way through.

I was still standing in the kitchen when my phone buzzed on the counter.

Kaisen: You okay?

I looked at it for a long moment—two words, no punctuation past the question mark, nothing else. I thought about all the things I could say back, and none of them felt like they belonged to that moment.

I didn’t answer.

I set the phone face down on the counter and left it there.

Chapter 3

AMAI

The room I used for this kind of work had no windows, no clocks, and one door with a biometric lock that only four people on earth could open. Priest called it the war room the same way he called everything with a whiteboard and a lock a war room, but this morning, three weeks after Victor’s container sealed shut on the West Bank, it earned the name properly for the first time.

I got there at 4:40 in the morning. Teal and Brandon were already inside, coffee going cold in front of them, a laptop open between them with a spreadsheet neither of them had finished. DeShawn came in behind me, carrying a banker’s box of paper files—old-school, deliberately off any network—that Corinne had pulled from Baptiste Logistics before I shut the company down for good. Priest arrived last, at 4:58, looking like a man who hadn’t slept and wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

“You said this was urgent,” Priest said, dropping into a chair across from me.

“It is.”

I set my own coffee down and picked up the marker. The whiteboard behind me was still blank, which felt wrong for a room this early in the morning, so I fixed that.

“Rahsaan,” I said, and wrote the name at the top, underlined it twice.

Nobody groaned, but Brandon rubbed his face like he wanted to.

“Every name we compile in this room today,” I said, “belongs to somebody who’s ever done something for that man. Moved his money. Housed him for a night, a week, or six months. Supplied him with product, weapons, information. Carried a message he was too smart to send himself. Hid a gun he didn’t want found on him. Ran a legitimate business that laundered dirty money through clean books. Or protected somebody in his family—wife, mother, kids, cousins, doesn’t matter.”

Teal looked up from the laptop. “That’s a big net.”

“It’s supposed to be.”

Priest leaned forward, elbows on the table, and I could see him already building the argument he was about to make. “So, we’re compiling a target list of people we bring in. Squeeze them one at a time, find out who’s talked to him recently, who’s seen him, who knows where he’s sleeping.”