Page 70 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

Two shots. Center mass, from what I could tell through the scope. Rahsaan’s body jerked once and then went still against the boards. The sound of the shots reached me a beat later, flat and unremarkable against the wider chaos still playing out closer to the warehouse.

It was over that fast. Eleven years, a war that had eaten half a city’s underworld, ended in two gunshots that didn’t even sound louder than the ones that came before them.

I lowered the binoculars and stood there for a long moment, letting the receiver’s static fill the silence I didn’t know how to fill myself. Down on the pier, the gunfire tapered into something quieter—a few final shots, shouted confirmations, the specific hush that settles after violence when the living start taking stock of who’s still breathing. I watched men move with the practiced efficiency of people who’d done this before, and I understood that I was watching the machinery of my brother’s world resetting itself, preparing to erase every trace of what had just happened the same way it always did.

I felt nothing that resembled satisfaction. I want to be honest about that, because dishonesty with myself had cost me enough already. Somewhere underneath everything else, I’d expected some measure of relief—the debt for Elias and Silas finally paid, a closed door I could point to and say, see, it’s over now. We can move forward. Instead, what I felt was closer to nausea, a specific, physical discomfort located somewhere behind my sternum that didn’t dissipate no matter how many times I told myself Rahsaan had deserved every bit of it.

What I felt, more than anything, was certainty. Cold and complete, settling in my bones like a cold winter chill.

I set the binoculars down on the folding table next to the receiver still hissing low static into the empty cabin air and went below deck without any real plan for where I was walking. Just the need to move, to put my body somewhere other than that spot at the rail where I’d just watched two people die within thirty seconds of each other. I’d seen dead bodies plenty, but the sadistic display of dick swinging Amai performed to end this was sickening.

The casino floor took up most of the boat’s lower level, and I’d left more of it intact than any practical version of this plan required. The felt tables reupholstered in deep green, the brass rails polished, a bar along the back wall stocked with bottles I had no intention of drinking because I needed my head clear for what was coming. I’d told myself, building it out, that Truth deserved something beautiful, something that reminded her of the life she could’ve had if things had gone differently. If Amai hadn’t walked into that fertility clinic’s story before I had a chance to write my own version of it.

Walking through it now, past dice tables nobody would ever roll on, I understood for the first time how much of what I’d built here was designed less for her and more for the version of myself who needed proof that he could give a woman something extraordinary.

The security room sat off the main corridor, banks of monitors dark except for the two I kept live-feeding the exterior cameras—nothing to see on either except gray water and the tree line on the far shore, calm in a way that felt almost insulting given what I’d just watched. I checked the generators automatically, an old habit, confirmed the water filtration system’s gauge was reading full capacity, noted the medical room’s supply inventory was current because I’d restocked it myself two days ago with exactly the kind of equipment a woman in her third trimester might need if something went wrong and there wasn’t a hospital close enough to reach in time. I wasn’t sure when I’d be able to grab Truth or how far along she’d be, so preparation was everything.

Every system on this boat functioned. Every system was ready. I’d made sure of that the way I made sure of everything, obsessively, redundantly, because the one thing I couldn’t survive was building a sanctuary that failed the person it was built for the way every other structure in my life had failed to protect the people inside it.

I reached into my jacket and pulled out the ultrasound photo, worn soft at the corners now from how many times I’d taken it out and put it back. The black-and-white shape of a boy who never got the chance to exist outside that image. I looked at it for a long time, standing in a nursery built for a family that had already, in some fundamental way, stopped being possible the moment Dr. Broussard’s wand found only one heartbeat instead of two.

But there was still one heartbeat. That was the thing I kept returning to, the load-bearing beam under every plan I’d built since that appointment. One heartbeat, still going, still Truth’s daughter, even if she wasn’t mine by blood. And a woman I’d loved before either of us understood what we were being used for, and a life that could still exist if somebody was brave enough, determined enough, to take it. Me and Truth were the real victims in all this shit.

I put the photo back in my pocket and walked back out through the corridor, past the casino floor, and up the stairs to the deck where the binoculars still sat where I’d left them, the receiver’s static filling the space around me like weather.

Out past the shoreline, activity had shifted into cleanup—men moving with the specific, unhurried efficiency of people erasing a scene, vehicles repositioning, something being loaded that I didn’t strain to identify. Amai stood near the edge of the pier for a moment, alone, looking out at the water in a way that, from this distance, could’ve been mistaken for grief if I didn’t know better. I knew better. I’d spent a lifetime learning the difference between my brother’s stillness and my brother’s peace, and what I was watching now wasn’t peace. It was a man cataloguing a debt paid, filing it away, and already moving forward toward whatever came next, which I understood with total, settled clarity, was going to be Truth. Was always going to be Truth.

He’d go home to her tonight with blood he hadn’t fully washed off, and she’d hold him. He’d let her believe whatever version of the day he decided to give her, and she’d never know—would never be allowed to know—what her daughter’s father was actually capable of when nobody who mattered was watching.

I stood there a long time after the last of the activity on the pier finally cleared out, the light shifting orange and low across water that had swallowed a knife and a woman’s blood and would probably swallow whatever evidence remained of either by morning, indifferent to all of it the way water always was.

I thought about Truth in that house, growing rounder every week, carrying a daughter who would learn to walk on floors that had already absorbed this kind of violence into their foundation without her ever knowing it happened. I thought about our son—because he was still, in the only version of this story I could survive believing, partly mine, some fraction of him carried in whatever biological accounting the universe had used to decide which twin got to keep breathing. I thought about a little girl growing up believing the man who fed her lies and called it love was the only kind of family available to her, because nobody had ever shown her another way it could look.

I turned and looked back at the boat around me, a floating world I’d built with my own hands and my own money, and every last reserve of patience I had left in me. A world Amai didn’t know existed and couldn’t touch even if he did.

This wasn’t about winning her anymore. I understood that now with an unspeakable clarity.

I wasn’t trying to take Truth from my brother. I was pulling her out of a house on fire before the smoke finished filling her lungs, before that little girl learned to breathe it too, before either of them understood that the man they trusted to keep them safe was the danger they needed protecting from in the first place. This shit was bigger than playing house. I’d been chosen to break the generational curse that has plagued this family since its inception.

I looked out at the water one more time, at the last of the light going down orange and quiet over a pier that would forget, by tomorrow, that any of this had ever happened.

I’m getting my family out.

Chapter 11

TRUTH

3 Months Later…

Iwas thirty-nine weeks and four days pregnant, sitting at my mama’s table with a plate of smothered pork chops, rice, and butter beans in front of me, when the first contraction hit.

I didn’t say nothing. I just stopped chewing for a second, waited it out, and kept eating. Braxton Hicks had been coming and going for two weeks straight, tightening my whole stomach like somebody wringing out a towel, and I’d learned not to jump every time my body decided to practice for the real thing. Dr. Broussard told me that was normal this close to the end. She told me not to panic every time my belly got hard.

So, I didn’t panic.

I looked around that table instead—Amai on my left in a fresh white tee that fit him like it was sewed on, Mama across from me, still fussing with the greens like they hadn’t been done twenty minutes ago, Raven arguing with Honor about whether Terrance’s cousin was really “fine” or just tall, and Saroya trying to keep her youngest from throwing rice at his sister. Three months of Sunday dinners, and it still felt like somebody was going to snatch it away from me if I looked too hard at how good it was. Anytime things felt too good to be true, I’d find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Second contraction came about eleven minutes after the first.