Page 80 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“I’m sure.” I settled back against the pillows, the exhaustion from the whole day finally catching up with me in a way I could feel in my teeth. “Grief makes people do strange shit, Amai. I know that better than anybody right now. Don’t mean every strange thing somebody does is a threat.”

“And if it is?”

I looked at him, really looked, and thought about the way Kaisen’s voice had cracked over the word uncle, the genuine wet shine in his eyes when he said it, set right up against the way that other word—daughter—had slipped out of him so easy, so unthinking, like it had been sitting right behind his teeth the whole time, waiting for an opening.

He was a grieving man standing in a hospital doorway, holding too many gifts for a baby that wasn’t his.

“Then we deal with it when it’s actually a problem,” I said. “Not before.”

Amai didn’t look convinced, not fully, but he let it sit, leaned down and kissed my forehead instead of pushing the conversation any further that night. “Get some sleep. I got her.”

I closed my eyes, and in the dark behind my eyelids, I could still see it—Kaisen’s face bent toward the bassinet, that soft, hungry attention he hadn’t quite managed to hide, the balloons still bumping gently against each other somewhere across the room, tethered to a gift he’d bought for a child he had no legal, biological, or rightful claim to.

Grief made people do strange things.

I just couldn’t shake the feeling, even half-asleep, that whatever this was, it had started feeling less like a man checking in on family and more like somebody quietly keeping tabs.

Chapter 12

KAISEN

The hallway outside Truth’s room was empty except for a nurse’s station forty feet down, its counter cluttered with clipboards and Stanley cups. I kept the limp going until I passed the second set of double doors, favoring my right side the way I’d practiced in front of my bathroom mirror for three days before ever showing up with those balloons. The cane tapped soft against the tile with each step—click, drag, click, drag—a rhythm I’d built and rebuilt until it stopped feeling like a performance and started feeling like the truth.

It wasn’t the truth. That was the thing I had to keep reminding myself, walking those first fifty feet: I felt fine. Better than fine. The stab wound in my side had closed up weeks ago into a thick pink scar I could press on without flinching, and the gunshot to my spleen—the one Amai had put there like a man leaving a receipt—had healed clean enough that I ran two miles most mornings before the sun came all the way up. I didn’t need the cane. I needed people to believe I needed it.

There’s a strategy in looking weaker than you are. My father used to say the same thing about money—never let a man see the full number, because the full number changes how he negotiates with you. I’d learned that lesson at his knee before I understood I was learning it, and now I was putting it to use against the very family that taught it to me. Amai believed the limp. He believed the wince when I lowered myself into a chair. He believed I was still healing, still fragile, still one hard shove away from another hospital bed, and that belief bought me things a man at full strength couldn’t get: sympathy, a slower guard, the benefit of the doubt in rooms where doubt should’ve been the only thing on offer.

I turned the corner past the vending machines and let the limp fall away like a coat I’d been carrying over one arm. My shoulders came back level. My stride lengthened. By the time I hit the elevator bank, I was walking the way I actually walked—quick, purposeful, the gait of a man who’d never lost anything to a bullet or a blade.

The elevator doors opened on an empty car, and I stepped inside. I caught my reflection in the brushed steel panel beside the buttons. I looked tired. Not from the walk. From the whole night, the whole week, the months since Dr. Broussard turned that wand and found one heartbeat where there used to be two.

I pressed the button for the parking garage and rode down alone.

This wasn’t cruelty, what I was doing. I want to be clear with myself about that, because a man has to be honest in the privacy of his own head, even if he can’t be honest anywhere else. The cane, the limp, the humble posture in that doorway—all of it was strategy in service of something bigger than my own comfort. Amai had already shot me once for standing too close to what he’d decided was his. If he thought I was still weak, still recovering, still no threat worth wasting bullets on, then he’d keep underestimating me right up until the moment it mattered that he didn’t see it coming.

You don’t show your hand to a man who’s already proven he’ll cut your fingers off to see the cards. Fuckin’ savage.

The parking garage smelled like exhaust and disinfectant, that particular hospital combination that clings to concrete no matter how many times they hose it down. I found my car on the third level, backed into a spot near the stairwell where the security cameras had a blind spot I’d clocked on the way in—old habit, the kind you don’t turn off, even when you’re not doing anything wrong. I got in, closed the door softly, and sat there for a second with my hands on the wheel before I even reached for my phone.

The gift bags I hadn’t given her—the extra two, the ones with the diaper bag and the sound machine—sat in my back seat where I’d left them, still wrapped. I’d bought more than I needed on purpose, the way you always buy more than the occasion calls for when you’re trying to prove something to a room that already suspects you.

I pulled my phone from my jacket pocket and opened the app.

It was disguised as something else on the home screen—a weather widget, innocuous, the kind of thing nobody looks at twice—but underneath that skin was a live feed running off a low-power camera module I’d had installed inside the stuffed bear I bought for Tru weeks before she was even born.

The bear had been sitting in a box in my nursery for two months, waiting for a birth date I didn’t know yet. When Winston’s man told me the labor had started, I’d grabbed it off the shelf without even thinking twice.

This wasn’t spying. I need to be precise about that distinction, because the word spying implies something ugly, something predatory, and what I was doing was neither of those things. This was due diligence. This was a father—because that’s what I was, biology be damned, DNA test be damned, everything that came out of that clinic be damned—making sure his daughter was safe in a house run by a man who solved every problem with a bullet and every disagreement with a fist.

Amai had proven, over and over, that he couldn’t be trusted to keep anyone safe who wasn’t directly under his thumb. He’d proven it with the vault. He’d proven it with Victor. He’d proven it with everybody who had dropped in this purge, every enemy he’d made who didn’t have to be made, every innocent bystander tangled up in his war because he refused to fight it clean. A man like that doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt just because he happened to share DNA with the one thing left worth protecting.

I tapped the feed open.

The video quality wasn’t great—the bear’s placement gave it a low, off-center angle from the rolling table by the window—but the audio came through clear enough. I could hear the hum of the hospital’s HVAC system, the soft rustle of blankets, and underneath all of it, Truth’s voice.

I leaned my head back against the headrest, closed my eyes, and let myself replay the moment I’d walked into that room, because something about it kept snagging in my chest like fabric on a nail.

I wasn’t asking to hold a grenade, Amai.