Page 83 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

She wasn’t ruling out the possibility that I was exactly what Amai feared. I understood that. I wasn’t naive about the words themselves. But she was refusing to condemn me in advance, refusing to let Amai’s paranoia become her own without evidence, and that refusal—that small, stubborn insistence on fairness even in a room she had every reason to want to simplify—told me more about where Truth’s heart actually sat than anything else in that conversation.

Amai didn’t sound convinced. I heard it in the silence that followed, the particular quality of a man’s quiet when he disagrees but has decided, for now, not to push it.

“Get some sleep,” he said instead. “I got her.”

The audio settled into the low hum of hospital machinery, the soft rustle of Truth adjusting herself in the bed, and then nothing much else worth listening for. I sat in my car with the phone still in my hand, screen glowing faint against the dim garage light, and I let the silence stretch out while I put the pieces together in my head the way I’d learned to put pieces together my whole life—methodically, without letting emotion get ahead of logic.

Here is what I knew, sitting in that parking garage with the engine still off:

Amai believed the surviving child was his because a laboratory told him so. That was the entirety of his claim—a piece of paper, a chain of custody, a technician’s signature. He hadn’t built anything toward that fatherhood the way I had. He hadn’t converted a guest room into a nursery with his own hands. He hadn’t lain awake calculating crib safety ratings or debating gray tones for nursery bedding. He simply woke up one day and discovered biology had handed him something he hadn’t earned, and now he stood in doorways with his arm flat against my chest like he had to protect what could be mine from me.

That wasn’t fatherhood. That was inheritance. And inheritance, unlike devotion, doesn’t require a man to prove himself worthy of what he’s been given. But I’d make sure he’d prove it with a pound of flesh before this was all over.

Some part of Truth still recognized what I already knew: that a man’s right to a child comes from more than genetics. It comes from presence, from labor, from the thousand small decisions that build a life around a person before that person even exists. I had made those decisions. Amai had made none of them. He had simply arrived, late, with a paternity test in his hand, and claimed a throne he hadn’t built.

And Amai’s refusal to let me near that child—his flat hand against my chest, his cold that’s what you get—that wasn’t protection. Protection implies a threat worth protecting against, and I posed no threat to that baby beyond the threat of loving her too visibly for Amai’s comfort. What Amai was actually doing, underneath the language of safety, was control. He controlled who got close to Truth. He controlled who got close to Trumai. He controlled the narrative Truth was fed about me, day after day, until suspicion became her reflex instead of her considered judgment. A man that controlling doesn’t stop at the nursery door. He extends that control into every room of a woman’s life until she can’t tell the difference between his protection and his ownership.

And a woman living under that kind of control, no matter how much she loved the man exercising it, was not free. She was managed. She was isolated by degrees so gradual she’d never notice the walls closing until she tried to leave and found there was nowhere left that felt like outside.

I thought about Amai’s world—the bodies I knew he’d dropped in the past several months alone, the purge tearing through the city with his name attached to every casualty, the enemies he was making faster than he could bury them. A man surrounded by that much violence doesn’t get to also claim safety as his gift to the people he loves. Eventually, someone he hadn’t accounted for would find a gap in his defenses. Eventually, the war he’d been fighting so recklessly would find its way back to the house he swears is untouchable. And when that happens—not if, when—Truth and Trumai would be standing in the blast radius of a life Amai had built entirely on his own terms, with no room for anyone else’s judgment about what safety actually required.

I wasn’t thinking about hurting anyone. I wasn’t plotting violence or rehearsing some dramatic confrontation. What I was doing was simpler and, I believed, more responsible than anything violent could ever be: I was recognizing a pattern, the way you recognize a structural crack in a foundation before the whole house comes down around the people living inside it. Amai’s world was unsustainable. It would end—eventually, inevitably—in exactly the kind of loss he’d already caused once, with my son, with the twin who never survived long enough to take a single breath outside his mother’s body.

Somebody had to be the one who saw that clearly enough to act before it happened again. Somebody had to be willing to make the hard decision, the unpopular decision, the decision that would look, to anyone standing outside the situation, like something other than what it actually was. My father had taught me that too, in his own cold way—that the men who actually protect their families are rarely the ones who get to look heroic doing it. Sometimes protection looks like control from the outside. Sometimes it looks like taking something away from someone who doesn’t yet understand they’re better off without it.

I wasn’t going to leave my family despite whatever label Amai insisted on using in front of witnesses.

I opened my eyes and looked out through the windshield at the concrete pillar in front of my car, the fluorescent light overhead humming faint and yellow, and I felt a peace that I hadn’t felt in months. Not rage. Not the grief that had been sitting on me like wet concrete since the ultrasound. Just peace.

I had a duty now. Not a plan yet—not something I could point to and name with a date and a method—but a duty, a direction, a reason to keep building toward the thing I’d been quietly constructing on that riverboat for longer than even I wanted to admit. The nursery I’d already assembled with my own hands. The DNA sample I’d taken from Amai’s own bloodied gauze, sitting in a lab drawer with his name printed clean across the label, waiting for a day I hadn’t let myself fully imagine until right now, sitting in this parking garage, listening to the woman I loved defend me against the man who had no idea what was coming for him.

I closed the app.

The screen went dark, and I sat there a moment longer in the quiet of my own car, feeling calmer than I had any right to feel after everything the last twelve hours had cost me. I looked up through the windshield toward the hospital tower rising above the parking structure, counting floors until I found the one I believed held Truth’s room, though I couldn’t actually see the window from this angle.

You are one, she’d said.

I held onto that, the way you hold onto the one true thing in a room full of noise. And I turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of the space, already thinking about how much time I needed to finish stocking the riverboat with supplies.

Not long now. Not long at all.

I couldn’t leave them there. Not with him. Somebody had to be willing to do what love actually required, even when it didn’t look like love to anyone standing on the outside looking in.

I pulled out of the garage and merged onto the street, and for the first time since the ultrasound, I didn’t feel like a man who’d lost his son.

I felt like a man with somewhere to be.

Chapter 13

AMAI

Ihad eighty-four million dollars spread across offshore accounts, three legitimate storefronts in Orleans Parish, and enough hardware locked in the floorboards of my basement to outfit a small militia. I’d stared down federal indictments, dodged three car bombs in my twenties, and shut down Victor Baptiste’s operations without losing a single night of sleep.

None of that shit meant a damn thing at three o’clock in the morning when a seven-pound human being decided she was breathing too quietly.

I was standing over the bassinet in our bedroom, barefoot on the hardwood, wearing nothing but gray sweatpants. My iPad was propped on the nightstand with the live video feed running. My iPhone was sitting on the dresser with the audio spiked to maximum sensitivity. On my wrist, the Apple Watch was synced to the smart monitor wrapped around Trumai’s left ankle, tracking her heart rate and oxygen levels down to the decimal point. And across the room, on the wall-mounted flat screen I’d hardwired into the house security grid, the infrared camera gave me a clean, four-angle split view of the nursery down the hall, even though she wasn’t even sleeping in there yet.

Four screens. Four different ways to tell me my daughter was fine.