Page 117 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

I’m going to prove it.

What did that mean?

What the fuck did that mean?

I crossed the room in three steps and locked the door, my hands shaking so badly I almost couldn’t turn the bolt.

Then I sank onto the edge of the bed, clutching Trumai against my chest, and let the sobs come.

She was crying too now, her small body trembling, her fists curled tight against my shirt.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered into her hair. “I’m so sorry, baby. Mama’s going to fix this. I promise. I’m going to get us out of here.”

But I didn’t know how.

I didn’t know where we were. I didn’t know how to reach Amai. I didn’t know if Kaisen had a plan or if he was just making this up as he went along.

All I knew was that I had to survive.

I had to keep Trumai safe.

And I had to find a way to stop Kaisen before whatever he was planning became something I couldn’t come back from.

I rocked her gently, humming a lullaby I barely remembered the words to, and stared at the locked door.

Waiting.

Listening.

Praying that Amai would find us before it was too late.

Chapter 20

DELPHINE

Ahouse knows when tragedy is walking toward it before the door even rattles.

It was three in the morning, the kind of wet, heavy dead-of-night quiet where even the cicadas in the Seventh Ward had stopped their humming. I was sitting at my kitchen table with a mug of chicory coffee I had no business drinking at that hour, staring at a stack of unread mail and listening to the old floorboards settle.

Then came the knock.

Three hard, uneven thuds against the cypress wood of my front door. Not police. Police bang like they own the hinges. Not a neighbor looking for sugar, and not some wandering drunk off Claiborne.

It was a fist driven by panic.

I set my mug down slowly, pulled my quilted housecoat tight around my chest, and walked to the door. The floor was cold under my bare feet. When I pulled back the sheer curtain over the front glass, the breath caught in my throat.

Amai stood on my porch under the sickly yellow glow of the streetlamp.

He didn’t have on his suit jacket. His white linen shirt was rumpled, open at the throat, with dark grease and fresh blood smeared across the cuff like he’d been tearing something apart with his bare hands. But it wasn’t the blood that made my stomach drop into my shoes. It was his eyes.

Amai Landry was a man who walked into every room like the world had already surrendered to him. Arrogant. Heavy-footed. Dangerous enough to make a whole room go quiet just by breathing in it.

The man standing on my porch looked hollowed out from the inside. His shoulders were slumped, his jaw trembling under a shadow of dark stubble, and his chest heaved like he’d been running for miles through swamp water.

He didn’t have Truth with him. And he didn’t have my grandbaby.

I didn’t ask a single question through the wood. I unlocked the deadbolt, pulled the door open, and stepped aside.