Page 130 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

Chapter 23

AMAI

For thirty days, I tore New Orleans down to its foundations and found nothing but dirt.

Thirty days. Seven hundred and twenty hours of asphalt, broken doorframes, screeching tires, and empty rooms.

I started in New Orleans, kicking through every commercial property, storage facility, and residential address registered to Kaisen’s name, his fake corporations, and the shell LLCs Winston had set up for him over the last seven years. When those turned up cold, I expanded the grid. I ran crews through Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Shreveport, and down into the marshy fringes of Houma.

Then Mississippi. We raided an off-grid cabin outside of Biloxi that Kaisen had bought under an alias four years ago. I kicked the front door off its hinges with enough force to splinter the frame into kindling, my Glock up, my finger trembling on the trigger reset, screaming Truth’s name into the stagnant air.

Nothing. Just dusty furniture covered in plastic sheeting and a dead hornet’s nest in the corner of the ceiling.

Then Texas. Beaumont. Port Arthur. Houston. I sent men through high-rise condominiums, gated subdivisions, and private storage lots. I pulled bankers out of their beds at three in the morning, holding them over balcony railings until they surrendered account numbers, wire transfers, and safe deposit records.

Every wire transfer stopped three weeks before the hits on my trap houses. Every credit card had been closed. Every vehicle Kaisen owned was sitting in a long-term parking garage near Louis Armstrong Airport—planted there to waste my time, to send my men chasing shadows through TSA logs while he vanished into thin air.

I didn’t sleep.

When your mind stops functioning on human rhythms, sleep stops being an option anyway. It becomes a violent hallucination that hits you in three-minute increments while sitting at red lights or leaning against the hood of the truck while Priest refueled. My brain felt like it had been scrubbed with wire wool. My skull throbbed with a persistent, low-frequency hum that never cut off, fueled by black coffee, stale nicotine, and a concentrated, poisonous guilt that was rotting me from the inside out.

“Amai, did you send … ?”

Her voice echoed in my head every time the wind shifted. Every time the tires hummed against the interstate.

She had called me. She had stood in my foyer, holding our daughter, sensing the danger in the air like she always did, asking for clarity. And what had I done? I had barked orders into the phone. I had been so consumed by two worthless stash houses getting hit—so obsessed with Rahsaan’s ghost and the pride of my street empire—that I had told her to basically trust the process and hung up the fucking phone.

I had handed my brother the keys to my life because I was too busy playing king of a graveyard.

By the third week, I stopped going to the safe houses. I stopped sleeping in my own bed.

I moved into the nursery.

The Garden District house was silent, haunted by the lingering scent of Delphine’s cooking and the faint, sweet trace of cocoa butter and lavender that belonged entirely to Truth. The main bedroom upstairs felt like an open grave. I couldn’t cross the threshold without seeing her sitting at the vanity or curled on the edge of the mattress, nursing Trumai, looking up at me with those sharp, beautiful hazel eyes that saw through every piece of armor I had ever built.

So, I stayed in the nursery.

I didn’t turn on the overhead chandelier. The only light came from the soft, pale blue glow of the digital baby monitor perched on the corner of the changing table. The camera was pointed down at the white wooden crib—the crib I had assembled with my bare hands, measuring every slat, making sure every bolt was tightened to the exact torque specification so nothing would ever wobble.

The crib was empty.

The blush-pink fitted sheet was pristine. The small, weighted swaddle blanket Delphine had washed sat folded over the railing, completely undisturbed. Beside it, the small plush shark I’d bought when Truth first laughed at my overprotective nonsense was propped against the bumper.

I sat on the hardwood floor with my back against the baseboard, my knees pulled up, my forearms resting on them, my heavy tactical boots unlaced. A half-empty bottle of bourbon sat between my thighs, gathering dust, untouched for two days because getting drunk dulled the razor edge of the rage, and I needed the rage sharp. I needed it cutting me open every second of every hour so I wouldn’t stop breathing.

My Glock 19 sat on the floor beside my right knee, the slide racked, the safety nonexistent.

Outside, rain tapped against the glass—a slow, relentless New Orleans drizzle that made the moss in the live oaks hang heavy and dark.

The baby monitor emitted a faint, static hiss from the speaker on the nightstand. It was connected to the secondary receiver, transmitting nothing from the empty room back into the empty room. Just white noise. A hollow, metallic hum of total absence.

I stared at the screen. My eyes burned, the capillaries burst into jagged webs of crimson, my vision blurring until the glowing blue frame looked like a portal into another life.

I reached out, my fingers trembling slightly as I picked up the handheld unit. I dragged the pad of my thumb over the little talk-back button on the side.

I held it down.

The static clicked, opening the line into the dark, silent room.