Page 134 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

Terrance nodded once, his expression solemn, and left the room.

I stood alone in the nursery for five seconds.

The exhaustion was gone. The fog was gone. The paralyzing guilt that had kept me pinned to the floorboards was replaced by a cold, mathematical, unyielding fury.

I looked at the empty crib one last time.

I picked my Glock up from the floor, checked the chamber, and slammed the magazine home.

Water.

I turned on my heel and walked out of the room.

I grabbed my keys on the way out the door.

“Get in the fucking car,” I said, my voice hollowed out by thirty days of pure poison.

Priest didn’t argue. He rounded the hood, pulled the passenger door open, and dropped his frame into the leather bucket seat. Before his door even clicked shut against the seal, I dropped the Bentley into drive and buried the accelerator into the floorboard.

The tires shrieked, clawing for traction against the crushed limestone driveway before biting the asphalt. The twin-turbo V8 roared, throwing us back against our headrests as the speedometer swept past sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour through the dark, rain-slicked streets of New Orleans.

Neither of us spoke for the first five miles.

The wipers snapped back and forth across the windshield, slicing through the heavy Gulf humidity and the gray mist hanging over the city. My knuckles were bone-white against the perforated leather of the steering wheel. My jaw was clamped so tight the muscles behind my ears throbbed in time with my pulse.

Every second was a serrated blade dragging across my ribs.

A riverboat.

For a month, I had been scouring every square inch of dry land between Houston and Atlanta. I had kicked in the doors of suburban tract homes, raided rural hunting camps, ripped apart commercial warehouses, and torn through every bank record, deed, and shell company Winston or Kaisen had ever touched. I had treated Kaisen like a traditional street predator—assuming he would burrow into concrete, hide behind private security gates, and fortify himself in a basement.

I had forgotten that Kaisen didn’t think like the rest of this family.

Winston liked fortresses. I liked high-rises and armored compounds.

Kaisen liked isolation. He liked control. And on the water, there were no property lines. No street corners. No police jurisdictions with overlapping radio bands. Just thousands of miles of tangled bayous, coastal marshes, industrial drainage cuts, and deep-water channels stretching from the mouth of the Mississippi all the way across the Gulf Coast.

A floating tomb. A mobile cage.

“Belle Chasse is twenty minutes out if you keep driving like a maniac,” Priest said, his voice cutting through the low rumble of the exhaust. He was already working his phone with one hand, his thumb flying across an encrypted messaging app. “I called Trey. He’s got four men staging on the perimeter of the freight depot right now. Terrance gave us Hector’s vehicle description—an old silver Honda Civic with a dented rear quarter panel. The car is parked in the south gravel lot. Hector clocked in twelve minutes ago.”

“Don’t let him leave the property,” I rasped, my throat raw. “If he gets spooked and runs into the marsh, I’ll tear that warehouse apart with my bare hands.”

“Trey’s team is already on foot,” Priest replied, never taking his eyes off his screen. “They’re covering the exits. When we pull up, we take him quiet. No shots, no sirens. A bulk logistics depot has too many civilian cameras. If the parish sheriff gets called out for an industrial kidnapping, it ties our hands before we even get the first word out of his mouth.”

“I don’t give a fuck about the sheriff, Priest.”

“You give a fuck about finding Truth,” Priest countered, his tone hardening just enough to make me listen. “And right now, that Mexican is the only thread tying you to her. You kill him before he talks, and you’re right back in that nursery, staring at an empty crib.”

The words hit me like ice water to the chest.

I swallowed hard, forcing the red mist behind my eyes to recede just enough to let the cold calculations take over.

Priest was right. Rage was a blunt instrument. It could break bones and kick down doors, but it couldn’t navigate a swamp. I needed Hector alive. I needed him lucid. I needed every detail his eyes had registered over the last sixty days.

We crossed the river, the industrial cranes and towering oil refineries of Plaquemines Parish rising out of the mist like rusted iron giants.

Ten minutes later, I cut the Bentley’s headlights and rolled into the access road behind Crescent Bulk Logistics.