Page 138 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

Priest stepped away from the wall, his eyes locked on mine. “I’m here.”

“Take Hector to the safehouse on Tchoupitoulas. Put him in the back suite. Give him hot food, clean clothes, and five thousand dollars from the safe. Put two men on the door. He stays comfortable, but he doesn’t touch a phone, and he doesn’t leave until my wife and daughter are back in my house.”

Hector let out a ragged, trembling breath, collapsing forward against his zip-ties in pure relief. “Thank you, señor… thank you. God bless you…”

“Priest,” I continued, ignoring Hector entirely. “Call our maritime contacts. I want every private marina, every commercial fuel dock, and every marine diesel bunker between Belle Chasse and Corpus Christi flagged. A boat that size needs twelve thousand gallons of fuel to stay mobile, and you don’t buy that much diesel at a civilian gas pump. Find out who’s sold bulk marine fuel off the books in the last few months.”

“Consider it done,” Priest said, pulling his phone out.

“Get with our hacker. I want eyes on every Coast Guard radar log, every drawbridge tender log, and every satellite sweep covering the Intracoastal Waterway from Barataria Bay all the way down to Galveston Bay. If a steel-hull paddle-wheeler with no registration numbers passed under a bridge or crossed a radar zone in the last month, I want the exact coordinates.”

“What about Port Bolivar?” Priest asked. “Hector said Kaisen mentioned it twice.”

“We lock it down,” I said, my voice dropping into a barely human register. “Send Trey and six soldiers to Galveston tonight. Have them canvas every private slip, every abandoned shipyard, and every shallow-water canal in Bolivar Peninsula. If Kaisen planned to make landfall there, he has a contact, a drop point, or a safehouse waiting.”

Priest nodded once, sharp and final. “We’re moving.”

I turned and walked out of the shed.

I stepped into the cool, damp night air. The rain fell softly against my face, washing away the dust and grime of thirty wasted days on the asphalt.

I looked out toward the dark, churning expanse of the Mississippi River rolling past the edge of the industrial slip. The black water moved with terrifying, relentless power, carving its way through the mud, and heading out toward the open Gulf.

Kaisen thought he had escaped.

He thought he had built an impenetrable floating fortress where he could play house with my woman and my child.

He forgot that I was a Landry. He forgot that the same blood running through his veins was running through mine—only mine had never known how to lose.

Chapter 24

TRUTH

Igave Kaisen Landry exactly what he expected from a captive.

I screamed until my vocal cords shredded. I shoved his porcelain dinner plates off the teakwood table, watching roasted chicken and wild rice splatter across the polished floors. I locked myself in the master bathroom until the steam suffocated me, clutching Trumai against my collarbone while she cried from the vibration of my shaking ribs. Every time he stepped into the room, I spat the word kidnapper into his face like venom, daring him to drop the polite Southern gentleman mask and show me the monster beneath it.

It had accomplished nothing.

Rage hadn’t unlocked the heavy steel hatches. Spite hadn’t lowered the aluminum tender skiffs into the water. Screaming hadn’t stopped the twin Caterpillar marine diesels from thrumming under the floorboards, pushing us deeper into the labyrinth of coastal bayous and brackish marshes where Louisiana bled into the Texas border.

All my fury had done was justify his delusion.

Whenever I fought, Kaisen didn’t strike back. He didn’t raise his voice or pin me against the wall the way a street enforcer would. He just stood there with that serene, infuriating half-smile, tilting his head with pity in his dark eyes. It’s the trauma speaking, Truth, he would tell me, his voice dripping with medicinal sweetness. Amai conditioned you to expect violence. You’re purging the poison. I can wait.

He was feeding on my resistance. It gave him a role to play: the martyr, the patient savior, the noble father enduring the hysteria of the woman he was rescuing from the gutter.

On the twenty-ninth morning, as the gray river fog pressed thick against the blacked-out stateroom windows, I looked down at Trumai. She was nursing quietly, her tiny fingers curled into the fabric of my cotton shirt, her dark eyes staring up at me with absolute, unconditional trust.

She didn’t have anyone else. Amai was out there tearing New Orleans apart, but between the iron hull of this riverboat and my daughter’s heartbeat, there was only me.

If I kept acting like a cornered animal, Kaisen would keep treating me like one—sedating the water bottles, locking the suite from the outside, controlling every ounce of oxygen that entered this cabin.

If I wanted to find a way off this boat, I had to stop fighting the cage.

I had to become the bird that forgot it had wings.

When the keypad on the master door beeped—the sharp, six-tone chime that used to make my stomach knot into iron—I didn’t lurch to my feet. I didn’t reach for the heavy glass carafe on the vanity.