Page 156 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

I stood up from the workbench, walked into the small private bathroom in the back of the shop, and turned on the hot water. I looked at myself in the mirror. My face was hollowed out, dark stubble grown into a thick, ragged beard, my eyes bloodshot and lethal.

I grabbed a straight razor from the medicine cabinet, lathered shaving soap across my jaw, and carefully, methodically shaved away every trace of the last thirty days. I scraped the blade clean under the running water, rinsed my face in ice-cold water, and dried off with a fresh towel.

When I walked back into the office, I pulled a clean black henley and dark denim from the locker in the corner, tossed my old clothes into the trash bin, and laced up my boots.

Priest was leaning against the table, watching me. He didn’t say a word. He’d known me since we were teenagers in the lower Ninth, and he recognized the shift. The wild dog had gone back into the cage. The man who handled business with a rifle was back in the room.

“What’s the play?” Priest asked.

“We keep the circle closed,” I said, my voice low and measured. “Nobody outside this room hears a word. Not Brandon, not DeShawn, and especially not Winston.”

“Winston’s been calling three times a day asking for updates.”

“Let him call,” I said. “If my father finds out we located the vessel, he’ll send twenty trigger-happy soldiers to light the water on fire just to clean up his own family mess. If Kaisen sees a squad of cleaners pulling up, he panics. He gets erratic. And Truth and my daughter are the ones trapped in the middle.”

“Agreed,” Priest said. “Who’s on the ground?”

“Just you, me, and Trey on comms,” I replied, pulling my leather tactical shoulder holster from the safe and checking the slide on my custom Kimber .45. “We don’t go in with automatic rifles spraying down steel hallways. Inside a commercial hull, a stray round will punch through drywall and ricochet off steel bulkheads. One bad angle, and my baby and wife dies.”

Priest nodded, his expression grim. “Infiltration from the waterline. Silent entry. Clear the guards by hand.”

“Call Dr. Broussard,” I instructed. “Pay her whatever she asks in cash. I want her and a private neonatal setup waiting at the safehouse on River Road. When I pull Truth and Trumai off that boat, they don’t sit in a city hospital waiting for doctors or Winston’s men to show up. They go straight to Broussard and Delphine.”

I felt the dull, familiar weight of guilt press against my chest—the cold reality that my own arrogance, my obsession with wiping out Rahsaan’s crew, and my failure to explain the war to Truth had allowed Kaisen to walk right up to my front door and steal my family. I had let my guard down, and they paid the price for more than a month.

I acknowledged the guilt, folded it up, and locked it away in the dark.

Guilt wouldn’t navigate the marsh. Remorse wouldn’t keep my daughter breathing. I would deal with my failures after Truth was back in my bed, and Trumai was back in her crib.

“We find the boat first,” I said. “We get my family safe on dry land second. After that… Kaisen is mine.”

“Understood,” Priest said.

“Amai,” Trey’s voice crackled through the speakerphone on the laptop, breaking the silence. “I just pulled the municipal video feed from the harbor authority outside that clinic in Intracoastal City. Timestamp is Tuesday, 11:14 AM. I’m routing the video file to your screen now.”

I moved behind Priest’s chair, my eyes fixed on the center monitor.

The feed came up in clear, high-definition color. It was an automated municipal camera mounted on a utility pole across the two-lane coastal road, angled down toward the clinic’s brick walkway and the small gravel parking lot leading toward the water.

At 11:14:20, the heavy glass door of the pediatric clinic pushed open.

Truth walked out into the sunlight.

The air left my lungs all at once.

My hands came down on the back of Priest’s chair so hard the wood creaked under my fingers.

She looked thinner. Her dark hair was pulled back into a simple, practical twist at the base of her neck, and she was wearing a pale gray linen sundress and flat sandals. But she was upright. She was walking with that smooth, deliberate stride I knew by heart.

And tucked against her chest, securely swaddled in a soft pink cotton blanket, was our daughter.

Trumai.

A tiny fist pushed out from the fold of the blanket, waving slightly against Truth’s neck. Truth’s left arm was hooked securely under the baby’s bottom, her right hand gently cradling the back of Tru’s head, shielding her eyes from the southern glare.

She’s alive.

The words echoed through the hollow chambers of my ribs, shattering days of suffocating dread. My baby was breathing. Truth was holding her, protecting her, moving under her own power.