Page 168 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

A man who spent his whole life watching for knives in the dark finally noticed the blade sitting right on the breakfast tray.

“How long?” he asked. The rasp in his throat deepened, turning raw.

“Since the night you brought that girl Yahmaria into that clinic to humiliate Amai,” I told him, keeping my voice even and low. “Since the night you told me Amai was your soldier before he was my child and then shot him in his leg in my foyer like he was a stray dog that wouldn’t heel.”

Winston closed his eyes for three long seconds. When he opened them, the disbelief was gone. In its place was something cold, hard, and ancient.

“You,” he breathed.

“Me.”

He let out a dry, wheezing cough that bent him double. A fleck of dark blood landed on the white sheet between his knees. I didn’t reach for a tissue. I let it sit there against the cotton, a black mark on his clean linen.

“I told you one day I was going to kill your ass for going too far,” I said.

The words didn’t come out in a scream. They didn’t need to. I’d said them when I knelt on the hardwood floor, putting gauze over my oldest son’s bleeding leg while Winston stood over us holding a smoking barrel and talking about leverage. He’d laughed then. He’d tucked that gun into his waistband and walked into his study like a man who thought wives were furniture that occasionally complained about the dust.

Winston stared at me through the dim lamp light, his chest rising in shallow, ragged hitches. “You… you poisoned your own husband. In my own house.”

“In our house,” I corrected him. “And you been poisoning this family for thirty years, Winston. You just did it with money and cruelty.”

“I built this,” he snarled, trying to find that old thunder that used to make councilmen and ward bosses sweat through their shirts. But the thunder came out like paper tearing. “Everything you got… everything them boys wore, drove, ate… I took out of other men’s hides. I made Amai into an iron wall. I made this name mean something in this city!”

“You made a graveyard, Winston.” I leaned in just an inch, close enough that he could smell the soap on my skin and the bitter almond steam coming off his cup. “You took Elias and Silas, and you put ’em in the ground before they was twenty-one years old because you couldn’t let Victor Baptiste have an inch of asphalt you didn’t tax. You took Kaisen and made him feel so small, so worthless, so hungry for a pat on the head that he stole his brother’s seed and thought kidnapping a woman was love. And you took Amai—my sweet, quiet boy who used to draw pictures on the back of brown paper sacks—and you turned him into a monster who thinks the only way to keep somebody is to put a fence around their neck.”

“They’re alive!” Winston choked out, spittle flying from his gray lips. “Amai’s alive! He runs this city! He took Victor down, he took Rahsaan down—he’s the strongest bastard from here to Houston because I didn’t let him be soft!”

“He’s not strong, Winston. He’s terrified.” My throat tightened, but I swallowed the ache down until it turned to steel behind my ribs. “He’s terrified every minute of the day that if he stops bleeding people, the world’s gonna take what he loves. You taught him fear, and you called it strength. You taught him obedience, and you called it loyalty.”

“You… you traitorous bitch,” he gasped, his fingers clawing at the duvet, trying to drag himself toward the edge of the bed. He was looking for the drawer where he kept the snub-nosed .38. But his legs were dead weight. His hips wouldn’t turn. “After forty years… you sit there… watch me drown in my own bed…”

“Why not?” I asked him. “You watched me drown every time we buried a baby. You looked at me with them dry, arrogant eyes and told me grief was for women who didn’t understand the cost of empire.”

“Why now?” He spit the words, sweat pouring down his temples, soaking his gray hair into greasy curls against his forehead. “Why didn’t you… do this twenty years ago if you hated me so damn much?”

“Because twenty years ago, I still believed love was supposed to hurt,” I said. “I believed staying through the blood and the mistresses and the beatings was what a good Southern wife did. I thought endurance was holy, Winston. I thought if I just loved you hard enough, prayed long enough, took enough of the blows myself, you’d finally look at them boys and see children instead of soldiers.”

I stood up. My knees popped in the quiet room, a dry, sharp sound like twigs breaking underfoot.

“Then I saw you look at that baby girl Truth was carrying,” I said, looking down at him. “I saw you look at that little girl not even born yet and start calculating how you were going to use her to keep Amai on his leash. I saw you look at Kaisen like he was a broken tool you needed to throw in the canal. And I realized you were never going to stop. You were going to eat my grandchildren just like you ate my sons.”

Winston’s breath hitched—hard. A long, rattling intake of air that pulled his collarbones sharp against his skin. His hand reached out, shaking uncontrollably, fingers hooking into the sleeve of my cardigan.

He gripped it with whatever life he had left in him.

“Odette…” His voice dropped into something small. Not repentance. Not an apology. Just the sheer, pathetic shock of a tyrant realizing the door had been locked from the outside. “I trusted you.”

I looked down at his yellowed eyes, at the face I’d kissed when we were young and poor in the Lower Ninth, before blood bought us chandeliers and dead sons.

“I know you did,” I whispered. “You spent your whole life telling everybody love was a weakness. So, I used the only weakness you had left. You thought I was too broken to fight back.”

I gently reached down and peeled his dying fingers off my sleeve, one by one.

“You forgot who taught our boys how to survive you.”

Winston Landry stared up at the canopy of the bed he bought with blood. His jaw worked, trying to find one last command, one last curse to throw at the woman who had ironed his shirts and buried his secrets for four decades.

Nothing came out but a long, wet sigh.