Page 77 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

Amai leaned down and kissed the top of her head, then reached over and kissed my temple. Both gestures done with the same careful weight, like he was distributing something precious between the two of us in equal measure.

“Hello, baby girl,” I said again, quieter this time, mostly just for her.

She didn’t stir. She just slept, small and warm and impossibly here, between the two people who’d already survived so much just to get to this room, this evening, this quiet after everything loud that came before it.

We sat like that for a long while, not talking, just watching her breathe, letting the empty space in the room exist right alongside the joy.

But for right now, in that hospital room with the light gone soft and orange outside the window, it was enough just to hold her.

The room had gone quiet enough that I could hear the compression cuffs on my calves cycling every few minutes, a soft mechanical squeeze that some nurse had explained was for blood clots. I’d nodded along without really listening because at that point, I would’ve let them hook me up to anything if it meant I got to keep breathing normal air with my daughter.

Amai had moved to the recliner in the corner, Tru finally down in the little bassinet on wheels they rolled in, and I was somewhere between awake and not, my eyes doing that heavy blink where you don’t remember closing them until you’re opening them again. The room smelled like hospital, that clean, chemical, nothing-smell mixed with the ghost of the flowers Odette had brought earlier that somebody had put in a vase by the window.

I heard the door before I saw it. Not a knock. Just the soft mechanical click of the handle turning, careful, like whoever was on the other side already knew they weren’t supposed to be making noise. And then the door easing open in that slow way people do when they’re trying not to wake somebody up but hadn’t quite committed to just not coming in at all.

I opened my eyes.

Kaisen.

What the fuck does he want?

That was the whole thought, clean and immediate, no buildup to it. He was standing in the doorway with his cane in one hand and enough shit hanging off his other arm that he looked like he’d robbed a Party City on his way over—two, three, four gift bags stacked and looped together at the handles, a cluster of balloons bobbing against the doorframe, gold and silver ones with “IT’S A GIRL” written across them in that curly script, plus a plain white one that just said “WELCOME” like he’d grabbed it as an afterthought.

He looked like he’d bought out an entire aisle. Like this was his baby too.

“I’m not trying to intrude,” he said before anybody had said a word to him, which told me he’d already thought about how this was going to look and decided to get ahead of it. “I know it’s late. I can come back tomorrow if this isn’t a good time.”

Amai was up out of that recliner so fast the footrest slammed down behind him. “Wasn’t expecting to see you.”

Not hey. Not what’s up. Just that, flat, no bullshit undertone that Kaisen either didn’t catch or chose to ignore.

“There was no way I would’ve missed my⁠—”

He stopped.

I felt it before I understood it, that half-second where a word gets caught behind somebody’s teeth, and you watch them try to swallow it back down whole.

“—my niece being born,” he finished, but it came out wrong, delayed, like the sentence had taken a detour somewhere in the middle, and he was still catching up to it by the time it left his mouth.

The room went dead, quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.

I sat up a little in the bed, ignoring the pull it put on my stitches, because something in me needed to be upright for whatever was about to happen next.

“Slip of the tongue,” Kaisen said, too fast, already moving forward with the bags like he could walk right past the moment if he kept his feet going. “I’ve had a long day. Didn’t mean anything by it.”

He meant something by it. I didn’t say that out loud. I just filed it, the way you file a smell in a house you’re thinking about buying, something you can’t point to on an inspection sheet but that makes you walk a little slower through the rooms.

“You good?” Amai asked him. Not soft. Not a real question about his wellbeing. It was the kind of “you good” that meant watch yourself.

“I’m good,” Kaisen said. “Long day. Long few months, if we’re being honest.” He set the bags down on the little rolling table by the window, careful with them, arranging the balloon strings so they wouldn’t tangle with the flowers already there. “I wanted to bring something. For her. I know it’s probably too much.”

It was too much. Four bags and five balloons for a baby who couldn’t focus her eyes yet was, by any measure, too much. But there was something in the way he said it—I wanted to bring something—that softened the edge of my irritation before I could stop it.

“You didn’t have to do all that,” I said, because it felt like somebody needed to say it, and Amai clearly wasn’t going to be the one.

“I wanted to.” Kaisen looked at me for the first time since he’d walked in, and relief crossed his face that I was talking to him at all. “How you feeling?”

“Like I got put through a wood chipper and lived to complain about it.” That got the corner of his mouth to move.