Page 149 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 2

The lakehouse where Amai goes to hide.

The pieces fell into place with brutal clarity.

Amai hadn’t just imprisoned Kaisen. He’d done it close to where he was keeping the woman. Close enough to monitor. Close enough to control.

Close enough to make sure Kaisen understood exactly what he’d lost.

I set the phone down on the windowsill and thought about how crazy this shit was about to get.

I’d raised Amai to be ruthless. I’d taught him that power came from the willingness to do what others wouldn’t. I’d shown him that family was both your greatest strength and your greatest vulnerability—that you protected your own with absolute brutality, and you eliminated threats without hesitation.

I’d made him into a weapon.

But weapons were supposed to becontrolled. Aimed. Directed.

Amai had stopped taking direction.

The realization settled over me like a weight. Not panic—I didn’t do panic. But a cold, strategic understanding that the game had changed.

When had it started?

I traced it back in my mind. The contract with Truth had been my idea. I’d orchestrated the fertility clinic manipulation to give Amai the legacy he claimed he didn’t want but that I knew he needed. An heir. A bloodline. Something to anchor him to the family structure.

Kaisen’s involvement was a way to hedge my bet and create leverage. If Amai’s specimen didn’t take, we had a backup. If it did, we had options.

It had been elegant. Calculated. The kind of long-term strategic thinking that had kept me alive and in power for forty years.

But we’d miscalculated one variable.

Truth herself.

I’d read her file. She’d seemed perfect—vulnerable enough to control, smart enough to carry a pregnancy to term, disconnected enough from our world that she wouldn’t be a complication.

We’d treated her like a vessel. A means to an end.

Amai had seen something else.

I didn’t know what, exactly. I’d watched him over the past weeks, seen the way his focus had shifted, the way his priorities had reordered themselves. The stabbing at the clinic had been the most obvious sign, but there had been others.

The way he’d stopped returning my calls as promptly.

The way he’d looked at me during our last conversation—not with the deference of a son, but with the cold assessment of an equal.

Or a rival.

I’d raised him to be a king. I’d taught him to take what he wanted and hold it with an iron fist.

I’d never considered that what he wanted might not align with what I needed.

The woman had destabilized everything.

Not because she was manipulative or strategic—from what I could tell, she was neither. But because Amai hadchosenher. Not as a vessel for his legacy, but as something more.

I’d seen obsession before. I’d felt it myself with Odette, back when we were young, and I still believed love was something other than a liability. But I’d learned to control it, to channel it into something useful.

Amai hadn’t learned that lesson.

Or maybe he’d learned it too well and decided the control itself was the problem.