13. WINSTON
WINSTON
My phone buzzed on the mahogany desk in front of me.
I didn’t look at it immediately. I was in the middle of reviewing quarterly reports from three of our legitimate businesses—the ones that kept the IRS satisfied and the money clean. Numbers had always been my language. Cold. Precise. Unemotional.
The phone buzzed again.
I glanced at the screen.
Kaisen.
My jaw tightened. I’d been expecting him to reach out eventually, probably with some excuse about the stabbing, some plea for intervention or protection. Kaisen always came crawling back when things got difficult. It was his pattern. Act out, get consequences, run to me to fix it.
I picked up the phone and opened the message.
The words hit me like a physical blow.
Buried in a concrete hole by Amai. Sending location.
I read it again.
Then a third time.
My hand tightened around the phone until I heard the case creak.
Buried.
Not “hurt me.” Not “attacked me.” Not even “tried to kill me.”
Buried.
The word carried implications that made my blood run cold—not from fear, but from the realization of what it meant.
Amai hadn’t just lashed out in rage at the clinic. That stabbing had been public, witnessed, a momentary loss of control that I’d attributed to the shock of discovering Kaisen’s involvement in the fertility clinic manipulation.
I’d thought it was an explosion. A release valve. The kind of violence that purged the system and allowed a man to regain his equilibrium.
I’d been wrong.
Amai hadn’t purged anything. He’d been calculating.
The stabbing was just the opening move.
I stood from my desk and walked to the window overlooking the estate grounds.
Order. Control. Legacy.
Everything I’d built.
Everything I’d raised my sons to protect and expand.
And now one of them had buried the other alive.
I pulled up my contacts and found Kaisen’s number. I didn’t call—if Amai had taken his phone, a call would alert him that Kaisen had another way to communicate. Instead, I opened the location sharing we’d set up years ago for security purposes.
The map loaded.
A blue dot pulsed on the screen, showing Kaisen’s location.
Not at a hospital. Not at a safe house. Not anywhere I recognized.
The coordinates placed him somewhere in the woods outside the city, near—
My breath caught.
Near the lake property.
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 be controlled. 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 had chosen her. 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.
My phone buzzed again.
I picked it up, expecting another message from Kaisen.
It was from one of my men stationed near Amai’s primary residence.
No movement.
I texted back: Leave and head to his lakehouse.
So Amai was playing house at the lakehouse. Pretending to be something other than the monster I’d raised him to be.
And Kaisen was buried somewhere in the woods, suffocating in darkness, paying the price for violating who Amai had fallen in love with.
I should have seen this coming.
The thought was bitter. I prided myself on anticipation, on reading three moves ahead of everyone else.
But I’d been so focused on the external threats—Rahsaan making moves on our territory, Victor’s unpredictable volatility, the various law enforcement agencies that circled like sharks—that I’d missed the threat growing inside my own house.
Amai had always been the perfect son. Controlled. Obedient. Ruthless when necessary but never reckless.
I’d mistaken control for loyalty.
They weren’t the same thing.
Control was a mask. Loyalty was a choice.
And Amai had stopped choosing me.
I pulled up my contacts again and scrolled to a name I hadn’t called in months: Terrell Thibodeaux. Parish sheriff, on my payroll for the past fifteen years, ran a jail facility that operated with the kind of discretion that made problems disappear.
He answered on the second ring.
“Winston. It’s been a while.”
“I need a favor,” I said, my voice flat. “Off the books. Solitary confinement. No record. No questions.”
There was a pause. Terrell knew better than to ask for details, but even he had limits to what he’d do without context.
“How long?” he asked.
“Indefinite. Until I say otherwise.”
Another pause. “This is a big ask.”
“I’m aware. Your usual rate, doubled. Cash.”
“Who’s the guest?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does if it’s going to come back on me.”
I considered how much to tell him. Terrell was loyal, but loyalty had limits when self-preservation was on the line.
“It’s leverage,” I said finally. “Someone close to a situation I need to control. He won’t be reported missing. No one will come looking.”
“He?”
“Yes.”
Terrell exhaled slowly. “Alright. When?”
“Today. I’ll have him delivered within three hours.”
“I’ll have a cell ready.”
I ended the call and immediately dialed another number.
Priest answered on the first ring. “Mr. Landry.”
“Where are you?” I asked.
“At the office. Amai’s got me handling some logistics for—”
“I need you to come to the estate. Now. Alone.”
There was a beat of silence. Priest was smart enough to hear the weight in my voice.
“Is everything alright?”
“No. But it will be. How long?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Make it fifteen.”
I hung up and stared at the phone in my hand.
Priest was Amai’s most trusted lieutenant. His second-in-command. The man who handled the details while Amai handled the vision.
He was also the key to controlling Amai.
Amai would tolerate physical dominance from me because of our history, because of the father-son dynamic that still held some weight.
But that weight was eroding.
I needed a different kind of leverage. Something that would remind Amai that his power existed within a structure, and that structure could be dismantled if he pushed too far.
Priest was that leverage.
Without the man who kept his operation running, who handled the logistics and coordination and ten thousand details that Amai didn’t have the patience for?
Amai would be crippled.
Not permanently. He was too smart, too capable. But long enough for me to reassert control. Long enough to remind him who built this empire and who could tear it down.
I walked back to my desk and sat down, pulling up the location tracker again.
Kaisen’s blue dot pulsed steadily.
Still alive. Still waiting.
I’d go get him, of course. He was my son, and despite his failures and weaknesses, he was still a Landry. Still mine.
But first, I needed to secure my position.
First, I needed to make sure Amai understood that his little rebellion—his obsession with this woman, his decision to operate outside my authority—had consequences.
I opened my desk drawer and pulled out a burner phone. I kept several, each used for specific purposes, each disposed of after a single use.
I typed out a message to a number I’d memorized years ago.
Need a pickup. Discreet. High value target. Will send location.
The response came within seconds.
Rate?
Triple.
Done. Send coordinates.
I forwarded Priest’s location—not his current location, but where he’d be in twenty minutes when he arrived at the estate.
My men would intercept him before he reached the gate. Clean. Professional. No witnesses.
By the time Amai realized Priest was missing, it would be too late.