KAISEN #2
I finally had something worth fighting for.
And I wasn’t going to let a bullet, a marriage, or my brother’s obsession take it away from me before I even knew what it was.
The silence he left behind was worse than my father’s voice had been. It gave the thoughts room to move, to stretch out and take shape, and once they started, I couldn’t stop them.
I kept coming back to the moment in the driveway.
Truth standing on her porch, her arms crossed, telling me to leave.
The way her voice had been steady, sure, like she’d rehearsed the words a hundred times before saying them to my face.
I’d told myself that was anger. Betrayal talking.
But lying here now, replaying it frame by frame, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something about her certainty had been too clean.
Too smooth. Like a script she’d been handed rather than a truth she’d arrived at on her own.
That was the thing about Amai. He didn’t force people into cages with bars—he built the kind of cage you’d never think to check the locks on.
Soft sheets. Warm food. A man who showed up bleeding and violent and then held you like you were the only fragile thing left in the world.
That wasn’t devotion. That was architecture.
He’d built her a home with his hands still slick from what he’d done to me, and she’d walked right into it and called it safety.
I closed my eyes and saw her face from the day at the fertility clinic, the horror bleeding into fury, the way she’d looked at both of us like we were equally guilty.
That had been real. That had been her, unfiltered, unmanaged.
But somewhere between that day and now, something had changed, and it wasn’t because she’d healed.
It was because Amai had gotten to her before the wound could scar clean.
He’d stitched himself into every open place before she’d had the chance to close on her own.
That’s what he did. He found what was broken and made himself the only person capable of fixing it.
I thought about her defending him after the shooting.
He shot me in a place I could survive, I’d told myself with something like pride, like it meant Amai feared losing.
But now, turning it over again, I saw it differently.
She’d forgiven a man for putting a bullet in his own brother outside her house.
She’d let him back inside afterward. That wasn’t love.
That was conditioning. Somewhere along the way, Amai had taught her that his violence was proof of devotion instead of the warning sign it actually was, and she’d absorbed the lesson so completely she didn’t even recognize she’d learned it.
He’d sold her that. A dream stitched together out of exactly the things a woman broken by a bad marriage and a worse ex-husband would want most: safety, structure, a family that looked whole even if it was built on rot underneath.
And she’d bought it. Because how could she not?
He’d made himself the only version of safety she had access to.
He’d isolated her slowly, surrounded her with his men, his money, his name attached to hers in every legal document that mattered, until there was no room left for her to imagine a life outside of him.
That wasn’t a relationship. That was a hostage situation dressed up in Egyptian cotton sheets and sonogram photos.
And I had to tear all that shit down. It was all a lie.
I laughed a little, dry and humorless, and the stitches in my side protested.
She thought she chose him.
That was the part that ate at me the most—not that she wanted him, but that she believed the wanting was hers.
That she’d stood on her porch and told me she was in control, that she’d built her own house, her own rules, her own independence, when the truth was, she’d never once stepped outside the perimeter Amai had drawn around her life.
Every choice she thought was hers had his fingerprints on it somewhere.
The house on Mimosa Ct he’d surveilled without her knowledge.
He’d given her the illusion of a cage door left open, knowing she’d never test how far she could actually walk before the leash snapped taut.
And she called that love.
I thought about the sperm test sitting somewhere in a lab, cells dividing in a dish while two grown men waited to find out which one of us had a claim to something none of us fully understood yet.
Amai wanted it to be his. Of course he did—it would be the final piece, the thing that let him tell himself the fantasy was real, that the family he’d built around Truth wasn’t hollow theater but blood and bone.
If it turned out to be mine, would he even tell her the truth?
Or would he find a way to bury that too, the way he buried everything inconvenient—quietly, efficiently, underground?
I didn’t know. That uncertainty should have scared me more than it did. Instead, it hardened into something else entirely: purpose.
Because if there was even a chance, even a single cell inside her carrying half of me, then I owed them more than silence. I owed Truth more than watching from the outside while Amai convinced her that surviving him was the same thing as loving him.
She wasn’t in a marriage. She wasn’t in a partnership. She was in captivity dressed up so beautifully she’d forgotten to notice the bars.
Someone had to notice for her.
I thought about all the ways I’d tried to reach her honestly—showing up, being consistent, building a nursery with my own hands because I believed, foolishly, that proof of devotion would be enough to break through whatever spell he’d cast. But devotion wasn’t the language Amai had taught her to trust. Fear was.
Control disguised as protection was. If I wanted her to see clearly, gentleness wasn’t going to cut through that kind of conditioning.
I’d need something sharper. Something that mirrored the only kind of care she now recognized as real.
The thought settled into my chest, cold and clean, no different than the anesthesia that had numbed my side before the surgery. It didn’t feel like madness from the inside. It felt like clarity. Like finally understanding the shape of the problem after months of looking at it sideways.
Truth wasn’t going to walk out of that house on her own.
Amai had made sure of that—made himself indispensable, made leaving feel more dangerous than staying, made his violence look like the only wall standing between her and the rest of the world.
If I wanted to get her out, I couldn’t ask her to choose me over him.
I’d have to make the choice disappear.
Take away the option. Remove the temptation. Show her, in whatever way it took, that the man she thought was keeping her safe was the very thing she needed saving from.
She might hate me for it. She might scream and fight and call me every version of the same monster she thought Amai was—but that was fine.
That was survivable. Better she hate me and live free than love a man who’d built her entire existence into something so pretty she’d forgotten to check if the doors actually opened.
I stared up at the ceiling tiles, counting the small water stains blooming across the foam like continents on a map nobody had charted yet, and somewhere beneath the morphine and the pain and the persistent ache where Amai’s bullet had carved through me, something settled with terrifying calm.
If Amai wouldn’t let her go, I’d find a way to take her back.
Not because I wanted to possess her.
Because someone had to save her from the man who already had.
A nurse came in to check my vitals and change out the fluid they pumped through my veins. Knowing Truth depended on me to save her seemed to give me super strength because I wasn’t hurting as bad now.
I waited until the nurse left before I picked up my phone.
The hospital room had a rhythm to it—the beep of the monitor, the hiss of the IV pump, footsteps in the hallway that never belonged to anyone I wanted to see.
I’d learned the pattern quick. I knew when the shift changed, when the halls emptied, when I had ten uninterrupted minutes to be a man instead of a patient.
I used one of them now.
The number was saved under a name that meant nothing to anyone who might scroll through my contacts—Delacroix HVAC. Jacob answered on the second ring, the way he always did, like he’d been sitting there waiting for me to remember he existed.
“Mr. Landry.” His voice was careful, practiced. Men who worked for me learned to sound that way. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you so soon.”
“Things came up.” I shifted against the pillows. “Give me an update.”
“We’re ahead on the structural work. Reinforced the lower level like you asked—double insulation, sound dampening throughout. The plumbing’s been rerouted so everything runs independent of the main system. You won’t have to worry about outages.”
“And the security?”
“Cameras are in on every entry point, exterior and interior. Biometric locks on the upper rooms, keypad backup. Nobody’s getting in or out without you knowing about it in real time.
” A pause, papers shuffling somewhere on his end.
“The reinforced door for the nursery suite—we installed that last week. Soundproofed, like you specified. Climate controlled separate from the rest of the space so you can keep it exactly how you want, no matter what’s happening outside. ”
Nursery suite.