7. WINSTON #3
I’d spent thirty-eight years building Amai into the perfect weapon. Teaching him discipline, precision, ruthlessness. Teaching him how to move and that power was the only currency that mattered.
I’d succeeded.
Too well.
My mind drifted back to the first body Amai ever caught.
He was nineteen years old. Still learning the business. Still figuring out who he was in this world.
We’d been at a restaurant in the Quarter—one of those upscale places where deals were made over expensive wine and rare steaks. Amai had excused himself to use the restroom.
A man—some tourist from Texas, drunk and loud—bumped into him in the hallway.
Didn’t apologize.
Just kept walking like Amai was invisible.
I’d seen the shift in my son’s face. The way his jaw ticked. The way his eyes went flat and cold.
“Let it go,” I’d told him when he came back to the table.
He’d nodded.
Said nothing.
But I knew.
Three hours later, I got the call.
The tourist had been found in an alley off Bourbon Street. Beaten so badly his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. Skull fractured in seven places. Ribs shattered. Face pulverized into something that barely resembled human.
The coroner said it took at least twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes of sustained, brutal violence.
When I confronted Amai, he didn’t deny it.
Didn’t apologize.
Didn’t show an ounce of remorse.
“He disrespected me,” Amai had said simply. “Nobody disrespects me.”
But it was the look in his eyes that had stopped me cold.
Pure joy.
Satisfaction.
Like he’d finally found something that made sense in a world that never had.
He’d enjoyed it.
Not just the act itself—the power of it. The autonomy. The ability to erase someone from existence because they’d committed the sin of not seeing him.
That’s when I knew.
My son wasn’t just ruthless.
He was something else entirely.
Something I’d helped create but couldn’t fully handle.
I’d spent the next decade trying to contain him. Teaching him when to unleash that darkness and when to lock it away. Building systems and structures and rules designed to keep him in check.
Because I understood the truth:
If Amai ever lost his shit completely, he wouldn’t just destroy our enemies.
He’d destroy everything.
Including the legacy I’d spent my entire life building.
The car turned onto St. Charles Avenue, and my mind shifted to the twins.
Elias and Silas.
The wound that never healed.
The loss that had broken Odette in ways she’d never recovered from.
They’d been seventeen years old when they died. Young. Reckless. Desperate to prove themselves to their older brothers.
Kaisen was supposed to handle the pickup that night. He knew the players, knew the territory, knew how to navigate the politics of a deal that size.
But Kaisen had been drunk or high. Who knows with him.
Laid up with some woman whose name I never learned.
So, the twins went instead.
And by the time I found out they’d taken the meeting, they were already dead.
Ambushed in a warehouse in the Ninth Ward. Executed with the kind of precision that told me it had been planned. That someone had known they were coming.
That someone had been waiting.
I’d asked Kaisen why he let them go.
Why he didn’t tell me.
He’d broken down. Said the twins begged him. Said they wanted to prove they could handle it. Said they promised not to tell me because they knew I’d say no.
The twins had always looked up to Amai and Kaisen.
Worshipped them in the way younger brothers do.
Would’ve done anything they asked.
Including walking into a trap they weren’t prepared for.
Amai had gotten revenge.
Methodically. Brutally. Completely.
He’d dismantled the crew responsible piece by piece over the course of six months.
Made examples of them that still got whispered about in the streets.
I don’t think he got the right people, but if it gave him peace, it was a small price to pay.
I did my own investigation, and all info pointed to them, but it was too clean.
Too easy to find them. I just let it go because I knew karma didn’t miss.
It didn’t bring the twins back.
And it didn’t fix what their deaths had done to our family.
We didn’t talk about Elias and Silas anymore.
It was an unspoken rule. A wound too deep to touch without risking complete collapse.
Odette couldn’t hear their names without breaking. Kaisen carried guilt that was slowly destroying him from the inside out.
The only person who ever brought them up was Amai.
And he only did it to make a point.
To remind Kaisen of his failure.
To hurt people when he needed leverage.
To wield their memory like a weapon when nothing else would cut deep enough.
That’s who my son was.
A man who understood that the dead could be just as useful as the living if you knew how to use them.
The car slowed as we approached Victor Baptiste’s estate.
I straightened my tie. Composed my face into the mask of control I’d worn for decades.
But inside, I was calculating.
Amai had chosen Truth over everything I’d taught him.
Had chosen love over power.
Had chosen to burn down the empire rather than sacrifice the woman carrying his child.
And now I had to figure out how to contain the weapon I’d created.
Before he destroyed us all.
The car stopped.
My driver opened the door.
I stepped out into the heat and humidity of a New Orleans afternoon.
And walked toward Victor Baptiste’s front door to discuss how we were going to survive the war my son was about to start.