KAISEN
Iwoke up to fluorescent light and the particular silence of machines doing the breathing my body didn’t trust itself to do alone.
The anesthesia hadn’t fully released me yet.
I floated somewhere between the ceiling tiles and my own chest, watching the rise and fall of it like it belonged to someone else.
Then, the pain arrived—not gradually, but all at once, like the anesthesia had been holding a door shut and someone finally kicked it open.
It started low, somewhere near my ribs, and radiated outward until it felt like my whole left side had been hollowed out and packed with broken glass.
I tried to move. A tube pulled somewhere near my abdomen—a drain, I realized, threading fluid out of a body cavity that had recently had a hole shot through it—and I hissed through my teeth, my hand instinctively reaching for the source of the pain before a monitor beeped its disapproval.
“Don’t,” a voice said. “You’ll pull the line.”
Winston.
Of course.
I turned my head slowly, every movement costing something.
He was sitting in the chair beside my bed, not leaning forward with concern, not gripping the armrest the way a worried father might.
He sat back, arms crossed, one leg over the other, watching me the way he watched everything—like a man calculating odds instead of feeling anything.
“Where’s the rest of me?” I muttered, my voice cracked and dry. “Feels like he took a whole organ.”
“Spleen.” Winston’s jaw tightened around the word, like it tasted bad. “You can live without it. That’s the whole point. He made sure of that before he pulled the trigger.”
“How considerate,” I said. Even sarcasm cost me air.
Winston didn’t laugh. His face had gone somewhere past anger, into that flat, controlled fury he only showed when something threatened the empire more than it threatened flesh.
“You want to explain to me,” he said, “why your brother put a bullet in you on a residential street, in the middle of a war, over a woman?”
“Ask him.”
“I’m asking you.” His voice dropped, sharpened. “Because from where I’m sitting, my son just told the entire city he’ll shoot his own blood over a surrogate. That’s not a message about Truth, Kaisen. That’s a message about weakness. His. Yours. Ours. And we don’t need that shit right now.”
I closed my eyes, let the pain settle into something I could breathe around. “You didn’t come here because you’re worried about me.”
“I came here,” Winston said, standing now, moving to the window like the view was more honest than my face, “because you almost died over something that was never yours to fight for.”
“She’s not a thing, Winston. She’s not property you and Amai get to argue custody over.”
He turned back to me, and something in his expression made my skin go cold despite the morphine dulling everything else.
“That woman wants Amai. She wanted him before she ever looked twice at you, and she’ll want him after you’re in the ground, trying to prove something to a brother who’s already won. ”
“He hasn’t won anything.”
“He shot you in the back, and you’re lying in a hospital bed, talking like you still have a hand to play.
” Winston’s voice rose, cracked with something almost desperate underneath the authority.
“Leave her alone. Leave the baby—babies, whatever the fuck they end up being—leave all of it alone. Let Amai have what he’s going to take anyway.
You’re not built for this kind of war, Kaisen. You never have been.”
The words landed exactly where he meant them to. They always did. Winston had spent thirty years learning precisely which parts of me to press to make me feel small, and even shot open on a hospital bed, that skill hadn’t dulled.
But something in me had shifted since the concrete hole. Since the water. Since I’d screamed myself raw in the dark and come out the other side with nothing left to lose.
“You don’t get to manage this,” I said. “This isn’t a business decision you get to make for me.”
“Everything in this family is a business decision. That’s how we’ve survived this long.”
“Then maybe that’s the problem.” I pushed myself up despite the pain screaming through my side, needing to meet his eyes level instead of looking up at him like a boy waiting for permission.
“You spent our whole lives treating us like assets. Like pieces you move around a board to protect the empire. And now you’re standing here trying to tell me who I’m allowed to want, like that’s your call to make too. ”
“I’m trying to keep you alive. You haven’t healed from him stabbing your ass, and now you’re lying there because he shot you. Let. This. Shit. Go. Ain’t no good gon’ come from it, Kaisen.”
“You’re trying to keep me controlled. There’s a difference, and you’ve never been able to tell them apart.”
Winston’s face did something complicated—anger, yes, but underneath it, something that almost looked like hurt, quickly buried the way he buried everything soft in himself.
“This is between you and your brother. Fine. But I’m not going to stand here and watch him kill you over a woman who’s never going to choose you over him.
That’s not love, Kaisen. That’s you refusing to accept you lost.”
“I haven’t lost anything.”
“He shot you.”
“He shot me in a place I could survive.” The realization hit me even as I said it out loud, something shifting into place with a clarity the pain had been keeping just out of reach. “He didn’t kill me, Dad. He could have. You know he could have. That man doesn’t miss.”
“Your point?”
I almost laughed. The movement pulled against the stitches, sending a fresh wave of fire through my side, but I let it happen anyway because it felt too true to swallow.
“My point is, he was careful,” I said. “He wanted me alive. He wanted me scared, sure, humbled, whatever—but alive. And you don’t do that for someone you’ve already beaten. You do that when you’re still worried they might win.”
“That’s not what that was.”
“Isn’t it?” I reached for my phone on the side table, wincing at the stretch, and unlocked it with a thumbprint that trembled more than I wanted it to. Amai’s message was still there, sitting at the top of my notifications like a wound that hadn’t scabbed yet.
Truth is off-limits. I’m sending your sample in with the rest for testing. Don’t make me remind you again.
I read it twice. Three times. And somewhere on the third pass, something cracked loose in my chest and came out as laughter—raw, disbelieving, the kind that hurt worse than the drain tugging at my side but felt too good to stop.
“Kaisen.” Winston’s voice had an edge of alarm in it now, the kind he probably hadn’t heard himself use since Elias and Silas.
“He shot me for a DNA sample he could’ve gotten a hundred easier ways,” I said, still laughing, tears mixing in with it now, whether from pain or something rawer, I couldn’t tell. “You understand what that means?”
“It means he’s efficient.”
“It means he’s scared.” I looked at my father, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I didn’t feel small in front of him. “A man who’s already won doesn’t need to send a message like that. He shot me because some part of him isn’t sure how this ends.”
“Or,” Winston said slowly, carefully, like he was trying to talk a man off a ledge, “he did it because he’s dangerous, and he doesn’t need a reason beyond I can.”
“Maybe both things are true.” I set the phone down, my hand steadier now than it had been in weeks. “He’s dangerous. He’s terrifying. He might even be right that Truth wants him more than she’ll ever want me. I’m not stupid, Winston. I see the way she looks at him. I’ve seen what they have.”
“Then, why—”
“Because nobody knows anything yet.” The words came out steadier than I felt, but saying them out loud made them feel truer, like speaking a thing into existence.
“The results aren’t back. Nobody—not me, not him, not her—knows whose blood is in either one of those babies.
And until somebody hands me proof that says otherwise, I’m not walking away from the possibility that they’re mine. ”
“And if the results don’t give you what you want?”
“Then I’ll deal with that when it’s real.
” I said it like I believed it, like the thought of Amai’s blood being the only blood that mattered wasn’t sitting somewhere in my chest like a stone I refused to look at directly.
“But I’m not going to disappear just because you and Amai have already decided how this ends.
No bullet Amai puts in me, no marriage he escapes, no contract Winston Landry drafted to keep his sons in line is going to make that decision for me before the truth even gets the chance to. ”
Winston stared at me for a long moment, and I watched something shift behind his eyes—not respect, not yet, but the beginning of a recalculation. The moment a man realizes the piece he thought he understood has started moving in directions he didn’t predict.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” he said finally, quieter now.
“Maybe.” I lay back against the pillow, exhaustion pulling at the edges of the high the laughter had given me. “But at least I’ll die fighting for something instead of just existing inside whatever you and Amai decide is left over.”
Winston didn’t answer that. He stood there a moment longer, jaw working like he wanted to say something else, some final threat or warning, but nothing came. He turned instead, walked to the door, and paused with his hand on the frame.
“The bullet didn’t stop you,” he said, not quite a question.
“No,” I said. “It didn’t.”
He left without another word, and I lay there in the sterile quiet of the room, pain pulsing steady and vicious through my side, my father’s warning still hanging in the air like smoke that hadn’t cleared.
But underneath the pain, underneath the fear I wasn’t stupid enough to pretend I didn’t feel, something else had settled into place—something colder, more certain, more dangerous than anything Amai’s bullet had put into me.