AMAI
The Sanctum was never warm. That was by design—the temperature kept low enough that the body stayed alert whether it wanted to or not, the mind unable to soften into comfort or sleep.
I’d built it that way deliberately, ten years ago, in collaboration with a contractor who had since relocated his family to Costa Rica on a generous, non-negotiable severance.
The place existed outside of weather, outside of season.
Whatever was happening in New Orleans above it—the heat and the Spanish moss and the second lines and the August storms—none of it reached this place.
This place was its own country, with its own rules and no appeals process.
I stood outside Yahmaria’s cell for a moment before entering.
A week had passed since the jewelry store. Since Truth leaning against my shoulder in the dark, the second line fading outside. Since I’d closed the laptop on the ring I’d spent three months designing and felt something in my chest settle into a groove it had been looking for.
A week of ordinary mornings and borrowed peace while this other thing waited for me here.
I looked at her through the observation glass.
Yaya was sitting on the edge of the low platform they called a bed, her hands folded in her lap with the precise stillness of someone who had spent a long time learning to control the only thing left to them.
She was thinner than she’d been when this started.
The outfit I gifted for her signing the divorce papers had been replaced with clean clothes Syx had requested—gray sweatpants, a white shirt.
I opened the door.
She looked up at me, and I watched the instinctive calculation move through her expression—threat assessment, posture reading, escape mapping—before she pressed it all back down.
She’d always been quick. That was the thing about Yahmaria Baptiste that her father had never properly used.
She was the smartest person in the room and had spent her whole life being treated like furniture.
“Is it Thursday or Friday?” she said.
“Friday.”
She nodded like this confirmed something. “I’ve been losing days.”
“That happens here.” I pulled a chair to the center of the room and sat across from her, no desk between us, no equipment. Just conversation. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
“I know.” She looked at me without flinching. “You haven’t yet.”
“I need information about your father. The same information I’ve been asking about.”
“And I’ve been telling you I don’t have what you need.”
“You’ve been telling me you don’t want to give me what I need,” I said. “Those are different things.”
She was quiet for a moment. Outside the cell wall, somewhere deeper in the facility, I could hear the low mechanical sound of the ventilation system—the only evidence that air moved in this place.
“I still can’t believe what he said.” Her jaw tightened, and she looked down at her folded hands.
“He said sacrifices are necessary during war. That was the whole conversation. He didn’t try to negotiate.
He didn’t ask how I was. He just told me what I was and hung up.
” She looked up. “You knew he’d do that. ”
“I suspected.”
“Is that why you let me call him? So, I’d stop protecting him?”
“I let you call him, so you’d know the truth about where you stood.” I watched her face. “You already knew, Yaya. You’ve known for years. You just needed to hear him say it out loud.”
She didn’t answer that. There was nothing to answer.
“The money,” I said. “His money. Not the vault money—I know that’s gone. Rahsaan took it from him before either of us could touch it. I mean Victor’s money. His private fortune. The one that predates any arrangement with us.”
She exhaled slowly through her nose. “He kept it completely separate from anything Landry-connected. Always has. Said he learned from the best—” A short, humorless sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “He meant your father. Said Winston’s one mistake was keeping too much in one place.”
“Where does it move?”
She was quiet for a long moment. I waited.
“Baptiste Logistics,” she finally said. “The Metairie office on Veterans Boulevard, the one listed as a regional distribution management company. That’s the shell.
Everything that looks like legitimate freight revenue is actually layered cash movement.
The company files clean taxes, has real clients, real invoices.
Victor makes sure of that. But the drivers—the ones Trey manages, not the regular fleet—those drivers are moving something else inside manifests marked as medical waste or disaster-relief supply chains. ”
“Where does Trey sit in this?”
“He runs the off-book drivers. He’s been with Victor twenty-two years. Completely loyal.” She paused. “Was. I don’t know anymore. I don’t know how much of what I knew is still standing.”
“What about that Corrine lady you mentioned?”
“She runs the front office like I told you. She’s the one who actually knows where everything is. Victor trusted her because she has too much of her own exposure to risk talking. She knows which manifests are real and which are clean-papered fiction.”
“Cold storage,” I said.
Yaya looked at me.
“He has a facility,” I said. “Or access to one. Something refrigerated, something he can use as a holding point before money clears into accounts. Somewhere the cash physically lives before it disappears into the layers.”
She was quiet for a beat too long.
“There’s an old parish cold-storage facility,” she said finally.
“Ostensibly decommissioned. On the West Bank, off the river road. The county records show it as pending demolition, but Victor owns the LLC that manages the property. It’s been pending demolition for eleven years.
” Her voice was flat. “He took me there once, when I was sixteen. Said he wanted me to understand how security really worked. That a man with no emergency protocol is a man who believes in luck.” She paused.
“He said luck was for people who couldn’t afford to plan. ”
“His emergency route.”
She inhaled. “If everything collapses—if he thinks federal agencies or rivals have moved in on the money—he activates a protocol through Corinne. One phrase. She doesn’t ask questions, she sends a message to Trey, and Trey repositions the last shipment manifest for a priority destination.
That shipment is the money. It gets routed to the cold storage facility on the West Bank.
Victor meets it there personally. He has a vehicle waiting, untraceable, with documentation under a different name.
He’s out of Louisiana within four hours.
The money follows through a separate channel two days later. ”
I sat with that for a moment, the whole architecture of it becoming visible in my mind—the layers of it, the elegance, the vanity.
Victor had built a system designed to outlast everyone he’d ever known.
He’d included his daughter in that sixteen-year-old tour because he wanted her to admire it. Not because he intended to save her.
Yaya had told me about this before, but this time, she added more detail, which is what I hoped for.
“The fortune,” I said. “How much?”
She met my eyes. “More than you’re expecting.”
“How much more.”
“A hundred million.”
I kept my face neutral, but the number sat inside me for a moment, rearranging things.
Rahsaan had the fifty million from the Landry vault, and that was its own war to be settled in time.
But what Victor had accumulated separately—what he’d built over thirty years of operating in the margins of other men’s empires—was a different category of money entirely.
“He told you this,” I said.
“He showed me documents when I was twenty. He said he wanted me to know what the family was worth.” She looked at me with that steady, unblinking quality she had. “He was showing me what I stood to lose if I displeased him.”
The room was quiet.
“I’m not choosing you,” she said. “I need to be clear about that. I’m not doing this for you or because I owe you anything. I’m not your informant, and I’m not your weapon.”
“I know.”
“I’m doing this because he made me expendable. And if he can do that to me—” She stopped. “I’m just done protecting him.”
“That’s enough,” I said. “That’s all I need.”
I stood.
“Amai.” Her voice stopped me at the door.
I turned.
“Is Syx alive?”
“Yes.”
“Is he hurt?”
“No.”
She nodded once, quickly, and looked back down at her hands.
I left her there and walked back through the Sanctum’s long corridor toward the exit, the fluorescent light casting everything in the same institutional gray, and I thought about a man who had taken his sixteen-year-old daughter to a cold-storage facility on the West Bank to show her how a man with real power operated.
The distance between the lesson he’d intended and the one she’d actually absorbed was going to cost him everything.
I spent the rest of that Friday making phone calls that had nothing to do with the thing I was planning.
That was how you did it. You didn’t move toward the target. You rearranged the landscape until the target moved toward you.
The federal DEA field office in Metairie received an anonymous tip—through two redirected numbers and a burner routed through a cell tower in Baton Rouge—that a regional logistics company on Veterans Boulevard had been used as a front for trafficking pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl precursors through false medical-supply manifests.
The tip was detailed, professional, and included three specific manifest numbers that corresponded to real shipments that could not be explained cleanly under scrutiny.
The tip also named Trey’s personal vehicle, which would be parked in front of the building at seven the following morning because Trey was a creature of habit, and I’d had eyes on the Metairie office since Yaya first mentioned it.