Yoruba Demon: Obinna | Chapter Two

Yoruba Demons Billionaire Club

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ROTKINEN

THE GENERATOR NEXT DOOR COUGHS to life at 6:47 a.m. I’ve been awake since 4:12, mind circling back to places I don’t want it to go.

A holding room. Polished cuffs. Silk against my eyes.

This Sunday morning is mine. Turmeric tea, silence, my nails, and nobody else’s emergency.

While the mask dries, I inspect last night’s work. Nude pink, neat, filed into cute squares. The left thumb has a tiny smudge near the cuticle that nobody but me would notice.

I notice. So, I fix it.

Some women do this for attention. I do this for the mirror. For the version of myself I constructed from rubble.

Schoolboy.

I meant it when I said it.

At work, on my social media pages where I post my Do Better documentaries and mini-docs, even in the column I earned in the nation’s favorite newspaper where every quarter I write about the systems eating at society—Obinna Okwuluoka is so young for what he does.

The people I usually investigate are older. Men and women with decades behind them. Which makes him unsettling. If he’s this powerful at his age, what kind of man will he be at fifty?

And, honestly, he’s not as tall as I expected. I’m five-eleven barefoot and I’ve never once bought flat shoes on purpose—so I spend most of my life looking down at grown men and watching them hate it. From his photos I assumed he’d be the exception, that he’d tower. He’s say… six-one or six-two, and in my heels I’d have half-inch on him.

I make my tea and carry it to the small table by the window.

After my release, I should have called someone. That’s what normal people do—call a friend, vent, get told they’re overreacting. But the last friend I had who knew about my uncle, who held me when the betting app notifications stopped and the eviction notices started, she moved to Canada three years ago. We mostly text on birthdays now.

I open WhatsApp. Tap my uncle’s name.

He picks up when I’m almost giving up.

“Rotkinen.” His face fills the screen. He’s in his security uniform—the navy blue one with the estate logo on the breast pocket. Behind him, I can see the gate of whatever Ajah mansion he’s guarding today.

“Good morning, sir.” I tilt the phone so he can’t see the remnants of the mask on my hairline. He teases me when he catches it, and we banter until he starts yawning.

“What’s for breakfast today?” I ask. “Come and inspire me.”

His pause tells me he knows what I’m indirectly asking. He shifts the phone and I catch a flash of his collarbone through the uniform collar. Keener than last month.

“Garri and groundnut,” he says.

“Haba, Uncle Cephas. That one is exam week food now. Serious talk uncle, ngha ma seme chinchin ne?”^[1]

“It is what I have I will eat. mang’tan a pin nyok ngan kat.”^[2]

It’s at the tip of my tongue to ask, are you gambling again? But I don’t, because he’ll deny it, and then I’ll push, and then he’ll do that thing where his eyes go flat and distant like I’m talking to a wall, and then I’ll feel like I’m twelve again—watching daddy do the same thing before he disappeared into a betting shop in Pankshin and didn’t come home for three days.

So, I say, “I’ll send you something to buy food. Real food.”

“Ehn… keep your money.”

“Ehn, send it back to me if you know my account number nau.”

His lips curve into a small smile. “Thank you. Small mummy.”

He says it like an accusation. Like mummy wasn’t the one who held him together after his wife left. Like she didn’t send him money every month, scraping it from a teacher’s salary that barely covered our own rent.

“Ngha rot ha^[3].” I end the call before my throat can do anything stupid.

I send him enough to eat for the rest of the month. That’s if he doesn’t feed it to whatever betting app has its teeth in him.

The thing about loving someone who gambles is that you become a gambler too. Every transfer, you’re placing a bet. Maybe this time he’ll use it for food. Maybe this time he won’t sit in a corner shop watching football scores. You know the odds. You play anyway.

That’s why I’m investigating a man whose empire runs on those odds. Obinna Bernard Okwuluoka. The man who kidnaps a journalist and uses silk. Whose company plasters every danfo, every billboard, every football jersey from Epe to Satellite Town. The company that probably has my uncle’s fingerprints somewhere in its user data. He funds youth programs and community outreach under CSR^[4], though I’d bet my next month’s salary he has no idea what half his CSR team actually does to make the company look good.

That man sat across from me and told me my investigation was “inconvenient.”

If he thought silk blindfolds and metal cuffs would scare me off, he miscalculated.

I’m scared. I’m also furious.

The fury is stronger.

I wash my mug. Dry it. Place it handle-right in the cabinet. Wipe the counter and fold the towel into thirds.

I’ve got work to do.

---

THE STUDIO IS A GHOST TOWN on Sundays.

Fluorescent lights reveal empty desks, the faint smell of Francis’s microwaved jollof from Friday lingers in the break room. I come in because I can think here. The apartment is for ritual. The studio is for war.

I’m prepping Friday’s segment—an education funding piece that’s solid but won’t set anything on fire—when Eucharia appears.

My editor moves like the weather. You don’t hear her coming. You just feel the atmospheric pressure change, and then she’s there, dropping a brown envelope on your desk like it’s a summons.

“Rotkinen.”

“Hi Eucharia.”

She taps the envelope. Her acrylic nails are perfect—French tips with stones, buffed smooth. They’re better than mine. I try not to stare.

“PuntPlay,” she says. “The mini-doc your followers are raving about.”

Although my pulse jumps, my face stays neutral.

“What about it?”

“The higher-ups are interested. There’s a new angle.” She pulls a chair, sits on it backward—Eucharia does things like that, sits on chairs backward, perches on desks, leans against walls at angles that shouldn’t be comfortable. “Obinna Okwuluoka. Born and mostly raised in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Founder. CEO. Old money father—the Okwuluokas of Ekwulobia. Political connections reaching into Aso Rock. The man is untouchable.”

She slides a photo out of the envelope.

I already know what he looks like. I’ve been in a room with him. He removed a silk blindfold from my face with steady, long fingers. I know what he smells like. His charcoal shirt, the understated cufflinks.

But I look at the photo anyway.

Dark suit, no tie, glass with amber liquid in his hand. Standing next to someone shorter, as he often must. Square jaw. Calculating eyes pulling me in.

I break the connection by looking at Eucharia.

“And?” I say.

“There are whispers. Match-fixing in the Finnish league—his club plays there. If we crack this, Rot, we go international. Not social media international. I’m talking network pickup. CNN. BBC.”

She’s watching me with those editor eyes. The ones that can tell if you’re hungry enough.

I am hungry.

But not for the reasons she thinks.

I almost tell her by almost saying: I’ve already met him. He kidnapped me weeks ago. He sat across from me and told me to back off. I told him I’d been investigating systems my entire career, and then he let me go. Uncuffed me himself. Told me he’d be watching.

I don’t say any of that.

Because saying it would involve me explaining why I didn’t report it. Explaining why I’m still investigating instead of filing charges. Explaining the part where he released me and I walked out confused instead of triumphant. Explaining why I’ve spent two weeks trying to put Obinna Okwuluoka in a category and failing every time.

“When do I start?” I say instead.

“You already have.” She stands, flips the chair back around. “File’s yours. Don’t let me down.”

She leaves the way she came.

I open the envelope. Financial summaries. Corporate structure. A list of subsidiaries I’ll need to cross-reference. A printed screenshot of an online forum where someone anonymous claims PuntPlay’s Finnish league results are “statistically impossible.”

I photograph everything. Upload to my encrypted drive. Label the folder: O. Okwuluoka.

Then I stare at his photo.

I’ve seen most of this file already—I pulled them before the kidnapping. But now I know things the file doesn’t capture. The exact shade of his eyes up close—darker than they photograph, calculating in a way that feels personal rather than professional. I know his voice doesn’t match his lanky stature. Deeper, more resonant, fills a room without being raised. I know his hands are careful—

I’m scared of what you represent.

Those were his words. Amongst other things.

He admitted he was scared. Of me.

And then he let me go.

Rich. Connected. Untouchable.

We’ll see.

I work for two more hours. Cross-referencing company registrations. Mapping the corporate structure—PuntPlay sits under Midas Venture Capital, which sits under Okwuluoka Holdings, which itself nests under three layers of offshore entities. Clean on the surface, but those structures cost serious money to maintain. Something is in there.

The Finnish league connection is thin but interesting. PuntPlay sponsors FC Kouvola, a third-division club. The forum post claims their last eight home results defied every predictive model. Could be luck. Could be a small club on a run. Could be worth pulling until it unravels.

I make notes in shorthand—a habit from Jos. I developed it in school while communal violence crackled at the edges of the city. It looks like Ngas script had a child with algebra. If someone ever takes my notes, they shouldn’t be able to make sense of a single line.

I leave the studio at half five, arrive home before seven, then decide to take a walk that doubles as a mini grocery restock.

On my way back, the hairs at my nape lift.

Someone is watching me.

Is it his people? Is he tracking me still? He said he’d be watching my work—does that mean watching me?

I keep walking. Don’t turn around. I learned a long time ago that turning around gives them power. I scan casually. Peripheral vision. Reflections in shop windows.

There’s a man walking thirty meters behind me. Baseball cap, dark shirt.

Could be Obinna’s security. Could be a guy I’ve been ignoring. Could be just a man on a regular Sunday evening walk.

I cross the street. Pause at Mama Sidi’s shop, pretend to look at the sachets of detergent hanging like bunting across the front. Use the reflection in the glass cabinet to scan behind me.

The man in the cap is gone. Or… was he never there? Maybe he turned a corner. Wait, is he standing somewhere I can’t see, waiting for me to start walking again?

Gosh, I’m being paranoid.

Except I was kidnapped two weeks ago, so maybe it’s not paranoia. Before, I’d felt it sometimes—the vigilance that comes with being a woman alone in Lagos, with having survived what I survived in Benin City.

My therapist—the one I saw for four sessions before I decided I was fine—called it hypervigilance. Said it was my nervous system staying ready for a threat that already passed.

I’m not breakable. I broke already. What’s left is the version that doesn’t break.

But my hand is shaking when I reach my door, and it takes me two tries to fit the key.

I go inside. Lock the bottom. Lock the top. Slide the bolt.

I stand in my dark apartment with my back against the door and breathe. My heart is going crazy. Auditioning for a heart attack.

Count.

Count!

Four in. Hold for seven. Out for eight.

After putting the groceries away, I prepare my bath—boiling water, pouring it into the tub until it’s too hot, the way I like it. Then I sink in until the water touches my collarbones and close my eyes.

Too late, I realize I should have brought my phone for music, because the water is too quiet. And in quiet, my mind wanders.

Breathe.

One. Two. Three—

A holding room. Silk against my eyes. His footsteps approaching. The click of the chair as he sat across from me. His voice: “Miss Nentawe.”

No. Not that. Further back.

A hand on my wrist. A boy’s hand, but strong. The sweet chemical scent that was all shades of wrong. A tablet dissolving under my tongue that I didn’t put there. The room tilting. The ceiling fan spinning slower and slower and—

I surface abruptly, water going everywhere. My elbow cracks against the edge of the tub and pain shoots up to my shoulder. I’m gasping. The bathroom is fogged. I get out of the tub. The mirror above the sink is a white blank. Why can’t I find myself in it?

Oh…

“I’m fine.” My voice bounces off the tiles. It’s a thin, sorry voice. Not the voice that told Obinna Okwuluoka I’d been investigating systems my entire career, that I wasn’t afraid of him, that men who made him look like a schoolboy had sat across from me before.

“I moved on.”

I pull the bath plug. The water drains.

“I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine,” I mutter as I stand, wrap myself in a towel, avoiding the mirror.

My phone screams in the silence. My heart jumps.

I grab it.

Whew… my aunt.

“Aunty Paddy.”

“Rotki!” Her warm, familiar voice melts my heart. “You’ve finally picked! I’ve been calling, you no dey answer.”

“It is work,” I say, steadying my breathing by placing a hand to my tummy. “You know how it is.”

“Work, work, work,” she clicks her tongue. “Is it that work that’ll carry you when you fall sick? Kai. We have not seen your face since all these days fa. How you dey?”

I lean against the wall, slide down slowly until I’m sitting on the edge of the bed.

“I’m fine, Aunty.”

“Fine ke?” she scoffs. “Don’t tell me that one. Even your voice sef is somehow. You that I know.”

I swallow. “I’m just tired. Long day.”

“Hmm.” We stay silent for a while before she asks softly. “Are you eating well at all?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sleeping?”

I hesitate, smiling wanly. “I try.”

“Rotkinen…” She says my full name the way only she does, drawing it out like a prayer. “You this girl. You too dey carry everybody matter for head. You think say you strong pass everybody? Talk true, how you dey?”

I let out a small breath. “Aunty Paddy I’m fine. For real.”

“Ehen. You will say you are fine nau.” Another click of her tongue. “Come and stay with us small. Even if it’s one weekend. Come. I’ll make tuwo for you. You’ll relax your body. Laugh small. Na this same Lagos we dey o.”

I nod even though she can’t see me. “Okay. I’ll come.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Soon when? Don’t tell me soon-soon. Give me a day. If not, I will come and carry you myself.”

“Aunty—” I laugh softly.

“I’m serious. You think I can’t enter keke and find you?”

“You can.”

“Exactly.” Her tone softens. “Take care of yourself, okay? And don’t forget to pray. You are doing well, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good girl.” She pauses, before adding: “We are here. You’re not alone, eh?”

I exhale. Silent tears stream down my cheeks. “I know.”

“Okay. Go and rest. I will see you soon kwo?”

“Yes, Aunty. Soon.”

I pull on my nightgown. Check the front door—all three locks. Check the windows. Check the back door to the small balcony I never use.

Everything secured. Everything in its place.

I get into bed, slippers left perpendicular because that’s just how they go. Set my alarm for 5:30 a.m. Connect my phone to charge.

The room is dark. The air is still. My body won’t settle. I stare at the ceiling crack.

My mind, initially occupied with scheduling a visit to Aunty Paddy and the Ngas Women’s Association, soon drift towards the holding room. The chair. The soft, expensive silk pressing against my eyelids. I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear everything—his unhurried footsteps, the creak of leather as he sat, the feel of his eyes on me.

My body remembers the way my pulse jumped when he spoke. The way my skin prickled when his footsteps came closer. The way I sat straighter in that chair, hyperaware of every inch of myself, because I couldn’t see him but I knew—he was seeing me.

“Miss Nentawe.”

I reflexively press my thighs together, remembering the richness of his voice.

Sleep.

But the memory keeps coming. The zip ties—not too tight, tight enough. The vulnerability of being bound, being blind, being completely at someone’s mercy. My senses on high alert.

I turn onto my side. Then my back. Then my side again.

His hands were careful when he removed the blindfold—

Stop. Stop. Stop.

But my hand has already moved. It is resting on my stomach, over the thin silk of my nightgown.

I’m just finding a comfortable position. I’m not—

His voice: “I’m scared of what you represent.”

My fingers drift lower.

No. This is insane. He kidnapped me. Threatened my career. He’s the man whose company is probably bleeding my uncle dry, whose empire was built on the desperation of people like my father. I want to destroy him.

My hand slips under the fabric anyway, my mind going somewhere I have no business letting it go.

The first touch is electric. I’m swollen, sensitive, and the brush of my fingertips sends a jolt through me that makes my hips lift off the mattress. I’m wet. Dripping. And I hate it—hate my body for this, hate the memory for lodging itself somewhere primal and unreasonable.

But I don’t stop.

I circle slowly, the way I’ve done countless times before. Building sensation using pressure in measured increments, relying on a method I’ve mastered to give myself what I need when no one else can be trusted to.

In my head, it’s his voice edging me on.

“Miss Nentawe.”

“I’m used to people being reasonable.” That infuriating certainty.

“I’ll be watching your work with interest.”

I slide two fingers inside myself and my breath catches. I’m thinking about his hands now—the ones that removed the blindfold, the ones that held the polished cuffs. What would they do if they touched me? Would they be gentle like this? Unhurried? Would he take his time the way he took his time in that holding room, making me wait, making me wonder?

These thought… I don’t know where they’re coming from, but they’re doing the trick tonight.

I press my free hand against myself and abandon caution. The measured pace I began with unravels, replaced by urgency. Need takes over, stripping away grace until all that remains is the relentless pursuit of release.

His eyes, cold and calculating across that table. Looking at me like I’m playing with fire. Only for him to admit he was scared—of me, of what I represent. Scared of—

“Hmm… hmmm…”

My back arches off the bed, thighs clenching around my hand. The sounds leaving my mouth lives somewhere between a gasp and a moan, his name bitten off before it fully forms. Orgasm tears through me in waves—yes, yes—I ride it with my eyes squeezed shut, seeing nothing but silk, shadow and smirking lips.

When it ends, I lie there. Breathing. Wet fingers resting against my thigh.

Did I just have the best orgasm in months thinking about the subject of my investigation? What is wrong with me?

This isn’t attraction. This is trauma response. This is my wires getting crossed somewhere between terror and arousal because my brain doesn’t know the difference between the two. My therapist would have something clinical to say about it. Threat and desire activated overlapping neural pathways. Something like that.

But here, in the dark, with the evidence of my betrayal sticky between my thighs, the clinical explanation doesn’t help.

I want to destroy Obinna Okwuluoka. I also want—

No. I don’t want anything. This was a release. A physical necessity. It means nothing.

I get up. Wash my hands and the rest of myself.

When I finally sleep, I dream about dark eyes and a man who peeled silk from my face.

I wake up angrier than when I went to bed.

Good.

Anger is fuel. Anger gets things done.

---

^[1] Ngas for what are you eating today?

^[2] Ngas for Stop stressing me.

^[3] Ngas for I love you.

^[4] Corporate Social Responsibility

40+ Chapters to go…

Releases September 30, 2026.