RED STICK KINGDOM: A NOVELETTE

Some cities are built on money. Baton Rouge was built on memory. >Nadine "Nia" Batiste has spent her life surviving poverty, violence, heartbreak, and abandonment beneath the shadow of Louisiana's industrial corridors. Raised by her grandmother Odessa Batiste-a feared community elder obsessed with names, histories, flood records, land transfers, and forgotten bloodlines-Nia believes she inherited struggle. >When Odessa is murdered during a violent campaign tied to corporate redevelopment and land acquisition, Nia uncovers a hidden archive capable of exposing decades of corruption buried beneath Baton Rouge's economic expansion. >Families displaced. Communities flooded. >And powerful men built fortunes from the silence that followed. Now, private security forces, political operators, investors, and a terrifyingly intelligent financier named Silas Creed are hunting the final surviving pieces of evidence before the truth reaches the public. Because the buried records do more than expose crimes. >Forced into hiding alongside Malik Varnado-her former lover and a man scarred by the violence of Baton Rouge's economic underworld-Nia enters a hidden network of underground archives, flood corridors, survival systems, erased Afro-Indigenous histories, and memory infrastructures older than modern institutions. >Real wealth cannot be stolen. Not when it lives inside people. This is not simply a story about corruption. >Perfect for readers who crave emotionally intelligent thrillers with depth, atmosphere, romance, political tension, and unforgettable characters, Red Stick Kingdom delivers a haunting exploration of memory, power, identity, love, and survival in modern America. Some inherit money. Some inherit power. >And entire empires are terrified of what she remembers.