He adjusts another instrument on the table. “Wasn’t an eclipse,” he says. “Shadow Sun. It accelerated the tar cycle though. You’ll start feeling the full moon effects earlier than expected.”
His eyes flick to me, then to Sisk. “We need her blood too.”
Viper gestures to the chair beside me with exaggerated politeness. “After you.”
Sisk looks at me instead. “You should’ve told me about this,” she says firmly.
I don’t know if she means about Viper or the science, either way, I don’t want to fucking talk about it.
“For what it’s worth,” Viper says smugly, reaching for a fresh syringe, “he wasn’t very good at communication when we were together either.”
“We were never together,” I snap. She’s going too far.
She arches a brow. “You slept in my bed.”
Sisk settles into the chair. “And still… he left.”
Viper’s mouth twitches but she draws Sisk’s blood with clinical precision. When the needle slides out, Sisk presses the gauze to her own arm before Viper can. Right here, right now, I realize something deeply inconvenient:I’m an idiot.Having Sisk meet Viper this way was a really fucking terrible idea.
Murtaugh slides both samples under a glass testing square. The tar in my blood sample shifts, separating like oil from water, and it starts to pull toward Sisk’s. The thin black filaments stretch across the glass, reaching for the drop of Sisk’s blood like a magnet.
Murtaugh leans in. “There,” he breathes. “Do you see that?”
We all lean in.
“It’s responding,” Murtaugh says quietly.
“You mean—” Sisk starts.
“I mean,” he says to us all, “the tar in Jax is connected to you, Sisk. I need you both to be extremely honest,” Murtaugh says carefully. “No judgment.”
Sisk exhales slowly. “Okay.”
“What happened that night?”
“You know what I did,” I snap. “You know about the fucking bargain. We are leaving.” I push off the table.
But Sisk doesn’t. “Jax, wait.”
“Sisk, I told you. This is nothing. They know everything. There’s nothing they can do?—”
“They don’t know everything,” she cuts in.
The room stills.
“You don’t know everything,” she finishes.
I look at her.
“The fuck does that mean?”
“I made a bargain that night too,” she says.
What in the actual fuck did she just say?
Fifty-Two
THEN | SISK
