Everyone is talking, everyone is fucking panicking, but my mind is clear. There’s only one thought left, one thing that matters:Protect her. At all costs.
“Jax, are you even listening to this?” Viper asks.
I nod but it’s a lie. I’m not listening to any of it. I’m watching the way Sisk is standing too still, her arms wrapped around herself like she’s trying to hold herself together.
“It’s going to be okay, alright?” Lou says as he hugs Sisk. “There’s gotta be a way.”
Is this a fucking bad time to think about prying his hands off her? Probably. He’s her friend, he’s scared, but all I see is someone else touching what’s mine.
Sisk doesn’t answer any questions. I know what her silence means—she’s already making a plan, and I’m not sure I want to ask what it is.
My mind is still stuck on the moment she realized what the black vein in her stomach meant. First came the shock of pregnancy, then the shock of it being mine, and finally the horror that it might not even be hers to keep. Pregnant with something that, in the best case scenario, is a healthy baby that gets taken from her. And in the worst case… I shut that thought down immediately.
“Tell us you can do something about this,” Matt says, inches from Murtaugh’s face.
“I told you,” Murtaugh replies nervously. “The options are… uncertain. Possibly impossible. If she doesn’t want to keep?—”
“What?” Sisk’s voice cuts him off.
Murtaugh looks up from his box, pushing his glasses up his nose. “We could attempt to remove it.”
My head lifts slowly, the words not registering at first. “It?”
“Well, how do we even know it’s entirely human?” he says, his voice detached. “This is unprecedented. The vein has already darkened and spread, you said so yourself. That suggests tar involvement… which means we don’t actually know what’s growing and developing inside her.”
“You will refer to my baby as baby,” Sisk says calmly. Deadly calm. “And I want this baby. I won’t hear otherwise.” Her eyes land on me when she says the last part. “Do I make myself clear?”
“Of course, hon,” Lou says, quickly grabbing her hand.
“We just want to help,” Viper says, getting her a glass of water.
“I’m not sick,” Sisk says, her voice sharp. “Stop treating me like I’m dying.”
She looks around the room, her gaze sweeping over all of them. “This is normal. I’m pregnant. That’s it.”
Silence.
“Now,” she continues, her eyes moving to me. “Can we get to the only important part? How Jax and I get the hell out of Tar City without, you know… burning it to the ground.”
“Get out?” we all say at the same time.
“Of course,” she says simply. “The sooner the better. I’m not leaving this to chance.”
“Sisk…” I say. “I can’t leave.”
Her eyes snap to mine. “What do you mean you can’t?”
It’s fucked up, but the moment I heard about the pregnancy, something in me finally settled. All this time, I’ve been fighting it, acting like I could outrun what’s in my blood. I can’t. This is the hand I was dealt, and I’m done pretending I can fold.Time to play the fucking cards.
I lift my hand and the tar pushes out of my palm. It moves with a purpose, it stretches downward, clinging to itself as it lengthens. I move my fingers and the tar responds. It thickens, extending across the table like a slow black rope until it wraps around the whiskey glass sitting near Matt’s elbow. The glass scrapes softly across the wood as the tar drags it toward me. Once the glass reaches my hand, the tar retracts slowly, pulling back into my palm like it was never there.
I take a sip, the whiskey burning a familiar path down my throat, and only then do I realize they’re all staring with their mouths open. Surprised like I just showed them the monster they all knew was hiding in my closet isn’t hiding anymore.
“What the hell…” Matt lets out.
The tar twists slowly between my fingers, forming a small shape: a spiral, then a ring, then a ball.
Murtaugh stares at it like a man watching a fundamental law of nature being broken right in front of his face. “You’re manipulating the structure of it,” he breathes, his voice full of a scientist’s sick glee.
