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CHAPTER48
ZEKE
Sleep is shakenfrom my body like an earthquake with the force of Nova’s hands.
“Zeke,” she says. “Wake up.”
I shoot straight up, my first thoughts on the baby.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m fine. But I was right, Zeke.” She tosses her phone in my lap. “I was fucking right.”
I scroll through the site she’s on, and it’s about Quinten Thompson, that country dude my sisters like.
“What does this have to do with us, Nov?” I scrub the sleep and confusion from my face.
“The girl he’s with,” Nova says, pointing to a girl with half her face covered in long brown hair. She’s dressed in a green uniform, just like Pris’s Parks Canada one. She’s sneaking out of a cabin, and I recognize that cabin.
“Is that my sister?” Sleep is yanked from me like a blanket, and I’m left cold and very awake.
Nova snatches her phone away and navigates to the texts.
Unknown: He doesn’t care about his future. What about hers?
“She knows that threatening you isn’t going to work, so she’s threatening your family,” Nova rubs my back and somewhere deep in the distance of my mind, I’m pissed. Right fucking raging mad, but up close, it’s hazy.
“My sister is hooking up with Q?” I haven’t quite caught up, I guess.
“Yeah,” she says. “Last summer. I didn’t know. I called him this morning. I’ve been pacing around for an hour. He said they met after that Festival your town has in July. You can’t tell it’s her, and her name wasn’t released, but this is a warning, Zeke.”
I ball my fists and slump back down into this ridiculously colossal bed. That’s not really ideal to find out just as I wake up. At least it’s not the sex image.
“This feels like a good thing, though. They don’t want to put out the sex picture. Which tells us whoever this is has at least a bit of a conscience.”
“I guess,” she says, rubbing her stomach. “But it still feels weird. Doesn’t it feel sporadic? Or inconsistent?”
“It does, which means we have an advantage. Whether it’s a crisis of conscience or being backed into a corner, the power is shifting because you’re not cowering anymore. You’re forcing them to act.” I sit up and face her in this bed the size of my whole bedroom back home.
“I’m scared. Before, I knew what they wanted. I understood what I was supposed to do. Now, it just feels…I don’t know. Dangerous. Unpredictable. I don’t do well with unpredictable, Zeke.”
“What do you think we should do? Confront her?” I ask. She knows her sister. She knows this world. I know my sisters, and if I weren’t tired and angry, I’d be amused because Dru has no idea what she’s stepping into right now.
“We talk to my mother. There’s no other way.”
“What about that image?”
“You said so yourself. They don’t want to release it. Bringing Pris into it was desperate.”
“I agree. I want this done, Nova. You’re having a baby in a couple of months. I just want this behind us.” I scrub my face again, and she sighs.
Nova bites her thumbnail, her eyebrows furrowed in worry, her mind whirling behind her eyes.
“There’s more, isn’t there?”
“I, um, kinda texted my dad. I told him he needed to come here and that it was an emergency. He’ll be here in a little over an hour.” She has this grimace on her face, like her plan to confront her parents was brewing long before I opened my eyes.
“Okay,” I say slowly, getting a sneaking suspicion I’m about to get my wish. Nova’s going to put an end to this by doing the one thing the blackmailer was trying to force her not to do. Speak up. Bring her family all together instead of keeping them all apart.
