My phone explodes with a text that makes my blood turn to ice water in my veins.
Miguel:WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?
Attached is a photo that stops my heart. Three pregnancy tests in gray bathroom trash, paper towels pushed aside to reveal them clearly. Positive. All positive. The image is sharp enough to see the brand names, the plus signs, the evidence of my complete destruction.
Miguel:Rico found these. Right after you left. Right after you puked in the parking lot.
My hands shake so hard I can barely type. The phone slips twice, my fingers suddenly too big, too clumsy.
Miguel, I can explain
Miguel:Gas station on Central. You were sick. These were in the trash. Don't lie to me.
Please, let me—
Miguel:Are you pregnant?
The question sits there on my screen like a cancer diagnosis, like a death sentence, like the end of everything I've ever known. Three dots appear, disappear, appear again. I can picture him typing and deleting, typing and deleting, his rage building with each attempt.
Miguel:WITH HIS KID?
I can't breathe. The room spins. I taste metal and bile and the specific flavor of a life imploding. My fingers hover over the keyboard. I could lie. I could run. I could throw my phone in the garbage with those tests and pretend none of this is happening.
Yes
The dots disappear. For thirty seconds that feel like thirty years, nothing. I can hear my heartbeat in my ears, feel it in my throat, in my wrists, in the place where cells are dividing into something that will call Zane "daddy."
Miguel:You're dead to me
Four words. That's all it takes to sever twenty-three years of family. Four words to orphan me again. Four words that hit my body like physical blows—chest, stomach, knees. I'm on the bathroom floor without remembering how I got there, clutching my phone and the remaining pregnancy test like they're the only solid things in a world that's suddenly liquid.
The test plastic is warm from my hand, the plus sign starting to fade but still visible. Still true. Still growing inside me even as everything outside falls apart.
Tonight, I have to face Zane, tell him about the baby. Tomorrow, I have to face a world where my brother hates me.
But first, I have to survive tonight pretending I'm not carrying a secret that will start a war.
Chapter thirty-one
Public Claiming, Private Bombs
Zane
She looks like she's dying from the inside out, and I can smell the change on her—something beneath her perfume, primal and wrong.
The MC party thrums around us—leather and testosterone, cigarette smoke mixing with weed and the underlying scent of violence that never quite washes out of these walls. But all I can see is Lena trying not to shatter. She's wearing that black dress that usually makes me lose my mind, but tonight it hangs wrong. Her breasts look different—fuller, heavier—and she keeps tugging at the neckline like the fabric hurts her skin. Her face carries a green undertone that the neon beer signs can't quite hide.
"You're not drinking," I observe, tracking the way she clutches her purse against her body like armor.
"Antibiotics," she says, the lie sliding out smooth as morphine. But her tell gives her away—that little pulse in her throat jumping twice, the way her left shoulder lifts half an inch when she's hiding something massive. Her fingers twist the purse strap, and I know that gesture. That's her about-to-break gesture. I've seen it exactly three times, and each time preceded disaster.
The cigarette smoke drifts past—Marlboros, someone's American Spirits, the sweet tang of someone's joint—and her whole body recoils like she's been slapped. Her throat works, swallowing convulsively, and there's sweat beading on her upper lip despite the bar's aggressive AC. She presses the back of her hand to her mouth, and I know that look. That's the thirty-seconds-from-vomiting look.
"Bathroom," she manages, already moving. Third time in an hour.
Joker appears at my elbow, bourbon breath and bad timing. "Your girl looks rough. She drinking with antibiotics?"
"Long shift," I say, but I'm cataloging symptoms like she taught me during those late-night texts when she'd explain medical things. The exhaustion that sits in her bones visible even under the makeup she's caked on to hide something. The way she keeps pressing her hand low on her belly—not her stomach, but below,protective. The careful distance she maintains from the bar, from the kitchen, from anything with a smell.
