“I know.”
“He’s gonna get Yusef back.” Her voice softened. “I’ve known my brother my whole life. When he sets his mind to something, it happens. Period.”
I nodded, swallowing past the lump in my throat. “I know he will. I just… I hate feeling useless. Sitting on the sidelines while he’s out there fighting.”
“Girl, you’re not useless. You’re the reason he’s fighting.” Serenity reached over and squeezed my hand. “That man was a walking corpse before you. Going through the motions. Killing people. Making money. But not really living. You woke something up in him.”
“She’s right.” Mehar’s voice floated from the backseat. “I see it whenever we’re all in the room together. The way he looks at you. I’ve never seen a man look at a woman like that. Like she was oxygen.”
I felt my cheeks warm. “Y’all are being dramatic.”
“We’re being real.” Serenity grinned. “Welcome to the family, sis. For better or worse.”
The nausea hit abouttwenty minutes from the beach house.
One minute I was fine, listening to Serenity tell a story about the time Justice tried to cook Thanksgiving dinner and almostburned the house down. The next minute, my stomach was doing backflips and my mouth was filling with saliva.
“Pull over.”
“What?”
“PULL OVER.”
Serenity swerved onto the shoulder so fast I barely had time to throw open the door before I was hurling into the grass.
Everything I’d eaten that day—which wasn’t much—came back up in violent waves. I gripped the door frame, my body heaving, tears streaming down my face from the force of it.
“Oh shit.” Serenity was beside me in seconds, holding my locs back from my face. “Girl, are you okay? What happened?”
Mehar appeared on my other side, rubbing my back in slow circles. “Was it something you ate? Or is it nerves? You’ve been through a lot today.”
I shook my head, spitting the last of the bile onto the ground. “I don’t know. I just… one second I was fine, and then…”
I trailed off. My brain was trying to tell me something. Something important. But it was buried under layers of stress and fear and exhaustion.
“Zainab.” Mehar’s voice was careful. Measured. “When was your last period?”
The question hit me like a bucket of cold water.
When WAS my last period?
I tried to think back. Tried to remember. But the past couple of months had been such a blur—Meech’s parole hearing, meeting Prime, moving in with him, the kidnapping, Zoo, running for our lives—that something as mundane as my menstrual cycle had completely fallen off my radar.
“I…” I straightened up slowly, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “I don’t remember.”
Serenity’s eyes went wide. “Wait. Are you saying…”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember. Everything’s been so crazy, I haven’t even thought about it.”
Mehar and Serenity exchanged a look. The kind of look that said they were both thinking the same thing.
“Okay.” Serenity was already pulling out her phone. “There’s a CVS like five minutes from here. We’re making a stop.”
“Serenity—”
“Don’t argue with me. We’re getting a test. Multiple tests. And we’re gonna find out for sure.” She was grinning now, her earlier concern replaced by barely contained excitement. “Oh my GOD. What if you’re pregnant? Prime is gonna LOSE it. In a good way. That man wants babies so bad, I can tell. He’s always playing with Justice’s daughters, spoiling them rotten?—”
“Can we not get ahead of ourselves?” I climbed back into the car, my legs shaky. “It could be nothing. Could just be stress.”
