“Mehar—”
“I love you. I’ll call you.”
I was down the hallway before he could respond, punching the elevator button like it personally offended me. The doors opened and I stepped inside, catching my reflection in the mirrored walls—wild eyes, messy hair, face drained of color. I looked like a woman who was falling apart.
Maybe I was.
The parking garage was cold and my footsteps echoed too loud in the concrete emptiness. I fumbled with my key fob, dropped it, picked it up, dropped it again. By the time I got the car started my eyes were blurring with tears I’d been holding back since that scream cut through the phone.
I pulled out of the garage and onto the street, and as soon as I hit the first red light, I called Prime.
He picked up on the second ring.
“Mehar. What’s up.”
“Something’s wrong with Zainab.” The words tumbled out fast and messy, tripping over each other. “I was just on the phone with her and she started screaming, Prime. Like, SCREAMING. And then she said something about her water—I think she said her water—and then the phone went dead. I think she’s in labor. I think something is really wrong.”
Silence. One beat. Two.
When Prime spoke again his voice was different. Not the calm, measured tone he used with me. Something colder. Something that reminded me that the man my sister loved was not someone you wanted coming for you.
“When.”
“Just now. Like five minutes ago. I tried calling back but?—”
“I’m on it.”
“Prime, please, she sounded?—”
“I said,I’m on it.” Three words. Final. Like a door slamming shut. “Thank you for calling me.”
The line went dead.
I sat at the green light for three seconds before the car behind me honked. I lurched forward, swiping at my face with the back of my hand, trying to see the road through the tears.
Zainab was going to be okay. Prime would make sure of it. That man would burn down the entire state of California if something happened to her. He’d done worse for less.
But that scream. God, that SCREAM. It was carved into my memory now, sitting right next to all the other screams I couldn’t unhear—my own, when Ahmad’s fists found me in the dark. Zahara’s, in the nightmares I used to have about her final moments, even though I never actually heard them. Screams from the siblings and mothers I’d grown up with.
I’d heard too many women scream in my lifetime.
I was about fifteen minutes from the apartment I shared with Serenity when I started to feel incredibly sick.
The nausea came out of nowhere. One second I was fine—well, not fine, but functional—and the next second my mouth was flooding with saliva and my stomach was doing something violent and my body was telling me in no uncertain terms that whatever was in there needed to come out immediately.
I barely got the car to the shoulder before I threw the door open and vomited onto the pavement.
It hit in waves. Each one worse than the last, my stomach heaving so hard my ribs ached, my eyes watering, my throat burning. I gripped the steering wheel with one hand and the doorframe with the other, hanging halfway out of the car, retching until there was nothing left.
When it finally passed, I sat there for a minute. Breathing hard. Wiping my mouth with the napkins from Thad’s takeout bag that were still in my cupholder.
Stress. That’s all this was. Stress and adrenaline and the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything since this morning except a protein bar and half a smoothie. My body was reacting to the panic. The fear. The helplessness of hearing my sister in pain and not being able to do a damn thing about it.
I reached for my water bottle and took a small sip, waiting for my stomach to rebel again. It didn’t.
Okay. Okay, I was fine. Just stress.
Except.
