Chapter 16 A SISTER’S KEEPER #2
I studied her face, trying to read what she wasn’t saying. There was something there. Something tangled and angry and hurt. But she’d buried it deep, and I knew better than to dig it out before she was ready.
“Is that his choice or yours?” I asked instead.
She pulled her hand back, wrapping her arms around her knees again. “Does it matter?”
“Yeah,” I said evenly. “It does.” Because if it was his choice to abandon my sister, I had a major ass kicking that needed to be delivered. Among other things.
“It was my choice. He doesn’t even know.”
I frowned at her. “Are you going to tell him?”
“No.” The word came out hard and final, as though she’d already had this argument with herself a hundred times and already decided it. “He doesn’t get to know. He doesn’t get to have a say in this.”
I wanted to ask why. Wanted to push for answers. But the look on her face told me that door was closed and locked, and I wasn’t getting through it today. And maybe that was okay. Maybe she needed to keep that part to herself for now and I just needed to let her.
“Okay,” I finally said, choosing to just support her. “Then we won’t talk about him.”
She looked at me, surprise flickering across her features. “Just like that?”
“Yeah, just like that.” I crawled over to her and propped myself against the headboard beside her before leaning my head against her shoulder. “You tell me what you want to tell me when you’re ready. Until then, I’ll just be here.”
Her breath hitched, and then she was crying again. The kind of broken, gasping sobs that came from somewhere deep and wounded and terrified. I wrapped my arm around her and held her while she fell apart, letting her soak my shirt with tears and grief and all the fear she’d been carrying alone.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she said between sobs, her voice muffled against my shoulder. “How am I supposed to bring a baby into this world? Into our world?”
I pulled back enough to look at her, understanding flooding through me. This wasn’t just about being a mother. It was about being a Slayer. About the cost of our bloodline and the price we paid for it every single day.
“Look at our lives, Jemma.” Her voice cracked.
“The Order. The Horsemen. The constant running and hiding and fighting. What kind of person brings a baby into that? What kind of mother would I be to drag an innocent child into this nightmare? I’m bringing a baby into a war zone and pretending that’s somehow okay. ”
I swallowed against the ache her words left behind because I couldn’t argue with a single one of them.
Our lives weren’t safe. They never had been.
They were stitched together with stolen time and broken promises and the kind of luck that always ran out at the worst possible moment.
We lived in a world where fathers were murdered in front of their daughters.
Where monsters were real and mercy was rare and the line between hero and villain was a moving target nobody could quite hit.
Where tomorrow was never guaranteed, and where safety was just another lie we whispered to ourselves in the dark, hoping it might be true long enough for us to close our eyes and rest.
She wasn’t wrong to be afraid. Frankly, I’d be more worried if she wasn’t.
“Maybe I should just do what Mom did and leave.”
“How would that help?” I asked, confused.
“Because I’d give the baby to someone with no ties to this world. To a normal human family that can raise it like a normal human baby.”
That seemed like a nice sentiment. “Except it’s not a normal human baby,” I pointed out quietly.
She squeezed her eyes shut as she shook her head, more tears falling down her cheeks. Her fingers dug into her arms hard enough to leave marks, as though she were trying to hold herself together through physical pressure.
“I know this world is dangerous, Tess. That it’s violent and unpredictable and there are no guarantees.
But you can teach them how to survive it.
How to fight. How to protect themselves.
How to be strong in a world that’s always trying to break them,” I said, knowing she knew exactly what I was talking about.
“And you can give them what we never had. A mother who stays. A family that tells the truth.”
Another tear trickled down her face as she processed my words. My version of the future. I watched her turn it over in her mind the way she always did. Looking for the flaws. The weak points. The places where everything could go wrong and fall apart on her.
“And you won’t be doing it alone,” I added, the words coming out more like a vow than a reassurance.
“If you choose to keep this baby, we’d protect them together.
All of us. We’d make sure they grow up knowing they’re loved and safe and that there are people in this world who would burn the entire planet down before they let anything hurt them. ”
“You can’t promise that, Jemma. You literally almost just died again yesterday. I’d be shocked if either one of us made it to it’s eighteenth birthday.”
“Okay, fine,” I said, giving her that one. “But I can promise to try. And if anything ever happens to me and I’m not around to keep my word, I promise you Trace and Dominic will keep it for me. They’d reach across time itself if they had to.”
“True,” she said and then smiled around it. “It’s not like they haven’t done it before.”
“Exactly.” My brows pulled together as her words fully registered. “Wait, what do you mean?”
“When Trace’s Alt came back and stopped me from killing Dominic.”
The memory rose up before I could brace for it.
The chaos in that room. The blood. Pricilla’s head on the floor.
Tessa’s dagger at Dominic’s throat, and the scream that had ripped out of me when I realized what she was about to do.
The split second when I thought I’d lost him for good.
And then Trace. Two of him. One beside me, one behind my sister, whispering something into her ear that had stopped her cold.
Whatever he’d said to her had ended it. Had bought Dominic his life.
And I’d never asked her what it was.
Maybe because I’d been too afraid of the answer.
Or maybe because some part of me had needed to leave that moment in the past, sealed away with all the other near-disasters I couldn’t bear to look at directly.
But it was different now. We were different now.
And there were no more secrets left to hide behind, not after everything we’d survived in the last few months.
I met her eyes, finally letting myself ask the question I should have asked a long time ago. “What did he say to you?”
Tessa huffed out a breath and looked down at her hands, rubbing her thumb over her knuckles as though it still hurt to think about what she’d almost done.
“He said that if I did it, I might as well put the knife in your heart too, because you would never come back from losing him. That he lived the agony every day with you.”
The air caught in my lungs as the words landed somewhere deep and irreversible inside me. I sat with them for a long moment, unable to speak or even move. Trace had come back through time to save Dominic. To save me from losing him. To save me from whatever I would have become without him.
I swallowed hard, my eyes welling up before I could blink them back.
“He’s loved you in ways you don’t even know yet, Jem,” she said, almost awestruck. “Both of them have.”
My throat thickened so painfully I could barely speak, the truth of it pressing down on my chest like a hand.
After everything I’d put them through. Every choice I’d made.
Every line I’d crossed to keep them both alive.
They had loved me back through every single one of them.
Across timelines. Across dimensions. Across the rules that were supposed to bind them and keep us apart.
I leaned my head back against her shoulder and let the tears fall this time, letting them blur the room and everything in it.
For a long while, neither of us said anything. We just sat there together in the late-afternoon hush, two sisters who had survived more than either of us had any right to survive, holding each other up the only way we knew how.
Outside the window, the light was beginning to turn.
Long amber shafts cut through the trees and laid themselves across her bedroom floor, gentling the room in a way the day hadn’t earned.
Somewhere downstairs, a door opened and closed.
Footsteps moved through the kitchen. Life going on, even though our world had cracked open all over again in this room.
The future wasn’t finished with us yet. There was a baby coming.
There were Horsemen still circling. There was an anointment buried in my body that no spell could fully undo, and there were people I loved who had already paid more than I could bear to think about just to keep me here, breathing, on this side of whatever was coming next.
But Tessa wasn’t going to face her storm alone. And neither was I. And maybe, in the end, that was the only kind of promise that ever really mattered.