Chapter 47
Forty-Seven
THEN | JAX
The scrape of gravel against my back wakes me and I realize I’m being dragged. My head lolls to the side and the pain brings me back to life.
“Drag him in there.” The voice is familiar. Too fucking familiar.
Another voice answers. “Show me the money.”
“I told you,” the first voice snaps, low and irritated, “not until you’re done. Do you think I’m stupid?”
“I think you’re a coward,” the second one mutters. “Or you’d be doing this yourself.”
“Stop talking and just throw him already.”
Throw me. Adrenaline pumps through my veins as I let my body stay limp, letting them think I’m still out. I can feel we’re moving downhill, sure that we’re headed toward the Pit as that wet, low bubbling sound creeps back into my ears.
My pants catch on something and the grip on my legs tightens. “Fuck me, he’s heavier than he looks,” the second voice grunts.
“Hurry up.”
My eyes open slightly. The guy dragging me by the ankles is bent over, struggling. And ten feet back—A silhouette I know. Even without seeing his face. He shifts his weight, impatient.
“Do it.”
That’s my cue to move. I twist hard, planting my palms into the gravel and yanking my legs free in one quick motion as the guy stumbles forward, and I surge up.
Pain explodes through my skull, but adrenaline drowns it out as I drive my fist into his throat.
He chokes, gagging, and his legs give out, sending him to the ground.
“Wait—” he wheezes. I don’t give him the chance to finish.
I grab his neck and slam him backward into the dirt.
He swings blind, his fist catching my jaw. I grab his hoodie, yanking him in as my hand goes to his neck. My fingers brush against a dog tag. I don’t give a shit what it says, I just drive my other fist into his ribs.
“Get up,” the dipshit yells from my right.
The guy beneath me wheezes, scrambling to crawl away.
I could break him. I should. I could rip his mask off and make sure he pays for it later.
But Ivan’s already stepping back, retreating like the fucking coward he is.
My rage finally has a place to land. Ivan didn’t plan to do it himself, he planned to watch.
I shove the man aside and take off after him.
Behind me, I hear the guy curse, “Fuck this,” already running in the opposite direction. I don’t look back.
Ivan isn’t fast, but I’m bleeding, dizzy, and my vision is flickering at the edges. He gets a few steps before I catch him, and by the time I do, I’m actually laughing.
I slam into him from behind, both of us crashing into the ground. He cries out as we roll, my fist already finding his ribs. I drive another punch into his face. He blocks the third hit, surprisingly quick, his elbow catching my ribs hard enough to make me suck in air.
“This isn’t—” he pants, scrambling. “This isn’t how this is supposed to go—”
I grab his shirt and he tries to twist out of my grip. I start dragging him toward the Pit.
“What are you doing?” he cries.
I grin down at him. “I’m still deciding.”
The bubbling grows louder the closer we get. I drag him to the edge and haul him upright. “You know,” I say conversationally, “I could throw you in.”
His breath stutters.
“That would be so easy.” I shove him forward enough that his shoes dip into the tar-black edge.
“You can’t stop it,” he blurts out.
“Stop what?”
He looks past me, toward the lot, toward the cars.
“I’ll tell you—just put me down—”
I slam him harder into the ground, forcing one foot deeper. The tar grips, thick and eager. “I don’t negotiate with scum.”
The bubbling grows louder.
“Last chance, stop what?”
“It asked for you!” he yells.
I search his face—panic, yes, but underneath it, fervor.
“What does Sisk have to do with it?” I snap. “What’s the plan? Throw me in and you think she’s gonna crawl into your bed out of solitude?”
“You don’t get it.”
“Then explain it.”
“If you throw me in, you’ll never know how to save her.”
My grip tightens. My chest tightens. “Save her from what?”
“You’re already too late.”
A chill crawls up my spine. “Too late for what?”
“Jax, let him go!” Sisk yells, and I hear more footsteps pounding behind us.
She skids to a stop just a foot away. “Jax!”
I twist to put him down, but he lunges sideways—not away from me, but toward Sisk.
He grabs her arm, and I react instantly, yanking him backward, but he slips as one foot, already half-sunk in tar, loses traction and the ground crumbles under him.
I watch as he grabs the first thing he can reach—her.
Sisk screams as he clamps onto her wrist, and she stumbles forward, her heel sliding in loose dirt.
“No—!” she cries as everything happens at once. I try to grab her other arm, but the edge gives out, and Sisk falls forward into the pit with Ivan going right after her.
I jump without thinking, without weighing consequences. All I see is her going down, and I know I can't lose her.
The Pit isn’t a pool; it’s a collapsed bowl in the earth. The tar feels like a searing cold that smolders, a crushing weight that pulls me down, moving through it is like fighting wet sand. I manage to grab Sisk, but she’s already sinking too fast.
Ivan is screaming now, clawing at both of us, his fingers digging into my shoulder, and I shove him away, watching him sink deeper.
“Jax!” Sisk screams, the tar now at her ribs.
“I’ve got you,” I growl, my arms locking around her waist as the tar pulls at my legs like hands. From somewhere to my left, Ivan’s voice is a high, desperate shriek. “Help! Help, let me go! I did what you said! I did everything you asked! Please!” It’s a constant stream of panicked nonsense.
Above us, everyone is losing their minds, yelling, but it’s just noise, useless. I shut it all out—Ivan’s begging, their panic, the fire in my own lungs—silencing it to focus on the one thing that matters: Sisk.
“Keep moving your legs,” I grunt, my voice strained as I fight the suction. “Swim. It’s just a pool, Sisk. Swim.”
She’s shaking violently, her eyes wide with terror. “I can’t swim,” she sobs, the words breaking. “I can’t, Jax, I can’t—”
“Yes, you can,” I snarl, pulling her tighter against me, my own muscles screaming. “You can. You’re brave. You’re strong. That’s why I love you. You can do this.”
Her sob catches, her eyes locking onto mine. And right when I think I can muscle through it—we sink. Slowly. So slowly, it’s like we are being savored.
“Sisk—look at me.” I call for her.
She’s shaking, tar creeping up her neck.
“Look at me,” I repeat and she does. “Make a wish.”
She shakes her head and screams as the tar hits our chest, then our shoulders, our throats.
Every part of me wants to thrash, instinct begging me to fight back, but the crushing pull…
it’s exactly how he described it. My grandfather’s stories, the ones I always dismissed as old man’s tales, flash in my mind.
“The Pit is an unnatural force,” he’d warned.
“No point in fighting what will always win. You have to join it instead.”
I close my eyes.
I’m eight years old again, standing in my grandfather’s office, the room lined with black-and-white photographs of Tar City when it was nothing but mud and ambition.
Blueprints are spread across his massive mahogany desk, showing the Mines, the extraction tunnels, and the land parcels outlined in red ink—ownership lines, our name written in the margins.
My grandfather sits behind the desk like a king pretending he’s just a man, his silver hair slicked back, his suit tailored within an inch of arrogance, a gold ring heavy on his hand as he taps the map with one finger.
“This town,” he tells me, voice calm and certain, “was built on what other men were too afraid to touch.”
I stare at the dark shaded section on the blueprint.
“The Tar?” I ask.
He leans back in his leather chair and looks at it.
“People think it’s cursed,” he says. “People think it’s evil.”
“Is it?”
“Nobody knows what it is, what it wants.”
I remember stepping closer to the desk, curious and fearless the way kids are. “Why not?”
His gaze drifts back to the map. “To know what something wants,” he says, “you have to ask it.” He looks at me.
“And nobody’s ever been brave enough to.”
The memory fractures as the tar climbs over my neck and tightens my vision. Panic claws through me. I don't know if it can hear thoughts, but it's all I've got left. “What do you want?”
The pressure shifts and the memory of the blueprints flickers again—the way certain parcels of land were circled, the way my grandfather once muttered, “Every city has a foundation. Ours just happens to be alive.”
I speak into it again, the words forming in my mind, a thought aimed at the darkness. “Save her.” The tar tightens around me. “Save her and I’ll do whatever you want.”
A pulse, then—a voice inside my head, my own voice but warped. “NO LIMITATIONS?”
Sisk chokes.
“No limitations,” I answer in my mind.
WE HAVE BEEN WAITING. FOR SOMEONE WHO DOES NOT DROWN.
“Save her,” I think again. “And I’m yours.”
A voice folds into my skull. WHY SHOULD WE TRUST YOU?
My lungs burn and Sisk’s fingers slip from mine.
I give it the only thing that matters, a thought born of desperation and hope. “Because I’m a St. Clair.”
For one suspended heartbeat, I think this is the end. The tar crawls over my mouth and forces itself inside me. I choke, black sludge sliding down my throat and burrowing deep beneath my ribs.
But then the tar recoils. The pressure releases and the grip loosens.
I gasp for air, and the second I realize I can move, I shove Sisk upward with everything I have left.
We fight our way through the tar, struggling but gaining ground, until hands grab her from above—Lou, Fiona, Bear, whoever finally found the nerve to get close. They haul her out.
YOU WILL OBEY. The voice says inside my brain as something unseen shoves upward beneath me. OR SHE WILL PAY.
The tar releases me, not gently, but expels me. I claw over the crumbling edge, coughing with my lungs on fire while black sludge pours off my clothes like I’m shedding skin.
I collapse onto the solid ground, every muscle screaming, for a moment that’s all there is—the ragged sound of my own breathing and Sisk’s beside me. We’re alive, and that’s the only thought my brain can process. We’re alive.
Next to me, Sisk is in shock, while Lou helps her, reminding her to breathe.
I’m struggling to get back to myself, and when I finally manage, I notice they’re all staring at me—Dean included—and the look on their faces says it all—they think it’s all my fault.
I look back and realize Ivan is gone and I was the last one holding him.
A part of me wants to say I feel something, anything I can use to explain what happened and fight for my innocence, although I’m not sure of it myself.
Yet, I can’t because my focus isn’t on them; it’s on the thing beneath us, deep and awake, and on the fact that my bargain with it has only just begun.