Chapter 65
Sixty-Five
NOW | JAX
“There’s not a fucking chance I’m letting you go there without me.”
Sisk crosses her arms. “Matt and Viper are coming. Lou’s keeping watch. I’m not going by myself.”
“I don’t trust anyone else protecting you,” I snap. “Not against the tar, not against this city, and definitely not against the drug lords running it.”
“You need to talk to your grandfather,” she says firmly, meeting my glare without flinching. “You can meet us there after you get answers.” She steps closer, lowering her voice so only I can hear. “That matters, Jax. To both of us. You think I’m not losing sleep over this pregnancy thing?”
I shake my head. “I know you are,” I say quietly. “You were crying in your sleep last night.”
She looks away.
“You two done over there or what?” Matt calls from his bike, revving the engine. “We need to leave if we’re making this meeting.”
Sisk swings a leg over the back of his bike.
“Get on or walk,” Viper tells Lou, nodding toward her own machine.
“We should’ve taken the train,” he mutters to Sisk.
Sisk snorts under her breath. “Just get on.”
Lou just sighs, accepting his fate.
Matt looks at me, his grin back in place. “Relax,” he says. “I’ve got your girl covered.”
“I don’t need covering,” Sisk snaps.
Matt ignores her. “Stop hovering, Jax. Handle your business. We’ll handle ours.”
I exhale slowly, watching them. “Fine.”
My eyes find Matt. “A scratch on her,” I say, my voice flat, “and I’ll rip your balls off and make you eat them. We clear?”
Matt just grins, a flash of white in the dark. “Crystal,” he says, before gunning the engine and peeling out onto the street. Viper’s bike follows, Lou clinging to her back like a terrified barnacle.
I stand there watching the red tail lights vanish toward the harbor.
I glance toward the docks, where the oil tanks rise behind the port, and behind them, the office tower where my grandfather works, top floor, looking straight over the back hangar, exactly where Danner told Sisk to meet him. No fucking way that’s a coincidence.
Lou’s voice from earlier echoes in my head: “Your grandfather works late for a rich man.”
I remember asking him about it as a kid, getting the same bullshit answer every time: that he thinks better at night. I look up at the building again. “Lying son of a bitch.”
I thought tonight was about the tar, turns out, this is about my fucking family.
I gun the throttle and head for the tower.
* * *
I haven’t been here in years, not since I was young enough to still believe my grandfather’s building was just an office building. Not since I still called him sir without tasting blood in my mouth.
The guards at the front don’t recognize me at first. They’re in black uniforms with earpieces, their eyes trained to look right through you.
But then one of them squints, really looks, and his spine straightens like a switch flipped.
He doesn’t say Mr. St. Clair, but he steps aside.
Guess the family resemblance is still doing its job.
The entire place is fucking sterile. The floor shines so much you can see your face in it. At this time of the night, everyone’s gone, which makes it very clear that my grandfather staying isn’t a normal work thing.
I take the stairs to keep myself from moving too quick, too fast. I breathe through the anger toward my family that decides now is a great time to surface.
When I hit the top floor, a memory comes back.
A scream. I remember it from when I was a kid, something specific and odd.
It’s buried so deep beneath everything else I’ve survived that I don’t even know who it belonged to anymore.
But standing here—back in this hallway—brings it up like it happened yesterday, and I know with a certainty that chills me that I heard it right here, in this spot.
Everything else from that moment is gone.
Names, faces, reasons. But I know it happened.
I move down the hall, grateful for the thick rug swallowing my footsteps. The paintings on the walls pretend to be art but they’re really just trophies of land acquired: waterlines, shorelines, property borders. My family’s legacy, drawn in blood and ink.
The door to his office is slightly cracked, and voices slip out.
“…had a witness last time.”
My grandfather’s voice—calm as a fucking ledger. “Then you were sloppy.”
“I’m saying we should adjust the timing,” the other man presses, a little too careful.
“The offering people have multiplied. They were still lighting candles. The whole ritual—the reverence they have for it. To dispose of one like that, right in the middle of their prayers… it feels like a risk. An insult.”
“Theatrics,” my grandfather cuts in. “I don’t care what you do to soothe your conscience, just don’t bring it into my building.”
“But—”
“The debt?” my grandfather asks, almost bored.
“It’s still unpaid.”
“An unpaid debt becomes a curse,” my grandfather says. “You know that. Make them pay.”
I take one more step and the floor creak gives me away.
My grandfather’s tone sharpens instantly. “Whoever the fuck is out there,” he says, cold and precise, “think very carefully before you—”
I push the door open.
The man in the gray jumpsuit startles, looking between me and my grandfather like he’s trying to decide which one of us will kill him first.
“Leave,” my grandfather says to the man.
The man hesitates.
My grandfather doesn’t raise his voice. “I said leave.”
The man almost runs.
I look at the photographs—black-and-white shots of Tar City before it was Tar City. Back when it was just scaffolding, smokestacks, and men in coal dust lined up like volunteers.
I take one step further in and he smiles. “What can I do for you, Jaxwell,” he says at last.
I’m not in the mood for his games. I lift my hand and show him my palm. “Tell me what it is,” I say.
He leans back slightly. “Look for yourself.” He gestures toward the wall. “To the right.”
I glance over and see that one of the old photographs isn’t a photograph at all but a faded survey map, with thick red ink carving lines through the rock diagrams, right in the center of which is the same symbol burned into my palm: a vertical shaft line with two branching tunnels splitting outward.
My grandfather taps the frame lightly. “That,” he says, “is the St. Clair claim.”
He watches me take it in. “Early mining companies marked territory with symbols,” he continues calmly. “Surveyors carved them into beams. Stamped them onto tools. Filed them with the land registry.” His eyes flick back to my hand. “That one means the shaft belongs to us.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a fucking tool,” I snap.
His eyes flick up. “You sound like your father.”
“Don’t.”
He tilts his head. “That’s not a compliment. He’s weak.”
I scoff.
“When his mark appeared,” my grandfather adds casually, “he threw a temper tantrum too.”
I bark a laugh. “My father has one?”
“Of course.”
He rolls back the sleeve of his shirt. I see the same mark on his bicep. Faded, but unmistakable. “We all do.”
“So you’re saying,” I say slowly, the pieces clicking into place with a sickening lurch, “you can see at night too?”
He frowns slightly, a genuine flicker of confusion. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t play me,” I take a step toward his desk. “The red eyes.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I believe him, the confusion on his face is real. My pulse ticks hard in my throat. I have a thousand questions and no idea where to start. So I start at the beginning. “What is the tar?” I say. “The truth. Don’t fucking lie to me or I swear I’ll throw you out that window myself.”
“Perhaps,” he says calmly, “you are more like me than I gave you credit for.”
“I’m nothing like you.”
“Well,” he says lightly, “time will tell.”
He folds his hands behind his back and walks toward the wall of maps. “What the tar is,” he continues, “nobody really knows. It doesn’t matter.”
He taps the glass. “What matters is what it wants.”
I don’t move.
“It began with a contract,” he says. “Like everything that built this city.” He gestures toward the photographs.
“There was land, and there were men who knew how to read rock. They knew there was coal under the soil. Iron in the bedrock. Something worth digging for. Investors followed,” he continues. “Among them—Augustus St. Clair.”
I cross my arms.
“Do you not remember the stories I used to tell you?” he asks, a strange, almost gentle look on his face.
“Well, of course not. You were still too busy trying to see how many rocks you could fit in your pockets before your pants fell down.” He gives me a thin smile. “You must be what now? Almost 30?”
The memory comes back to me—him telling me about the dark that lived under the city, my father grabbing my arm later and hissing that I wasn’t to listen to a word my grandfather said about the tar. I shake it off.
“Get to the point,” I snap.
“Where were we? Oh, yes, back then our name meant nothing,” he continues smoothly, “Simply ownership lines on maps.”
He points to the diagram behind the glass.
“You see this? Tunnels,” he says. “First they drilled straight down. Then outward. Timber beams holding ceilings that groaned under pressure. Men hauling carts through passages thick with dust and gas.” His voice stays calm.
“The deeper they went, the hotter it got. Water seeped in. Methane pockets hissed.” He glances at me.
“There are always collapses in mines. But then,” he says quietly, “they hit something else.”
“What?”
“A pocket.”
“The tar?”
“Pressurized,” he says. “When the drill cracked through, the earth answered.”
I don’t like the way he says that.
“Workers said it moved wrong.”
“Alive?”
“Alive in a way no one could explain without sounding drunk. The tunnel flooded with it. Men were buried before they could climb out.”
He walks back toward the window, looking down at the city lights.