Chapter Text
She stood in front of the bathroom sink, her trembling hand holding a positive pregnancy test.
He had left. He had abandoned her.
No. Correction. She hadn’t been abandoned by anyone—it was she who had thrown him out of her life, because she didn’t need him.
And it was much better that way. Ekko was a killjoy who wasn’t willing to join her in any of the plans Jinx had for the rest of her life. He wasn’t willing to follow her into madness, into her affinity for creating chaos wherever she went. He wasn’t willing to step forward at her side.
He was afraid to jump into the void for her.
But Jinx was the queen of the city, and chaos was part of her signature. Missteps were her trademark, always impulsive and occasionally reckless. She couldn’t let him hold her back, stop her from moving forward.
The decision had been made—more by her than by him—and both walked away after what could have been a blossoming, perfect relationship that soon became a nightmare.
Because Jinx was proud and wouldn’t let anyone trample over her—not even him. And she had more important things to deal with.
Silco, her legal guardian, was the leading crime boss of the entire Undercity. Jinx had gained notoriety because of that—infamous, yes, but earned on her own merit. Silco and she pulled the strings of the city as they pleased. Of course, they had to tread carefully when it came to Piltover and its government, infested with corruption and hypocrisy, especially when they played the role of the “good guys” and sent their stupid Enforcers to screw up their lives and their business.
A nearly generational business, since Silco planned to leave it in Jinx’s hands once he was gone. And Jinx was content with that—she was good at it. She had a natural talent for getting her way and scaring off a few rats in the process.
Besides, it was fun.
It was damn fun to collect Silco’s debts, to walk the streets striking terror with her hollow steps, to be on everyone’s lips as one of the most dangerous criminals in Zaun.
Her ego swelled—and with it, her arrogance—because honestly, who would even dare to cross her path?
Her life was perfect enough for a Zaunite. Good enough for an orphaned girl who had been left in the care of one of her parents’ best friends. For a girl who once had nothing and now had everything.
She held the cigarette between her index and middle fingers. She inhaled deeply while the man in front of her mumbled something she didn’t care to hear. The background noise of the bar kept her ears buzzing, the barely-there lighting reflected on the man’s sweaty forehead.
“... I swear I’ll have the money in three days,” he finished.
Jinx exhaled, blowing smoke in his face. She dropped her feet from the table and leaned in close to him.
“Promises are only good for two things,” she said, “breaking them or delaying the inevitable. You know what’s inevitable here?”
She shot a knowing glance to Silco’s men flanking her, who had moved behind the man. In a second, both grabbed him and pinned him against the wooden table, knocking over all the drinks and ashtrays on it. Jinx raised her foot, planting her boot right in front of his face, now crushed by the enforcers. She drew her weapon, spinning it between her fingers with an almost inhuman speed, ending with the barrel pressed against his temple.
“The bullet in your head,” she grinned darkly.
“No, no, no, please, wait!” the man pleaded.
But Jinx’s smile didn’t falter. Her glowing pink gaze shimmered with euphoria—and she pulled the trigger.
Blood splattered across the table, dripping over the rounded edges until it pooled on the floor.
“He was our best client,” Sevika muttered, stepping back to avoid the red mess staining her boots.
“You said it yourself,” Jinx mocked, holstering her weapon. “Was.”
Sevika growled, teeth clenched.
“Silco—”
“Silco,” Jinx cut her off, “authorized me to kill whoever I wanted. You know as well as I do he doesn’t like waiting on a payment.” The girl lifted her foot, a sticky string of blood stretching between the sole and the floor. “Clean it up.”
Before Sevika could object about what kind of jobs she was supposed to do, and why cleaning up the blue brat’s messes wasn’t one of them, Silco’s tall figure pushed through the bar patrons after silence fell post-shot. Cigarette smoke outlined his hostile silhouette. He stopped in front of the scene, stared at the corpse, then at Jinx’s nonchalant expression. He said nothing, turned, and went back to his office.
Sevika and Jinx exchanged a look. They both knew what it meant: they had to follow. He wouldn’t say it again—but if they didn’t, there would be consequences.
Silco sat behind his desk and glared at them as soon as the door shut behind them.
“I told her he was our best client,” Sevika tried to justify.
“What a pathetic excuse. I should sew your mouth shut one of these days,” Jinx barked, flopping onto the couch with a groan.
Silco inhaled sharply, rubbing his forehead with one hand. It looked like the world was collapsing on him—and Jinx didn’t seem to care one bit. But he knew full well she’d go down with him if he were caught, and that was the last thing he wanted. Why couldn’t she understand that? Was her immaturity so overwhelming—or did she just not care?
“You knew he was an important client, that Piltover is breathing down my neck, that we need to move that Shimmer,” he scolded. “And to top it off… I have your sister breathing down my neck too!”
Jinx bit her lower lip in anger, opening her eyes to shoot a glare at Silco.
She’d screwed up, but not that bad.
Not bad enough to bring up her stupid sister—the one who’d abandoned her years ago.
“You know I hate when you mention her.”
“That’s the least of my worries right now,” Silco snapped. “Ever since that foolish girl joined the Enforcers, business has been tanking. And you go and kill my best client! Now I have to find someone else to get all this shit to Piltover.”
Jinx tried to speak, but Silco stopped her with a look.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said. “You’re not the one doing it.”
“I can go unnoticed!”
“Your face is on every damn ‘Wanted’ poster in the city!”
Jinx grinned proudly, much to Silco’s frustration. Sometimes he couldn’t fathom how he had the patience to deal with her childish outbursts.
“If you keep this up, I’ll ban you from all external work. You can start supervising the factories—”
“What?!” Jinx interrupted. “That’s Sevika’s boring-ass job! The idiot just needed more time, what was I supposed to do?! You said we don’t wait for anyone!”
“That was before everything started falling apart! Next time you want to show off, think twice,” Silco yelled, taking a breath and massaging his temple. “If it weren’t for your mother—”
He stopped cold, biting his tongue. The heat of the moment had made him say too much.
“Because my mother... what?” Jinx shot back, offended. “She abandoned me with you? Is that what you were going to say?”
“Of course not.”
“Forget it. I get it now.”
She said nothing more. Her throat felt dry from the whirlwind of emotions in her head. She left the office and headed back to her room.
Arguments with Silco didn’t bother her—they were common. After all, she was eighteen and he was an old man; the clash between them was inevitable. Silco acted like a father to her, sometimes too overprotective for her taste—but in the end, she understood that was his role.
The problem was when Silco loosened his tongue and brought up her sister or her mother. That’s when the bile rose in her throat.
Her mother, Felicia, had left when she was just a child—same as her sister, Violet, who had joined the Enforcers thinking that was “the right thing to do.” Because Shimmer was, after all, a drug that drove people mad and eventually killed them. Something neither Jinx nor Silco cared about, as long as it gave them the power to stay on top.
“Doing the right thing.” If she thought about it, he had also left for that reason. Ekko had also decided that what she and Silco were doing was wrong—and he wanted to fix it.
By abandoning her. Just like her mother and sister had done.
The scent of rain and wet earth drifted into the room. The warmth of a pair of arms wrapped around her shoulders, and the breath brushing her skin made her shiver.
“Hey, gorgeous.”
Jinx jumped off the bed, startled by the bright olive-green eyes of her companion.
“Lars?” she asked, overwhelmed. “What the hell? How did you get in?”
The black-haired boy approached her dangerously with a bold grin.
“I have my ways,” he replied. “Especially when it’s to be with you.”
He lunged at her, kissing her neck.
“I’m not in the mood, Lars,” Jinx said, pushing him away. “Silco was a jerk to me today.”
The boy let out a mocking laugh.
“When is he not?”
Jinx scrunched her nose in annoyance. Only she could talk about him that way—because Silco might be an annoying old man, but he was her annoying old man.
“Come on, Jinx,” Lars urged, his voice low and sultry. “We’ve been seeing each other for months, don’t you think we could… increase our number of encounters?”
Jinx remained silent as his hands traced her waist and his lips brushed against her skin.
He wasn’t Ekko.
But Ekko had left. He wasn’t there anymore.
So many times, Jinx had lost everything she loved. So many times she had simply been pushed aside, replaced, abandoned. Now she knew—even the idiot Lars, with whom she had chosen to start something a while ago, could do the same. He could leave, too.
She had made her own choices—and those choices had brought her here. To this constant, persistent desire…
To not be alone.
Not again.
Silco had decided to give her a second chance after the girl went three days without speaking to him. Although, in reality, Jinx held much of Silco’s will in her hands, it was clear that, in the eyes of the crime lord’s associates, Jinx was nothing more than his pet.
“I heard Silco tightened your leash.”
Renni looked at her with a sneer, sitting beside her at the bar. Jinx clicked her lips loudly and then took a sip of her drink, eyeing her from the corner of her eye.
“The cargo’s ready. You can get lost now,” she said.
The woman smiled again, ignoring the remark. Rare were the times when any of them—anyone, really—had the chance to mess with Jinx, and this was one of those times. She definitely wouldn’t waste it.
“You shouldn’t play too far from daddy anymore. You could get hurt,” she mocked. “And Silco wouldn’t have a legacy to protect.”
“Is that a threat?” Jinx asked, with sardonic disbelief.
Her hand went toward her gun holster but froze mid-move as she remembered Silco’s words. They were in trouble, and killing one of his biggest partners wouldn’t help. She reluctantly pulled her fingers back and wrapped them around her glass again.
Renni’s only son ran by them with a heavy gait, letting out laughs that were unbearably loud for Jinx.
“Shut your annoying rat up. This isn’t a place for children,” the girl spat.
Renni’s expression vanished immediately, and Jinx seemed pleased with that. The older woman slammed her fist on the bar, making the glassware rattle.
“Don’t you dare talk about my boy like that,” she snarled. Jinx smiled even wider. She loved making Silco’s old partners' blood boil. “The day you have one, I’ll make sure you regret it, you stupid brat.”
This time it was Jinx’s smile that faded. Renni stormed off, stirring the air around her. Jinx took another sip and swirled the glass in front of her face, making the liquid move to the rhythm of her wrist, hypnotizing herself.
“Ha!” she scoffed. “I’d rather die than bring one of those horrible things into the world.”
She set the glass down and sighed, whispering to herself,
“There’s no way I’ll ever be a mother.”
Because even thinking about it was insane. She didn’t completely hate her life, but she did hate the idea of bringing a second life into the world and having to care for it. The word “responsibility” wasn’t in her vocabulary, and a kid came with a lot of that.
The thing is, life has curious ways of playing a twisted version of Russian roulette. And Jinx had been feeling weird for weeks, with a delayed period that had lit a red warning light in her head the moment Renni mocked her.
She stood in front of the bathroom sink, her trembling hand holding a positive pregnancy test. Her pale skin had gone almost translucent. All she could think about was Silco killing her—or throwing herself off a rooftop.
“There’s no way I’ll be a mother,” she kept repeating in her head. “There’s no way I’ll be a mother.”
There was no way she had screwed up her life like this. She couldn’t have. Shit—she didn’t want to. Just the thought of something growing inside her right now, something that would be kicking her guts as soon as it got bigger than a grain of rice, made her nauseous.
She wasn’t going to change diapers. She wasn’t going to give up her life—her goddamn good life—for a smelly, ungrateful brat who wouldn’t even let her breathe freely once it came into the world.
She wasn’t going to be someone’s slave. She wasn’t going to hand her life over to that thing. Never.
The bathroom door burst open.
“What the hell is taking you so long? We were supposed to leave thirty minutes ago.”
Sevika walked in without asking, her expression impatient—until she noticed the pregnancy test Jinx had tried to hide, unsuccessfully, behind her back.
“You’ve got to be kidding me…” the older woman barely managed to say.
She hadn’t seen the result yet, but the fact that Silco’s brat had even bought a pregnancy test was already a bad sign—especially for her, since the dumb girl was her responsibility.
She took a step forward and snatched the test, saw the result, and her face went from white to purple. She was furious, scared, and itching to strangle her right then and there.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” she roared, waving the test in Jinx’s face. “How the hell did this happen?!”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know where babies come from, ogre girl.”
Jinx tried to lighten the mood, but the woman looked like she was about to blow steam out of her nose from sheer rage.
“Keep making your stupid jokes,” Sevika spat, throwing the test to the ground. “Which idiot did you mess around with this time?”
Jinx looked uneasy. She’d expected that question, but hadn’t come up with an answer. She wasn’t in a position to give one.
“Lars? That moron?” Sevika asked, jumping ahead of Jinx’s thoughts. The girl stayed silent.
“Do you know what Silco will do if he finds out?”
The younger woman finally snapped back, locking her jittery gaze on Sevika.
“He doesn’t have to find out!” she cried. “I’ll get rid of it before it’s too late. I’m probably only a few week—”
“‘Weeks’?! How the hell didn’t you notice before?”
“I have better things to think about!”
“You’re an idiot,” Sevika grunted, trying to compose herself and eyeing the test on the floor. “And now you’ll be a mother…”
Jinx felt a shiver. Hearing someone else say it out loud sent chills down her spine.
“I won’t be,” she said firmly. “This is going away.”
And the thing was, she couldn’t even call it a “baby” because it wasn’t one yet. And she couldn’t have one of those. How would it look to everyone if she—she—had one of those things clinging to her arms? How would it look to all her peers if one of those things called her “Mom”? Another shiver ran through her nerves.
No. She wasn’t made to be a mother. That wasn’t the role she was meant to play in this world.
She had let Sevika deliver the shipment on her own—something they both agreed on—because the older woman preferred to be far away in case Jinx changed her mind and needed “emotional support.” That wasn’t her style, and the brat only ever caused her problems. Why would she do something like that?
Jinx remained in that dark alleyway, staring at the clouds that promised an approaching storm. Her tangled thoughts echoed in her head; she couldn’t even do the math right, no matter how hard she tried, the timeline didn’t add up. She even began to wonder if she was assigning the responsibility to the right person.
But… it had to be him, because Ekko couldn’t… No, it wasn’t possible.
Even if, deep down, she would’ve preferred it that way. Because maybe what she was about to do would’ve been easier if it had been Ekko’s.
And because if that creature had been Ekko’s… maybe she would’ve made a different decision.
Lars landed behind her with a jump, wrapping his arms around her waist to kiss her cheek. Jinx startled, stepping forward to get away from him. He looked displeased, but at that moment, she couldn’t even bring herself to look him in the face—she stood completely still.
“I thought you wanted to see me,” he complained, frowning. “Is this about Silco? Did he send you? I already told you I’ll have his payment by Friday. There shouldn’t be a problem if I work for him too—he gives me all the dirty jobs he doesn’t want you to do. That should be enough—”
“I’m pregnant.”
They locked eyes—cold, inert. The color drained from Lars’s face. Jinx could barely hear her own thoughts over the deafening drumbeat of her heart.
But she knew exactly what was spinning in her head now: if Ekko had been the father, things would’ve been easier right then.
Lars stepped toward her and grabbed her shoulders roughly, slamming her against the wall of the nearby building. Jinx felt the blow in her spine and bit her tongue to keep from screaming. She reached for the weapon strapped to her leg and tried to fire between his eyes, but he managed to strike her hand first, sending the gun flying several meters away.
He wasn’t an idiot—not like the ones who let themselves be killed by her so easily. Maybe that’s why he caught her attention in the first place. But now she regretted ever being so stupid.
Lars grabbed her by the neck, lifting her a few inches off the ground, forcing her wide magenta eyes to lock on his.
“Don’t play with me,” he growled. “We haven’t even been together long enough for you to come at me with the bullshit that you’re pregnant.” He looked at her belly in disgust. “And if you are, it’s probably not even mine. Who knows how many other idiots you’ve screwed, you fucking whore.”
Jinx grabbed his hand with both of hers, trying to pry him off. She kicked helplessly—no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t break free. Her breath began to fail, and the dry choking sounds caused by the pressure on her throat came more and more frequently.
“You better get rid of that thing,” he warned, letting her drop to the ground, “and don’t you dare tell Silco that crazy idea in your head that I’m the father.”
Jinx crashed down with a loud thud and desperately tried to catch her breath. Lars crouched in front of her, lifting her chin with one finger.
“If you dare to keep it and tell everyone it’s mine, I swear you’re dead,” he spat, his voice calm and chilling. “I swear I’ll kill you—and that stupid baby of yours.”
He suddenly released her again. Jinx couldn’t say anything. She clenched her teeth as her brow furrowed, trying to muster an expression that showed strength, but the truth was that her will had crumbled the moment she heard that threat. For a second, a sharp stab went through her chest. Maybe something she had never felt before… Fear?
It was possible, but she wasn’t sure if she was feeling it for herself. Was she afraid of what that bastard might do to… whatever was growing inside her?
The heavy, metallic march of the Enforcers echoed through the alley. The gunshot had drawn them in.
Lars stood up with a grin.
“You better run, sweetheart,” he mocked. “They’re probably after you. You’re real famous in the city above, and they know what Silco would pay to get you back.”
He pulled up his hood and ran in the opposite direction of the approaching sound. Rain began to fall, the cold water piercing Jinx’s skin as if cutting straight to the bone.
She cursed herself, again and again. If Ekko had been the father, things would’ve been simpler in that moment.
Jinx tried to stand, but the effects of oxygen deprivation still gripped her. Her blurred vision and the weakness in her legs barely let her get on her feet, leaning against the same wall that had nearly broken her back.
She didn’t even have time to run, and no strength left to fight. The Enforcers arrived in a group and pinned her against the wall, cuffing her wrists behind her back. Jinx let out a whimper, struggling to break free, but it was useless.
She couldn’t shake the thought that no one was there to help her, that no one would stop them from taking her.
They would take her to Stillwater. They’d take a stupid, pregnant girl to that wretched place she never wanted to set foot in.
She probably wouldn’t see daylight again, and if that happened… what would become of that thing inside her?
She was supposed to go with Lars to Piltover to find a doctor who, for the right price, would get rid of it.
Now she couldn’t.
That thing would stay inside her until the day it decided to come into the world.
Until the day it invaded her world.
And it would do so while its idiot mother remained locked away in a moldy, damp, unsanitary cell.
Because that was all Jinx had to offer it. Nothing more. She was a criminal, and she knew full well that any child of a criminal would suffer the consequences of their parents’ actions.
Jinx had to stop it. Before it was too late.
That creature inside her wasn’t allowed to be born.
Jinx didn’t need it. Not as long as she had herself.