“To bring her back?” I ask tentatively.
“No,” Jack says, finally turning his head to look down at me, a vaguely haunted look in his eyes, the horrors he experienced visible in every line of his face. “She ran. Like my brother.” He releases another long breath. “Ian Stone doesn’t believe in second chances.”
Then Jack scoffs, a rippling wave of fury washing across his face, resentment in his voice when he says, “Except for his son, apparently.”
So, Rohan is his father’s only exception.
Somehow, I can’t bring myself to think he’s more fortunate than his mother and Jack’s brother. Tartarus is still Tartarus, even when you’re favourited by the god of the underworld.
“Well, shit,” I say, at a loss for any other words.
Jack doesn’t respond, instead choosing to exit the War Room much the same as the rest of our unit, leaving me on my own to stew in my thoughts over the revelations of the last few minutes.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LEO
I’m not sure what compels me to go and invade Rohan’s eerie supervillains lab, but after what Jack admitted, it would feel odd to carry on like nothing has happened.
If Jack really did kill his mum, on his dad’s orders, then it gives new perspective to how Rohan acted in the safe house. His animosity towards Jack makes far more sense to me now. I can almost admire the restraint it must have taken to look past his own anger and resentment and help to save Jack from Obsidian Inc. Even if he must know, intellectually, that Jack only did what he did because he was forced to. He had very little choice in the matter. OI took that away through years of breaking him down mentally, not to mention the bloody chip in his neck, which must have felt like an ever-tightening noose.
Jack, whatever he might believe about himself, does not enjoy killing. He didn’t revel in it during our mission. It was all perfunctory. He was just doing what he’d been trained to do in those types of situations. OI would not have taught him to hold back, to deploy mercy when possible. I can’t blame him for being analytical towards death. He would have had to be to survive what OI demanded of him.
However blasé he might have seemed in the War Room, speaking about killing Rohan’s mum, I’m certain he feels guilt over what he had to do.
It’s unlikely that Rohan will talk to me about his mum’s death, but I think someone should be checking in with him. Having his mum’s killer walking around the base has to make him feel some kind of way.
Rohan looks up at me when I go into his lab. He’s working on something at a large metal table. He has tools in his hands, a small set of tweezers and what I think is a soldering iron. The lab smells a bit like molten metal.
He’s wearing thick gloves and plastic goggles, which halo his messy, dark hair. In his white lab coat and safety gear, he looks more like a haphazard scientist than the boarding-school dropout I pegged him as when we first met.
He seems to be working on an obscure metal object caught in a vice. If I had to guess, I would say it was a toy. It resembles a spider, with thin metal legs and a round body. There are tiny wires of red and blue sticking out of the circular body.
I have no clue what it is Rohan is actually working on. R&D is a secretive bunch on their best days. Rohan is particularly well-known for being close-lipped about his independent projects.
Unsure of my welcome, I stay near the doorway, not wanting to come across as invading his personal workspace without his express permission.
After all the years spent keeping the true extent of my mum’s alcoholism a secret from teachers and the police, and then years of missions where I was put in compromising positions all the time, I know what it feels like when people don’t respect your boundaries. With those experiences in mind, I make a concentrated effort not to do that to anyone else.
Plus, Rohan is even less likely to be open to speaking with me if I just bulldoze into his lab and demand a heartfelt inquest.
“Hey,” I call over to him, keeping my tone purposefully light, “you okay to have a word?”
Rohan takes note of my hesitancy and the question by giving a heavy sigh and waving me over. He puts his tools down on the metal table and removes his goggles, tugging them down so they hang around his neck like a bizarre necklace.
I go to stand on the opposite side of the metal table, leaving a decent amount of space between us.
Rohan looks over the table at me, an expectant frown on his face. When he doesn’t give me any verbal prompt, I answer the question of why I’m there interrupting his work.
“Okay, it’s very possible I’m overstepping the line here,” I say as a bracer, “But I wanted to see if you were alright. Jack told me about. You know. The reason you’re not exactly ecstatic to be around him.”
Rohan, in his typical arsehole fashion, goes out of his way to make this conversation as difficult as it can be by pretending not to understand, when I can tell just by his clenched expression that he very much does.
“There are a lot of reasons why the close proximity of Jack Roth would not excite me,” he drawls, voice acidic. “You’re going to need to narrow it down a bit.”
I remind myself that Rohan and I are strangers, and I’m asking about his murdered mother. If it were the other way round, I’d probably be defensive about the whole thing too.
“If you don’t want to talk about your mum to me, I get it. All I want to know is if working with Jack is going to cause problems for you—”
