VI
We bring Mara in.Behind her, Armen shuts the door and locks it, two bolts, one after the other, the sound heavy and serious in the small room.
Mara doesn’t flinch. She’s past flinching.
Rogue hands her a blanket without being asked. I watch her register the gesture, the slight widening of her eyes, the half-second delay before she accepts it with a nod, as if that’s all she can muster in thanks. She wraps it around her shoulders and helps herself to the edge of the mattress with her knees drawn up. For a moment, she looks so small inside the fabric that my throat clogs with a lump. She’s no longer my kick-ass, ball-busting bestie, but something I don’t know.
I don’t bother with introductions. They are out of place in my new world.
I take a seat next to her, close enough that our legs touch. I need the contact, that’s how afraid I am they’re going to kick her out on her ass.
Like I could stop them.
Armen hands her a water bottle, and I whisper a thanks his way in case Mara can’t or won’t. She holds it in both hands like something precious and drinks in small, careful sips, the way you drink when you know good water is hard to come by and something to be rationed, not gulped down, no matter how badly you want it.
The guys settle into position. Not sitting. None of them sit. Armen stands near the door, arms crossed, expression flat. Rogue leans against the far wall with his ankles crossed, head tilted, studying Mara with an openness that could pass for either friendly or lethal depending on what side of him you’re on. Sting stays on his feet near the window, weight balanced, shoulders square. Still.
Three points of a triangle. Mara and me at the center.
I can feel the load, the pressure of their attention. Not so much directed at me but at Mara. The new variable. The unknown quantity sitting on their mattress, drinking their water, potentially aware of things about their operation that nobody outside this room is supposed to know. It’s not enough that I can vouch for her, I realize. Until she proves herself as a trustworthy entity, they will assume she’s trouble, no matter what I say.
Which irritates the shit out of me.
I ignore them and turn to Mara. “Tell me everything,” I say.
She doesn’t start from the beginning. She starts from the middle, the way people do when they’ve been carrying something too long, and it just spills out like verbal diarrhea.
She leads with guilt.
Our fight. Our last conversation a year or so ago, before I entered the Hunt. When she said my father was part of the corruption that killed this city, and I said she didn’t know what she was fucking talking about. She said I was being an idiot, and I told her she was being a bitch. Standard Mara-Vi detonation.Loud, ugly, both of us saying the thing calculated to land hard and with maximum damage. We’d done it before, and always recovered.
Except this time it was different. She’d talked shit about my father, pushing us past the point of no return. Too many ugly words said. Our lifelong friendship ended right there on a dime.
“I thought you were dead,” she says, eyes fixed on the water bottle like she’s afraid to look directly at me. Or maybe it’s just shame coupled with the uncertainty of whether forgiveness is coming her way. “For a while I was sure you were dead. And I kept thinking the last thing I said to you was that your father deserved what happened to him.”
It still stings, after all this time. But things are different now.
“Mara—”
“Don’t.” She shakes her head. “Don’t tell me you forgive me. Don’t tell me to just forget about it. I deserve the guilt I’ve lived with. Am still living with.”
She fills me in piece by piece. After I vanished, she tried the normal routes. Called people, asked around, showed up at places I used to hang out. Nobody knew anything. Nobody wanted to. These days, Rothwell makes people go quiet.
So she came looking on her own.
She doesn’t give me a clear timeline and I don’t push for one. The details come in bits and pieces, like her sleeping in the dead zone outside the Rot’s footprint, the area that nobody claims, where you can camp out if you’re lucky and can put up with the misery.
She ate what she found, and avoided people when she could, running when she couldn’t.
I don’t mention her mother’s visit to the Rot, not yet.
“There was a man,” she says. “Just outside. Older guy, scar on his chin. Wouldn’t give me his name.”
I know the type. The low-level Rotters who patrol the edges. They’re not important enough to make decisions but important enough to know things. Lots of things.
“I described you to him,” Mara says. “And something in his face changed. Like he knew exactly who I was talking about but wasn’t sure he should say so.”
She pauses. Takes another sip. “He told me you were alive. And that you were bound.”
