The word sits differently in Mara’s mouth than it does in my new world. Here,boundmeans claimed, protected. A specific arrangement between people, with rules and a kind of permanence that most in the Rot would kill for.
But in Mara’s voice, stripped of that context, it just sounds like a leash. A prison. A creepy arrangement I could not possibly have consented to.
I don’t correct her. Not yet.
Her eyes widen. “So the guy told me if I went deeper, I’d either find you or I’d disappear, but that most people who go looking for someone disappear.”
“But you looked for me anyway.”
She stares at me. Really stares, past the surface, past the room, past the three men arranged around us like watch dogs. Her eyes are bloodshot and hollowed out, but underneath there’s the same stubborn, reckless, unbreakable friend I’ve known since we were kids.
“Of course I did. You know me.”
I have to look away for a second. Blink hard. Swallow. I do know her. But I still don’t understand why.
She describes tonight. She’d been circling closer for days, she says, learning the patterns, watching the exits, trying to figure out which faces came and went and which ones stayed. She saw us leave the Rot. Three men and a woman, moving together in a way that made people step aside without being asked.
“I recognized your walk before I could see your face. Can you believe that? So crazy.”
The lump in my throat grows but I don’t want to cry, at least not right now.
She followed us from a distance, watching us enter the club, but was smart enough not to try to get in, herself. After all, she might be reckless but she isn’t stupid. She waited, sitting in the dark outside the building for hours, back against a wall, watching the door. When we came out and headed here, she followed. When the lights went off, she waited a while, then knocked.
She throws her hands up. “I didn’t have a plan.” This is not like Mara. The woman always has a plan or three, like a backup for her backup. “I just needed to find you.”
I take her hand, and she squeezes back hard until it hurts my fingers.
I want to be angry. Part of me tries, the part that’s still insulted by how she talked about my father, the part that knows how dangerous this stunt was, and the part that’s spent weeks watching how the Rot devours people whose luck has run out. She could have been taken, followed by God knows what. She walked into a territory run by men who don’t answer to anyone, and she did it with nothing but stubbornness and my name.
Things could have gone badly for her.
But she’s here. Shaking and real. And I don’t have enough room in me for anger and relief at the same time.
So relief wins, like it always does with Mara.
Armen hasn’t moved from the door. He’s watching, not Mara specifically, but everything happening in the room. He’s got this gaze, one that takes in everything and saves it for when he needs it. No doubt, he’ll eventually have questions that he’ll ask them when he’s ready. I know that much about him.
Rogue has shifted his weight twice, which I’ve learned, in his case, means interest.
And Sting hasn’t moved at all. He stands at the window perfectly still, like a statue, communicating the same thing he always does:I know what’s going on and I’m not telling you shit until I’m ready to.
The guys’ energy swirls around Mara and me while we do our own thing, reuniting and figuring out what the hell is going on with each other.
The guys on the other hand, they’re not hostile but they sure as hell are not welcoming, either. They’re working inside their heads, weighing risks and rewards and what the price of keeping Mara around versus getting rid of her might be.
She squeezes my hand again. She doesn’t know these guys—but she knows enough. Her future is in their hands, and I’m not part of whatever comes next.
3
VI
Something nags at me.
Mara’s story makes sense. Kind of. The guilt, the searching, the Rotter at the security gate, all of it. But there’s a gap in the middle that she stepped over without stopping, something I almost didn’t notice.
Guilt got her to the door. Guilt made her ask around, knock on doors, pester strangers. Guilt is an engine that runs hot but burns out fast. It only takes you so far.
It doesn’t keep you sleeping in dead zones for weeks, circling the Rot when a man with a scar on his chin tells you that people who go looking tend to disappear. Something else does that. Something she hasn’t told me.
