I can feel it. The quality of her attention becomes focused and sharper. She doesn’t say anything though, or try to recapture my gaze or force the conversation I’m not ready to have.
Are you in?
Yeah.
37
VI
Something is up with Sting.
It’s not his usual, old resistance. I know what that looks like— that Sting I could work with. That Sting I could push against, argue with, pin to a couch and kiss until his certainty cracked. That Sting was a wall, solid and consistent. A wall you can lean against.
But this is something different. This Sting is a wall with something moving behind it.
It’s been three days since I handed him the bag of papers. Three days since I stood in his doorway and saidyou wanted inand walked away without looking back, feeling powerful, like we’d finally turned a corner. I expected… well, I’m not sure what I expected. Not a speech. Certainly not him falling to his knees and declaring my father innocent, I know better than that. But I expected something. Maybe an acknowledgment. A conversation. Even one of his precise, clinical assessments that secretly means he’s moved an inch in my direction.
Instead, he’s pulled back.
Not from the Rot or from his responsibilities. He’s still everywhere he’s supposed to be, handling negotiations with traders, making decisions that keep this place running. But he’s rougher about it. A supply dispute he’d normally resolve in five minutes with cold logic took twenty because he ground down the other party until they stopped arguing out of exhaustion. I watched from across the neutral zone and thought,That’s not how you do it. That’s not how you’ve ever done it.
He’s shorter with Rogue, which is noticeable because Sting is never short with Rogue. Rogue said something at breakfast yesterday, some joke about a generator, and Sting looked at him with an expression that made Rogue’s grin fade for a full two seconds before he recovered. Rogue recovering from anything in two seconds tells me whatever he saw on Sting’s face was not business as usual.
And with me, he’s present but unreachable. He’s in the room, for sure. He’s at the table, too. He’s walking the same corridors I walk, at the same hours I walk them. But there’s a gap now. What I’ve grown used to isn’t there anymore, even after I thought we’d turned a corner.
I’m trying to figure it out. I thought I’d gotten good at reading the man, like the changes in his posture, and way his voice changes. I’ve built a whole internal dictionary of this guy and now something has changed. I feel like I’m starting over.
I hope to God it’s the evidence about Rothwell and my dad. Maybe he read everything and found what I found and it broke something in him. Or maybe he read everything and it confirmed what he already believed, that Dad was dirty, that officials can’t be trusted, that Mayor Renner’s daughter is chasing a ghost.
Or maybe it’s the Skylight Room.
I keep coming back to that night and the stars through the broken glass, his mother’s story, her patient, Dorothy, and how he nodded when I said her name.
Maybe I heard or saw too much? Maybe in reading all my papers, he opened a door he’s been trying to close ever since, and the withdrawal isn’t about the evidence at all. It’s about me sitting six inches from his shoulder and hearing the one story he’s never told anyone, about his mom.
God, this man. I could shake him. I want to corner him in one of those narrow corridors and press myself against him and force him to stop fucking thinking. I know the noise he makes when I take his cock in my hand, what his face looks like when he comes, and the way his control shatters before he pieces it back together.
I want the version of Sting who held my face when it was bleeding. That man is in there but right now I can’t reach him.
In the work hub, I’m sorting a stack of trade receipts that Armen asked me to organize because he’s teaching me how the supply chain works, which is either genuine mentorship or a clever way to keep me busy while the guys figure out what to do with me. Maybe both.
Sting passes through.
He’s heading somewhere, moving with the purpose he brings to everything, and he doesn’t stop. Doesn’t speak to me. Doesn’t acknowledge me. But as he crosses behind my station, I feel his gaze land on me, heavy, before he keeps walking.
I don’t turn around. I wait until his footsteps fade down the corridor, and then I look.
He’s stopped twenty feet away, his back to me, not moving. Just standing there, one hand on the doorframe, head slightly down, the posture of a man who was going somewhere and forgot why.
Then he turns just enough, looks over his shoulder, and catches me looking.
For a second, the gap between us, the one that’s driving me crazy. I can see his face clearly, and the expression on it isn’t distance or control or any of the things he’s been wearing for three days. It’s conflicted, torn, the face of a man fighting himself.
My whole body aches and not in a good way, not with the heat I feel when he’s close and his hands are on me. This ache is worry because I know what Sting looks like when he’s choosing not to let me in, and this isn’t that. This is something else.
I suppose I could be wrong, and that this isn’t a temporary thing. Maybe he’s pulling away for good. That the Skylight Room, the club, and his holding my bleeding face were all moments that meant more to me than to him.
He looks away first, turns and walks on.
