“Go on.”
“We remove her. Permanently. Clean. No trace.” I hold up a second finger. “Or we dump her outside with a warning and hope she’s smart enough to stay gone. And smart enough to keep her mouth shut.”
Armen rubs his chin. Not disagreement, processing. “Option one is off the table.”
“Why?”
“Because Vi would never forgive us. And an uncooperative Vi inside the Rot is a bigger liability than one woman outside it.”
Fuck all. He’s right. I know he’s right. That doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.
“With option one, a body creates questions, and that can mean new problems. But option two isn’t clean either,” Armen continues. “She’d be a loose end. If she talks to anyone aboutanything, we don’t control the narrative. And if she disappears and someone comes looking for her,like her mother again, we’ve doubled the problem instead of solving it.”
Armen’s boxing out my options with the same precision I used to present them, which I respect, even though it sucks.
I feel a headache circling like a hungry vulture. Goddamn, when I woke up this morning, I wasn’t expecting any bullshit like this.
Rogue’s arms are crossed, his weight on one leg. His head is angled toward the conversation but his eyes keep drifting to the two women on the mattress. He’s watching them the way he watches everything, with an ease that hides how much he’s actually taking in.
“So what,” he scoffs, “she just lives with us now?”
The question lands and sits there.
I don’t want to answer it because every answer is wrong. Killing her is clean but costs us Vi. Dumping her is fast but leaves a live wire we can’t monitor. And keeping her, hell, keeping her means absorbing another person into an arrangement that was already more complicated than we ever planned for.
Three Rotters. One woman. That is our makeup. Tight. Defined. Every variable accounted for.
And now, out of nowhere, there’s a fifth element sitting on the mattress, wrapped in our blanket, drinking our water, holding our woman’s hand with a grip that saysI’m not letting go and you can’t make me.
“She can’t live withus,” I say. “But I suppose she could live inside the Rot. Under supervision. We contain the information by containing the source.”
Rogue’s eyebrows lift a fraction. “You want to bring a civilian into the Rot. A girl who hasn’t entered via the Hunt?”
“I want to bring aknown quantityinto the Rot. She’s already been circling the place. She’s already been talking to guards. Ifshe’s inside, we control what she sees, who she talks to, and where she goes. If she’s outside, we control nothing. And fuck it, we always need more able bodies. The Hunt as a recruiting tool only brings in so many workers.”
Armen is thinking, his arms crossed and pulled in tight. My guess is, he’s close to a decision he isn’t entirely happy about.
“Vi will want this,” he says.
“Vi’s wants are not a priority.”
“But her cooperation is,” he replies. “And right now, the fastest way to lose it is to take that woman away from her.”
Rogue snorts. “You talk about her like she’s a pet.”
I side-eye him and he chuckles. “All right,” I say. “She stays, even though it feels like extortion. But the terms are ours.”
Armen holds my gaze, then nods. Rogue offers a silent agreement, or at least the absence of objection. We’ve chosen the least bad option from a bucket of even worse options.
It’s done.
Except it isn’t because while the operational problem is solved, underneath is another. There’s always another fucking problem.
The way Vi looked at her.
When that door opened and the woman was standing there, wrecked, filthy, and half-starved, Vi’s face did something I haven’t seen it do once in the weeks since she came to us. It wasn’t the anger I’m used to, not the snarky bravado she uses when she’s unsure of herself. Not the careful, measured acceptance she’s learned to wear inside the Rot, nor the heat that surfaces when my hands are on her.
What I saw that I hadn’t before, was relief. Pure, uncut, full-body relief. The kind that changes someone’s face, the kind you can’t fake.
