Saint pushes away from the desk and steps up to me, his body heat reaching me before he touches me. My breath catches in my throat, his eyes flicking briefly to my mouth.
“Yes, you did.”
The words hit the same place they always do when he says them like that as if he’s naming something I’ve been hiding from myself.
Saint lifts two fingers beneath my chin and tilts my face higher. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you?”
My mouth parts a little as my hands twitch at my sides, reaching for nothing because I don’t know what I’m allowed to touch.
Saint’s eyes darken as he watches me fail to hide the reaction. “Oh,” he says softly. “That’s dangerous.”
“Don’t.” My voice barely works.
His thumb rests against the edge of my jaw. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t use that if you don’t mean it.”
For the first time, something moves across his face that doesn’t immediately turn into calculation. It’s gone too quickly to understand, but I see it. Then his hand drops. “I’ll be gone tonight.”
The change is so abrupt I almost lose my balance. “What?”
“Warehouse issue. Moth’s coming with me. Bricks will be downstairs. You stay here.”
The office still feels charged from his hand under my chin, and now he’s already somewhere else, business locking back over whatever the moment almost became. “Here as in the clubhouse?”
“Here as in my room, unless Tally has you eating or Bricks has eyes on you.”
“I’m not a prisoner.”
“No. Prisoners get searched before they lie to me.”
“I haven’t lied to you.”
Saint looks at me for a long moment, the silence feeling less like suspicion than a warning. “Keep it that way.”
Oisín
Heleaveslessthanan hour later. Watching from the window, I catch a glimpse of his bike speeding down the path, the anger welling up in my chest from this afternoon building until it snaps. I make it two hours before getting too antsy, needing something to take my mind off of whatever is growing between Saint and myself.
My phone buzzes and I pull it out of my pocket, surprised to see something from my sister. We haven’t ever really talked so I never expected her to message me when I was all but sold off to Obsidian.
Café at the corner. Twenty minutes. Alone.
No greeting. No apology. No explanation. Just a command dressed in fewer words than Canon would’ve used.
My first instinct is to ignore it. My second is to ask Saint, and that makes me so angry at myself that I’m already reaching for my shoes. I tell the prospect near the back hall that I’m getting air and let him assume someone important knows. It isn’t a good lie, but it’s quiet enough to pass.
The coffee shop sits six blocks away, wedged between a closed bookstore and a laundromat with half its lights burned out. Varina is already in the back booth when I arrive, black coffee untouched in front of her, leather jacket zipped to her throat. She looks tired in a way she’d never allow at the Rogues’ clubhouse. She gestures to the seat across from her with it’s own black coffee.
Her eyes move over me once and stop at the fading mark beneath my jaw. “Jesus, Oisín.”
I sit across from her. “That’s what you wanted to say?”
She looks away first, and for one second I see my sister instead of Canon’s heir. The girl who used to crawl into my bed after Mom died. The girl who once stood between me and rooms too loud for me to survive alone. Then her face hardens, and I know before she speaks that whatever tenderness brought me here is already lost.
“You need to remember where you come from,” she growls.
I wrap both hands around my mug. “I know where I come from.”
