“I want to know where you stand before shit goes sideways.” Bricks clicks his tongue as he watches my face. “Your father sees an actual product when he looks at that kid. Canon and the Rogues don’t care about Oisín except for what he can carry back. Moth sees the brain. Tally sees the bruised little stray she’s already decided is staying. Demo sees a friend because Demo has the survival instincts of a damp paper bag. Where do you stand?”
The easy answer is ownership. Mine. I took him. I signed the contract. I put him in my room, my bed, my rules, my hand. The easy answer should be enough because ownership is a language I understand. But Bricks didn’t ask who Oisín belongs to. He asked where I stand, and that makes the answer more dangerous.
So I give him the version that costs me nothing.
“I took him to piss off the Rogues. He’s useful, he knows routes, and he makes Canon look like an idiot every time he opens his mouth. He settles when I tell him to, and he’s got enough in his head to help Moth clean up problems we should’ve caught months ago. That’s all.”
Bricks listens without blinking. Then he snorts. “You avoided my question so hard you built a whole damn road around it.”
I push off the desk. “We done?”
“Yeah.” He turns toward the door, then pauses with his hand on the knob. “But I think I got my answer.”
I don’t ask what answer he thinks he found. That would be another mistake, and I’ve already made enough before noon.
Oisín
I’msittinginSaint’soffice when Bricks finds me, halfway through a route sheet that no one actually asked me to review.
The office has become familiar in a way I don’t fully trust. I know which drawer Saint keeps locked, which floorboard creaks near the cabinet, which file stacks belong to Moth and which ones Saint has touched because the edges sit slightly less neat after his hands have been on them. The chair near the wall has somehow become mine, though no one has said that out loud. I sit there with my notebook open across my lap, trying to decide whether the discrepancy in the Buffalo complaint is connected to the supply distortion I found or only wearing the same shape. The more I stare at the numbers, the more they feel like a hook waiting beneath the water.
Bricks knocks once and opens the door before I answer. “You’re up.”
I look at him over the top of the notebook. “I’m what?”
He steps inside far enough to close the door behind him, and that alone makes my stomach tighten. Bricks fills space even when he isn’t trying, but today he looks less amused than usual, shoulders set beneath his cut, beard shadowing a mouth pulled into a hard line. “Up. Grab your shoes.”
I glance toward the desk phone, as if it might ring and provide a version of this that makes sense. “Where’s Saint?”
“Already gone. He’s dealing with the buyer who says we fucked up his shipment, and Sol decided you’re going too.”
The notebook shifts against my lap because my fingers have gone stiff around it. “Why would I be going to that?”
“Because Sol overrode everything Saint said and wants you at the meet. His logic is that if your information is part of how we’re moving product, you can stand there while it gets tested.” Bricks watches my face as his voice loses some of the roughness. “Don’t look at me like that, kid. I’m just the asshole sent to collect you.”
Being collected has become a recurring theme in my life. Canon collected me when he needed numbers. Saint collected me when the contract gave him room to maneuver. Now Sol is collecting me because some buyer complained, and apparently my body in the room will make a point no one cared enough to explain to me first.
I set the notebook on Saint’s desk. “Why wouldn’t Saint come tell me himself?”
Bricks exhales through his nose and looks away for half a second, which is more answer than I want. “Because Saint asked me to. He gets into a headspace for these things, and when he’s there, he’s better pointed at the problem than he is explaining the problem to someone he doesn’t want standing anywhere near it.”
“He doesn’t want me there?”
“No.” Bricks looks back at me. “And that’s exactly why Sol wants you there. So do yourself a favor and don’t say shit unless Saint or Moth asks you a direct question. These rooms aren’t like the ones you’ve been watching from the edges. Smart men die in them when they mistake knowing something for needing to prove it.”
I put on my shoes, then follow him into the private hall, where the clubhouse noise reaches us in muffled waves from the other side of the locked door. Demo is near the bar when we come through, carrying a crate of bottles with the anxious concentration of a man defusing a bomb badly disguised as beer. Tally is behind the counter, a towel in her hand and her eyes already narrowed on Bricks.
“You taking him out?” she asks.
“Sol’s orders.”
Her mouth tightens. “Of course they are.”
Demo sets the crate down too fast, glass clinking sharply. “Is Saint there?”
“Already there,” Bricks says, not slowing down enough for anyone to turn the answer into a discussion.
The ride takes twenty minutes but feels longer because Bricks is quiet for the first half of it. Riding behind Bricks is different than Saint, thought the sheer size of this man’s back keeps the wind from hitting any part of me. The city thins into industrial lots, chain-link fences, old brick warehouses, and wet asphalt shining under a low gray sky.
