Oisín
Idon’tknowhowmuch time has passed by the time they put the screen in front of me. It stretches between questions, snaps around pain, disappears in gray patches when my head drops forward, and comes back all at once when someone grips my hair or slaps my face hard enough to drag me out of whatever shallow darkness my body keeps trying to fall into. The room has narrowed to light, concrete, blood, metal, and the chair holding me upright because my own strength is long gone.
My left eye is swelling badly enough that the room tilts if I try to look through it. Everything on that side has gone blurred and heavy, skin pulled tight around the socket where Rook’s fist landed too many times for me to remember which hit started the damage. My lip is split. My ribs feel like each breath is beingdragged over something sharp, though I don’t think anything is broken.
Canon has been careful about that, or maybe Rook has. Bruises heal cleaner than fractures. Cuts can be explained away if they aren’t too deep. Pain can be inflicted with almost endless variety before the body crosses a line it can’t be dragged back from, and the Rogues know exactly where that line is because they have always understood cruelty better than mercy.
My forearm burns where the knife opened skin in shallow, parallel lines. Blood has dried in streaks toward my wrist, sticky under the leather strap, and each time my fingers twitch, the cuts pull open enough to remind me they’re there. There are more than there were before.
Someone threw water on me when my head stayed down too long, soaking through my shirt, mixing with blood, and leaving me shivering beneath the yellow workshop lights while Canon watched with the disappointed patience of a man waiting for faulty equipment to start working again.
He hasn’t asked a question in a while, and that frightens me more than the questions did.
Rook had dragged a metal cart across the concrete, the wheels shrieking loud enough to make me flinch before I can stop myself. A laptop sits on top with a cable running from it to a small black receiver. He sets it beyond reach and flips the screen open. Blue-white light hits my face and turns the room behind it into shadow, making Canon’s expression harder to read and Varina’s easier.
Canon steps beside the cart and folds his arms. “Wake up.”
I try to lift my head, but my neck won’t cooperate. Rook solves the problem by catching my hair and yanking until pain tears along my scalp and my spine arches against the chair. I choke on a sound I don’t want to make, and Canon’s mouth curves as if the sound confirms something he already knew.
“There you are,” he says. “Still with us.”
My mouth tastes like blood and old fear. “Unfortunately.”
Rook laughs under his breath. “Still cute.”
Canon doesn’t laugh. He looks at the screen, then at me. “I thought you might like to see what usefulness looks like when it finally serves the family that made you.”
The laptop feed stutters, then clears into grainy night footage of a road cut between two industrial buildings. It takes my mind several seconds to understand what I’m seeing because fear keeps trying to reject the shape of it. Then the angle shifts, and the eastern corridor arranges itself on the screen at the support junction, the place I tried to protect with old timing and partial truths.
Rogues are already moving along the outer edge of the road, two near the fence, a van tucked behind the building. I whisper no before I can stop myself, and Canon tilts his head like he has been waiting for the exact shape of that sound.
“You see, that’s always been your problem.” He pulls a chair closer and sits beside the cart like we’re reviewing accounts together, like this is one more ledger he expects me to correct. “You think refusing reality changes it. You were always going to give us something. Men like you do. There’s no shame in being what you are.”
I look at him through the blur of my bad eye. “There’s shame in being you.”
Rook hits me across the mouth before Canon can answer. My head snaps sideways, pain bursting through my lip, and blood spills fresh over my tongue.
Canon sighs. “Don’t mistake a little defiance for strength. You already gave us what we needed.”
The screen flickers as one of the Rogue men on the feed lifts a hand, signaling someone out of frame. A vehicle passes in the distance, just some unlucky civilian moving through a roadthat has no idea it’s become part of a war. I search the image desperately for anything that tells me Saint knows. A counter-position. A wrong shadow. A hint of Obsidian waiting where Canon doesn’t expect them. The feed is too grainy, though, fear making every dark shape look alike.
“And you see, while you were giving us this, I forgot to mention… Saint isn’t coming for you. None of Obsidian is. We’re not stupid, son. We fixed what we needed to, to ensure that they’d think you chose this.”
I’m sure Saint knows I wouldn’t do that but that doesn’t change the truth.
I don’t know if anyone is coming and I don’t know what Saint actually thinks. Maybe Sol got to him first. Maybe Saint is standing in the clubhouse right now with that cold, empty look on his face, letting my absence become proof because proof is easier than faith. Maybe he thinks the silence in his office was the last answer either of us needed.
I close my eyes because the screen hurts worse than the light. Rook grips my jaw and turns my face back toward it, fingers pressing into bruises with enough force to make my stomach roll.
“Watch,” he says.
I open them because I have no choice and the feed jumps again, refocusing on the road.
Canon watches me watch it. “There’s the face.”
“What face?” Rook asks.
“The one he makes when he finally understands he isn’t special.” Canon leans back, satisfaction settling into him. “Obsidian doesn’t love you, Oisín. Saint doesn’t love you. He loves control, and you gave him a prettier version of it. After tonight, he’ll realize you were just a leak wrapped in a ring.”
