Page 59 of Rogue’s Mark

She tears her eyes off the window and looks at me.

"Whatever's up there," I tell her, "you’re not going in alone. You go in front and we hold the back. But you're not alone. You hear me?"

For a second her composure wavers, just a hairline, just for me, and then she gets it back, and nods.

"Okay," she says. "Okay."

Armen pulls the street door. It isn't even locked, which tells me somebody up there is expecting company. I can't tell if that's a good sign or a bad one.

The stairwell is dim and smells like dust and old paper and, faintly, like coffee. Does that mean somebody’s awake up there? Because that would mean this shit is real, and that in about ninety seconds, Vi may lay eyes on the man she buried years ago.

She takes the first step.

36

ROGUE

The door at the top of the stairs is open a crack when we reach it.

That tells me he heard us coming. Good. It means whatever hiding did to him, it didn't dull him or his survival skills. The careful man Vi's been chasing should be in there, still listening.

She stops in front of the door, her hand flat against the wood, and I watch her take one breath, and then hold it. Then she pushes the door open and steps through, and Armen and I go in behind her, fanning automatically with him to the left, me to the right, and we’ve pretty much read the room before we’ve even fully seen it.

It's small. Lived-in. There’s a cot, a table buried under paper, a hot plate with a steaming pot on it. Years of someone making do, making a life out of nothing. There are documents everywhere, stacked and sorted in a system I'd bet money looks a lot like the one Vi keeps on her own floor. Apple doesn't fall far and all that.

And there, standing beside the table, is the man from the photograph.

Renner. Mayor Renner.

He's older in person than the picture let on. Thinner, the gray gone all the way through his hair, the skin at his throat loose where a heavier man used to be. But it's him. The shoulders Vi would know in the dark. The man who tried.

He isn't looking at Vi.

He's looking at me.

And at Armen. Back and forth, fast and cold, taking the measure of the two strangers who just walked into his hideout. I know that look, I've worn that look, because it's the look of a man calculating exits and weapons and odds in split seconds. His weight's already shifted toward the far end of the table, where I'd lay odds there's something within his reach. He doesn't know us. He doesn't know if the daughter walking through his door is the real thing or bait on a hook, doesn't know if the men flanking her are here to reunite him with his kid or to finally finish the job somebody started years ago.

He's been waiting for both. You can see it on him. He's been bracing for both every single day for years, and the bracing has worn grooves in him.

I keep my hands where he can see them. I don't smile. A smile from a stranger would read as the wrong thing to a man this wound up. I just let him look, and I let him conclude what he wants, because there's nothing I can say that he'll believe coming from me.

Then Vi says, "Dad."

One word. It comes out cracked down the middle.

And his eyes finally leave me.

They go to her, and for a second, one long, terrible second, nothing happens. He looks at his daughter like he's looking at something that’s not real, something he wants so badly he's afraid to believe in it because somebody might take it away. The wariness doesn't fall. It just gets joined by something underneath it, something raw and disbelieving and scared, and the two things fight on his face while he stands frozen.

He doesn't move toward her.

That's the part that gets me, watching from the edge of the room. He doesn't move. This man has wanted nothing in the world more than this. Hell, he created a paper boat for a photograph on the off chance he'd reach this moment, and now that it's here, he's rooted to the floor because some part of him doesn't think he's earned the right to cross it. He let her grieve him. He made her bury him. And now, she's standing in his doorway alive and grown and harder than he left her, and he has no idea if she's come to forgive him or to spit in his face.

He's bracing for either. Or both.

So he just says it. Quiet. Like a question he's terrified of the answer to.

"Vi?"