Page 60 of Rogue’s Mark

And there it is, the hairline crack. His voice doesn't hold. It breaks clean across the single syllable of her name, and one of his hands lifts off the table an inch, shaking, before he catches it and presses it flat again like he can will himself back under control.

He can't. I can see he can't. The armor I registered the second we walked in, the same armor I've been wearing myself for so long I forget I've got it on, is splitting right down the seam.

The man underneath it is just a father looking at his daughter.

Vi crosses the room.

She doesn't run. She walks, the same steady, deliberate, chin-up walk she's used all morning, right up to him, and she stops, inches away, and the two of them stand there not touching, both of them shaking now, both of them holding back the same flood for reasons that are mirror images of each other. She's got a lifetime of why sagging on her shoulders. He's got a lifetime of I'm sorry bearing down on his shoulders.

Neither of them says any of it.

Then he lifts that unsteady hand the rest of the way and lays it against the side of his daughter's face, careful, like she might break or bolt. Her eyes close, and she leans into it about a quarter of an inch. That's the thing that undoes them both.

He pulls her in and she lets him. His arms wrap around her, and she grabs the back of his worn jacket. It’s not gentle or soft. It's two people gripping each other like the floor's tilting and the other one is the only fixed point. He says something into her hair I can't hear. I don't try to. His shoulders are shaking. Hers are too.

But even now, even buried in his chest with years collapsing between them, Vi's spine is rigid. I can see it from here. She's holding on to him with everything she's got and holding back with everything else, because she came here for answers as much as for this, and the answers are yet to come.

I spot Armen at the far wall, gone still and watchful, giving them the room without leaving it. Outside and below, Sting's got the street, the morning, the rest of the world held off at arm's length so Vi and her dad can have their moment.

As for me, I stand at the edge of this story that’s both a beginning and an end, with my back to the wall, watching a father and a daughter find each other across a table full of paper in a dead city at dawn.

Something's coming loose in my chest. I tell it to wait.

It doesn't listen.

37

ROGUE

Renner and Vi don't let go of each other, but the shaking eases. The grip loosens into something steadier. He pulls back just far enough to look at her face, both hands on her shoulders now, and he says her name again. She laughs, surprised, and wipes her face with the heel of her hand. He reaches up and does the same to his own face. They're both a mess and neither of them cares.

I should keep watching the door. That's my job. The door, the windows, his hands.

But somewhere in the last few minutes, I stopped being the man holding the perimeter and turned into a man watching a father get his daughter back. The first one keeps his eyes on the door. The second one can't look away.

I had a father once, too.

A good one. An honest one, the kind of honest that's almost a handicap, the kind that won't cut a corner even when cutting it is the only thing that'll save him. I looked up to him the way you look up to someone before you're old enough to see the cost of how they live. He worked hard. He played it straight. And when the same people who hollowed out this whole city came for what he'd built, he found out what playing it straight is worth when the other side doesn't play fair.

They took everything from my father, and there was nowhere for him to turn. No honest cop, no clean judge, no court that hadn't already been bought. I watched a good man stand in the wreckage of everything he'd done right and have no recourse at all. I watched it humiliate him. That's the part that's never stopped grating on me like fucking barbed wire. It’s not that he lost but that losing made him small, and he'd never been small a day in his life until then.

I wanted him to fight. God, I wanted it. I was young and angry, and I begged him to make them bleed for it, to make noise, to make it cost them something. And he looked at me, tired down to the bone, and said no. Said you can't beat people like that, Son, you can only survive them. He said it like surviving was enough.

It wasn't enough. Not for me.

We said things, that last time. Hard things. The kind you don't get to take back, and then, because of how it all went, I never got the chance to take them back anyway.

And now I'm standing in a dead building at dawn watching Renner, a man who got hit by the town’s corruption and did the opposite. He didn't fold. He built a case in the dark, then let the whole world think he was dead rather than quit so that eventually his own daughter had to claw her way across a ruined city to find out he was still breathing.

Renner is the man I wanted my father to be.

That's what's been coming loose in my chest since we walked in. Not just grief that I'll never get what Vi's getting right now. Something meaner and more honest underneath it: I've spent years furious at a man for not being like the one standing in front of me. I'm only now seeing how much of my fury was really me just missing him. My dad.

I breathe through it. I put it back where it lives. I've had a lot of practice.

Sting's voice comes from the doorway, flat and low.

"Street's clear. Nothing moving," he tells Armen and me.