Page 64 of Rogue’s Mark

"Good," he says. "I spent years sick about you being out there alone." His voice catches. "You're not alone."

"No," I say. "I'm not."

And there it is, the thing I came all this way to understand, except it turns out it isn't the thing I thought. I came here for him. For answers, for the truth, for the father I buried. And I'm getting all of that.

But the realization sitting in my chest right now isn't about him at all.

It's that I walked into this room as terrified as I've ever been, sat down across from the hardest conversation of my life, and didn't break. Not because I'm strong, whatever my father wants to believe. Because I'm held. Because there's a hand on my chair and a wall at my back and a man on the street, and every one of them decided my hardest day was theirs too.

My father lost everything trying to do this alone.

I don't have to.

That's the difference. That's the whole difference.

"Okay," I say, and breathe, and turn back to him. "Tell me the rest. Tell me what you found."

40

VI

My father doesn't answer right away. He gets up and goes to his cot. From underneath it, he drags a hard-sided case, scuffed and old, the kind of old-school suitcase nobody's made in years. He sets it on the table between us and opens it.

It's full. Packed tight with folders and notebooks and labeled envelopes, years of paper sorted with the same obsessive care I recognize from my own floor back at the Rot.

"This is what I've been doing," he says. "Since the day I disappeared.”

I reach out and touch the edge of a folder, not ready to pick anything up yet. "What is it?"

"More of the story about where the money went and who moved it. The shell companies, the transfers, the people who signed, and the people who hid behind them." He rests his hand flat on the stack, gentle, like it's alive. "It climbs all the way up to a law firm, the one that kept the people at the very top clean. That firm's the last door I got to but I never got it open."

My heart slams. Could the ceiling be in there, or the ones above Fischer, the ones we couldn’t reach?

"So you know who they are," I say. "The ones at the top."

"No." His jaw tightens. "That's the part that nearly broke me. I got everything else, the whole machine, every name that signed, the firm that shielded them. But the people that firm was protecting? I ran out of time before I could put a face to them. I was closer than anyone's ever gotten, and then they came for me and I had to vanish. Because of that, the last door stayed shut."

He shakes his head. "And even what I had, I couldn't use. The courts were gone or bought. The press was gone or bought. Every office that should've been all over this was hollowed out or scared quiet. The second anyone knew I was alive, I was dead. So I sat in this room with enough to burn most of them down, and not one match that would light. The truth's worth nothing if you've got no way to tell it."

He looks at me. "I have to ask. How did all of you come by any of this? You were supposed to be far away from it, Vi. Safe."

"It started with Alice," I say.

Something moves across his face at the name. "Alice."

"She found me in the Rot, months ago. She just walked up to me one day like she'd been waiting, and told me she had some documents for me. Said you left them for someone to find." I watch him take it in. "Everything I did after that started with her handing me those papers."

For a moment, he can't speak. When he does, his voice is rough. "I knew I could count on Alice. Of everyone I worked with, she was the one I trusted to hold the line." He swallows. "I left those with her years ago. Not to reach you but as insurance. So that if they found me, the truth wouldn't die in this room along with me. I never meant for them to lead you here. You were the one person I wanted kept all the way out of it."

"They led me here anyway," I say. "And here we are."

He looks at me a long moment. "Here we are," he agrees.

Behind me, Rogue shifts off the wall. It's the first time he's moved since Dad and I sat down. "You haven't asked how we found you," he says.

My father turns to him, and for a second, there's something almost like a smile. "I know my daughter is relentless. She always has been.”

"She is," Rogue says. "But that's not how."