Page 72 of Rogue’s Mark

"I did not hate you." His voice drops. "That was the problem. I couldn't control how much I didn't hate you."

For a second, I forget how to breathe.

This is the thing he keeps locked down. Not anger, not some dark secret. This. A man who organized his entire life around never being at anyone's mercy, telling me I'm the one thing he can't manage and never could.

"And just now," he says, "in that room, watching you run it — watching you not need me to run it — I felt the same thing I felt the first week. That I can't control you. That I can't control what you do to me." He shakes his head, slow. "The difference is, this time I'm not fighting it. This time I watched you take that room and all I could think was, there she is. Vi’s the woman I didn't see coming."

I've been undressed by this man. I've been held down by him, taken apart by him, put back together by him. And none of it, not one second of it, was as naked as Armen is right now, standing fully clothed at a window with his control finally switched off.

I reach up and put my hand against the side of his face, the way he's done to me so many times, and for once, I'm the steady one and he's the one who leans into it.

"I see you," I tell him. "All the way down. And I'm not looking away."

Something moves through him, and he closes his eyes, just for a moment, this enormous controlled man letting me hold his face at a dirty window in a dead mall. I think about how many people have stood in front of Armen and never once seen what I'm seeing right now. I don't take it lightly. It's more intimate than anything we've ever done with our clothes off, and we both know it.

"I'm not going anywhere," I say. "I already chose. In that room with my father, I chose this. I chose you."

"I know. I watched you do it." A pause, and then, quiet: "I'll spend a long time being grateful for that."

We stand there awhile longer, his forehead coming down to rest against mine, neither of us in a hurry to move. Outside, it's the same gray morning over the same dead loading dock. Nothing out there has changed.

Everything in here has.

Eventually he straightens, and I watch him gather his control back up and put it into place, but it's different now. I've seen behind it. He knows I've seen behind it. That door doesn't fully close again, and from the look on his face, he's all right with that.

"Rogue's waiting to take you to Alice," he says.

"Cool. I’m ready."

"Go find the name, Vi." And there it is, the steel sliding back under the voice, but warmer than it used to be when it points at me. "Then we go take it to them."

I push off the window. There's a firm to crack, a ceiling to drag into the light, a father’s name to clear, and a city to answer for.

But I take one more second first, and just look at him.

48

VI

Finding Alice is never a matter of looking. You don't find Alice. Alice lets you find her.

Or doesn't.

Rogue and I work our way down into the older part of the Rot, past the hub, past the corridors people actually use, into the dim back passages where the air goes cold and the lights struggle to illuminate anything. I've only been down here once, never able to retrace the route after. Rogue moves like he knows it cold, because he does.

She's waiting at a junction where two passages cross, like she's been standing there all day. Maybe she has. Shaved head, the scar down her cheek, drab gray clothes that turn her into part of the wall. If you passed her on the street, you'd never look twice, and that, I'm starting to understand, is the entire point.

"You found him," she says. Not a question.

I stop. "How do you⁠—"

"It's all over you." Her eyes move across my face, unhurried. "You walk different than you did a week ago. So. He's alive."

"He's alive." Saying it out loud to her, of all people, puts a lump in my throat I wasn't expecting. "We found him. He's safe, for now. Alice, he, he asked about you. He said he knew he could count on you to hold the line."

For one second, just one, the famous flat calm slips. Something crosses Alice's face that I've never seen there before. It’s not surprise, she's too controlled for surprise, but something older and more tired lets go all at once. Her eyes go bright. She looks at the ceiling, breathes, and brings herself back.

"Good," she says, her voice rough. "That's good. I wasn't sure. All these years, I told myself he made it, but I wasn't sure. How could anyone know?" She clears her throat, and the wall goes back up, but gentler now. "All right. You didn't come down here to make an old woman cry. What do you need?"