I’m still sitting, waiting for my father to say something when his gaze turns on me. One of those ‘you fucked it up, you fix it’ kind of looks.Gladly.I clear my throat, the chaos dying down almost immediately. “Anyone draws in my house dies in it.”
My gaze trails around the room, one eyebrow raised as both Rogues and Obsidians drop their hands back to their sides, relaxing in the next breath. Then I land on Oisín, mildly pleased at how flustered he is. But there’s more than that. He’s humiliated and angry and there’s a bit of terror beneath all of that, too.
The hatred in his eyes is going to make this all that much more fun.
I look at Canon while keeping Oisín in my peripheral vision. “I’ll sign for him.”
Canon’s mouth twists. “He hasn’t agreed.”
“No,” Oisín says, louder this time. “I haven’t.”
Oisín
Theroomeruptsintomore chaos, noise blooming from every side at once, voices rising over scraped chairs and shifting bodies until the meeting stops feeling like a negotiation and starts feeling like the second before somebody reaches for a gun.
I’m still standing behind Varina with the folder still clutched to my chest, fingers pressed so hard into the cardboard spine that the edge is bending beneath my grip. For a moment, I can’t make my body move. I can’t even seem to make my thoughts move in a straight line. Saint’s words keep replaying inside my head with awful clarity, each one colder and heavier than the last.
I’ll sign for him.
Like I’m a substitution. Like I’m an amendment. Like whatever happened six nights ago in a dark room with music shaking the walls has somehow reached forward, grabbed me by the throat, and dragged me into the center of both clubs.
Canon is shouting. Varina is shouting back. Rook has one hand on the table and the other hovering too close to his cut, while Bricks, the massive Obsidian man with the gold tooth and mean amusement in his eyes, looks like he’s been waiting all day for a reason to hurt somebody.
Moth keeps trying to cut through the noise with the contract open beneath his palm, explaining clause language and bloodline requirements like paperwork can hold back pride once it starts spilling.
Sol Masters is at the head of the Obsidian side, just watching the room with a stillness that somehow makes every raised voice seem childish.
And then there’s Saint.
He’s on the other side of the table with his hands planted against the wood, massive shoulders loose under his cut, mouth curved in a slow smile that feels less like amusement than possession learning its own shape. His eyes stay on me through the chaos, as if the room has become an inconvenient background to whatever decision he made the second he recognized me.
I hate that my body remembers him before my mind can decide what to do.
It remembers the weight of his attention. It remembers the low certainty of his voice. It remembers the impossible, humiliating relief of being looked at by someone who didn’t want me harder or louder or crueler before he wanted me at all. Now that same attention is on me in a room full of men who would turn that truth into a weapon if they understood it, and instead of feeling only fear, only rage, only the reasonable panic of a manwhose life is being rewritten without consent, some hidden part of me warms beneath it.
That’s the sickest part.
That beneath the shame and terror, Saint’s presence makes me feel seen and that sick, awful part of me craves more of it. I must be broken.
“Oisín.”
Canon’s voice cuts through the mess cleanly enough that my whole body responds. I look at him, and the room tilts back into place around my father’s face.
He’s standing near the corner of the table now, one hand braced against the chair he shoved aside. The fury in him hasn’t burned out. It’s been compacted into something harder, more useful. That’s what Canon does with every emotion eventually. Rage becomes command. Grief became silence. Disappointment became my childhood.
“Come here,” he says.
Varina turns toward him. “Don’t.”
Canon doesn’t even glance at her. “I wasn’t speaking to you.”
Varina’s mouth tightens, and for one second I see the girl she used to be under all that sharpness, the one who once stood in doorways blocking me from rooms where Canon’s disappointment felt too loud. Then the moment disappears.
I step around her as Canon takes me by the upper arm, and draws me a few steps away from the table toward the side of the room where a framed map of Rogue territory hangs beside a locked liquor cabinet.
My father leans close enough that his voice doesn’t need to carry. “You know him.”
It isn’t a question.
