“I don’t know. Canon doesn’t share guesses with me unless he needs them organized.”
“But he has guesses.”
“Everyonehas guesses. Obsidian keeps pharmaceutical-grade product moving in three states, and every idiot with binoculars and ambition thinks that means they can find the source if they watch enough roads.”
“What did Canon think?”
I fold my arms across my chest, partly because I’m cold and partly because I need to keep my hands from fidgeting. “He thought your lab wasn’t mobile. The consistency is too clean for a moving setup, and your batch windows don’t show the drift he’d expect if you were relocating synthesis every few weeks.” I pause as Saint raises an eyebrow. My shoulders fall in defeat and I know I can’t hold back the information now that he’s asked. “Old medical laundry facility outside Utica. Decommissioned bottling plant near Rome. Storage complex south of Rochester.”
“Were they right?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they’re too obvious. Men like my father think a lab has to look like a lab or hide inside something that used to be one. Your routes don’t protect buildings. They protect people and windows. Whatever matters most isn’t where everyone thinks it is. It’s attached to who can access it.”
I realize too late how close I’ve stepped to something Saint doesn’t let people touch. Saint watches me for a long moment, and I can feel him rearranging me in his head. Liability, spouse, pressure point, asset. Maybe all of them at once.
“How much have you told Canon?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“Varina?” He tilts his head to the side a little.
“Nothing.”
“Moth?”
“Only what he asked about the corridor.”
His eyes narrow slightly at that. “Did Canon send you here to collect pipeline intelligence?”
“No.”
“Did Varina?”
I sigh, tired of the circular questioning. “No.”
“Did anyone tell you to report back after the signing?”
“No.”
The questions keep coming, but he doesn’t pepper them fast enough for it to turn into a shallow back-and-forth. He circles the subject, watching where my answers tighten, where my breathing changes, where hesitation comes before I speak. He asks about escort windows, dead drops, buyer routes, surveillance points, which men on the Rogue side liked which theories, and who had access to the alliance files before Canon called the meeting.
At some point, I start pacing. The office is too small for the amount of information he’s dragging out of me, and movement is the only thing keeping the pressure from spilling through my skin. Saint lets me cross the same strip of carpet three times before his voice cuts through the room.
“Stop moving.”
I stop immediately, the obedience humiliating me before he even reacts. His gaze drops to my feet, then to my hands, then returns to my face.
“You reorganized Moth’s board without being asked,” he says. “You identified redundancies, exposure points, and a false-safe route we’ve been treating like a fallback. You know Canon’s assumptions about the XR3 pipeline, you know why those assumptions were wrong, and you were planning to stand around my clubhouse pretending all of that wasn’t sitting in your head.”
“I wasn’t pretending.” My voice comes out quieter than I intend. “I’m overwhelmed.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“I didn’t know what you wanted from me,” I push out, my voice wobbling a little bit. With Canon, there was never any interrogation. I did my job, handed off the documents, and then disappeared to my apartment. Here, I am very much in the limelight at all times.
