Nearlyaweekintoliving with the Obsidian club and people still watch me like they’re waiting for my edges to show.
The staring has changed since the first day. No one lowers their voice every time I walk into the room anymore, and Cade has kept his mouth shut since Tally warned him with a spatula in one hand and murder in her eyes. The prospects have mostly stopped looking at me like Saint might appear from a shadow and break their wrists if they stand too close. Demo has decided I’m safe, which means he speaks to me with the open, relentless enthusiasm of someone who has never once met a silence he didn’t feel morally obligated to fill.
Still, the wariness stays. It sits beneath conversations, inside glances, in the slight pauses that happen when I enter a roomalready occupied by patched men who don’t know whether to treat me like family, leverage, temptation, or an active threat wrapped in Saint’s clothes. I’m Rogue blood under an Obsidian roof. Saint’s husband by contract, Saint’s lover by implication, Saint’s problem by every practical measure. They don’t know what I’m here for, and since I don’t know either, I have no right to resent them for it.
Most days, I stay out of the way because it’s the skill I learned early enough to trust. If Tally is in the kitchen, I sit at the island and chop whatever she puts in front of me while she complains that I dice onions like I’m apologizing to them.
If Saint is gone and his room feels too much like waiting, I drift into his office and sit in the chair near the wall with a book I rarely manage to read. Sometimes Demo finds me there and talks until the silence is full of harmless nonsense. Which prospect got locked out naked after a poker game, why Halo hates his nickname, how Bricks once convinced a drunk buyer that Moth was an accountant for a church charity just to watch Moth suffer through the conversation.
It should feel peaceful, maybe. It doesn’t. The boredom is strange because part of me likes having no immediate demand pressing on my throat, no accounts to reconcile before dawn, no Canon snapping my name because a shipment went sideways and someone quiet needs to absorb the first wave of blame.
Another part of me can’t stand it. My mind has never known what to do with open space except fill it with patterns, dangers, and questions I don’t want answered. Lately, when there’s nothing else to occupy me, it starts looking for Saint.
I know the weight of his boots now. I know the difference between the silence that means he’s gone and the silence that means he’s in the building and everyone else has adjusted around him. I know his office feels different when he isn’t in it as if the room is holding itself in reserve until he returns.
The problem is that this arrangement can’t become anything more than what it is. Saint doesn’t love me. I don’t love him. People don’t build love out of contracts, criminal alliances, and nights that leave me aching too deeply to pretend I didn’t want them. Saint wants control. I want quiet. The fact that those hungers fit together in the dark doesn’t make them tender, and it definitely doesn’t make them safe.
Lunch arrives around noon because Tally has apparently decided my continued existence requires supervision. She walks into Saint’s office without knocking, carrying a plate covered with a dish towel and a mug of coffee balanced in her other hand.
“You planning to haunt this room all day?” she asks with a crooked smile on her face.
I look up from the book I haven’t turned a page of in twenty minutes. “Is haunting one of the things I’m not allowed to do?”
“Depends how annoying you are about it.” She sets the plate on the desk and pulls the towel away to reveal a sandwich, sliced apples, and a pile of chips she will absolutely deny arranging with care if anyone accuses her. “Eat before Saint comes back and decides my head is on the chopping block for forgetting to feed you.”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
Tally gives me a flat look so I pick up a chip and throw it in my mouth. She visibly relaxes but I don’t even get to take a bite of the sandwich before the desk phone rings. I freeze, unsure of what to do. Saint’s office phone has rung twice since I started spending time in here, and both times someone else answered before I had to decide whether touching it would get me yelled at, shot, or silently judged by Moth. Tally glances toward the hallway, then back at me.
“Well?” she says.
“It’s not my phone.”
“It’s ringing in the room you’re sitting in.”
“That doesn’t make it mine.”
“No, but if Saint didn’t want you near anything breakable, he wouldn’t keep leaving you in here.”
The phone rings again. I set the sandwich down and pick up the receiver before I can think myself into paralysis. “Saint’s office.”
There’s a pause on the other end, then Moth’s voice comes through. “Is he there?”
“No.”
“Is Tally there?”
Tally leans her hip against the desk and raises her brows as if she already knows the call is about to become my problem.
“Yes.”
“Good. Make yourself useful. Look through the folder on the desk.”
The line goes dead.
I stare at the receiver for a second before putting it back. “He hung up.”
“That’s Moth’s version of a warm hug,” Tally says. “What does he want?”
