"Good. Canon's sending one of the heirs next week to meet the table. We'll make it official then. Now get the fuck out of my office and go make sure that next run to the quarry doesn't grow legs and walk off."
I turn on my heel without another word.
A spouse. A fucking leash wrapped in club colors. Someone who'll sleep in my bed, wear my ink, and expect me to pretend this is anything but a transaction.
I don't want them in my space.
I don't want anyone close enough to see the seven-year-old still screaming inside my chest.
But the pipeline needs bodies. The empire needs the alliance.
And Saint Solomon Masters doesn't lose arguments.
Oisín
Raintickssteadilyagainstthe narrow windows above my desk while I stare at the same spreadsheet for the fourth time in twenty minutes, trying to make myself care about fuel percentages instead of the memory that’s been living under my skin for six days.
The accounting office sits above the Rogues’ clubhouse like an afterthought, all exposed pipes, yellowing lights, and filing cabinets that have probably survived more presidents than I have years on this earth. Downstairs, music pulses through the floorboards beneath my boots, muffled by distance and old wood, while laughter rises and falls in rough bursts from the bar. Up here, everything sounds softened at the edges, and I usuallylike that. I usually like being somewhere the noise can’t quite reach me.
Numbers make more sense than people. They don’t ask me to be harder before they cooperate, and they don’t look disappointed when I’m quiet. A shipment either arrives or it doesn’t. A payment clears or it fails. A loss hides somewhere in the ledger until I find it and drag it into the light. There’s comfort in that kind of certainty, especially inside a club where half the men downstairs would rather shoot through a problem than admit they don’t understand it.
Tonight, though, my focus keeps slipping no matter how many times I pull it back.
Every time I glance away from the screen, I’m back in that club almost a week ago, standing beneath dim lights with bass moving through my ribs and a stranger’s attention fixed on me so completely it felt like being touched before his hand ever landed.
I don’t remember him in clean details so much as impressions... how much larger he was than me, those beautiful tattoos across his dark skin, the certainty in his voice, and the way he looked at me like softness wasn’t a flaw he had to tolerate but the exact thing he wanted from me.
That’s the part that keeps undoing me.
Not the danger of it. Not the stupidity. Not even the fact that I let a stranger see more of me in twenty minutes than my own club has managed to see in twenty-seven years. It’s the relief I can’t stop thinking about.
For once, I hadn’t needed to perform hardness badly enough to embarrass myself. I hadn’t needed to sharpen my voice or square my shoulders or pretend I knew what to do with all the aggression men like my father, Canon, mistake for worth. I’d just stood there, nervous and wanting and too honest for my own good, and the stranger had wanted exactly that.
I rub both hands over my face and force my attention back to the laptop before the memory can pull me any deeper. The Rogues’ quarterly financials glow across the screen in neat rows that look far calmer than they should. Fuel costs are up again along the eastern corridor. Security payouts have nearly doubled since the feds started sniffing around our usual routes.
Two shipments disappeared somewhere between Albany and Syracuse last month, and nobody’s officially admitted what that means because admitting weakness inside the Rogues is like cutting yourself open in a room full of hungry dogs.
The club isn’t collapsing, but it’s leaning harder on reputation than actual strength, and that never ends well. Canon can swagger through the clubhouse with his rings flashing and his voice carrying over everybody else’s, but the numbers don’t care who raised them. They don’t care about his pride, or my sister Varina’s temper, or the way men move aside when a Ward walks through a room. The numbers say we’re bleeding. Slowly enough to hide. Steadily enough to matter.
I save the report into the encrypted drive Canon likes pretending only he understands, then begin stacking the physical copies into folders. My handwriting runs along the tabs in small, precise letters because if I’m going to be invisible, I might as well be efficient about it. Shipment manifests go first. Then revenue projections. Then route losses, inventory discrepancies, enforcement payouts, and the revised cash reserves Canon won’t thank me for calculating honestly.
The last folder sits half-buried under a stack of old invoices, and my fingers pause when I see the label.
OBSIDIAN.
For a moment, I just stare at it while the rain drags silver lines down the glass behind my desk.
“So the whispers are true,” I mumble.
I’ve heard pieces for weeks, though never anything concrete enough to trust. Obsidian sightings near the eastern corridor. Varina disappearing into closed-door meetings and coming back with a look on her face like she wanted to punch a hole through the nearest wall. Canon taking calls outside instead of in his office, which means either money or pride was involved, and with him it’s usually both. Still, I never thought he’d actually do it. My father would rather choke on his own tongue than admit the Rogues need another club’s help.
I should put the folder with the rest and walk away. I know that. I’ve survived this long by understanding exactly when not to ask questions, when not to stand too close to the machinery while it’s moving, when not to look at the thing everyone else is pretending isn’t there. Curiosity has never been safe in my family. But the folder is already under my hand, and I’m tired enough tonight that my self-preservation is quieter than usual.
I open it to find that most of the paperwork is logistics, which is probably why it ended up in my stack in the first place. Shared security runs. Corridor support. Enforcement rotation. Projected distribution windows. Territorial boundaries. The language is dry and corporate in that ridiculous way men use when they’re trying to make crime look like business and business look like destiny.
Then I find the XR3 projections, and my stomach tightens.
Everybody knows what XR3 is, even if they pretend they don’t. Obsidian’s synthetic miracle. Their empire in little glass vials. Half the city talks about it like salvation, clean focus and clean euphoria and all the sharp edges of life suddenly polished. The other half talks about it like the end of the world dressed up as progress. Either way, people can’t stop wanting it, and Obsidian has figured out how to make wanting profitable enough to turn a motorcycle club into something closer to a sovereign power.
