I hate that I feel this much for a man who doesn’t want me cleanly. I hate that I’m standing here with his ring on my hand and his marks under my clothes and still need words he may not have inside him. My voice comes out smaller than my anger deserves, but I make myself hold his gaze.
“That I’m not just useful.”
Saint stares at me for long enough that my chest starts to ache.
“I don’t love you,” he forces out.
The words hurt, but not the way he thinks they will. Maybe because I already know. Maybe because I wasn’t asking for the thing he’s most afraid to give, and the fact that he reached for it anyway tells me more than he meant to reveal.
“I’m not fucking asking you to.” My voice shakes now, and I let it because I’m too tired to keep bleeding quietly for his comfort. “I’m asking whether or not you want me.”
Saint’s mouth tightens but he doesn’t answer.
For a moment, the office holds only our breathing and the distant noise of the clubhouse beyond the door. His hand is still at my waist, but the pressure has changed. He isn’t pushing me into place anymore. He’s holding on. His eyes move over my facewith a softness so brief anyone else would miss it, but I don’t. I’ve learned to read him in fractions because that’s all he gives.
I’m not going to get the words right.
I reach up, take his face between my hands, and kiss him slowly.
He freezes for the first second because there’s no force in it, no command, no surrender. I lead it completely, pressing my mouth to his with all the hurt still sitting between us, all the anger, all the want I wish I could put down. I kiss him like I’m giving him one last chance to understand the shape of what he almost said and didn’t.
Then I pull away before he can take it from me.
Saint
ThedaysafterOisínkisses me like he has the right to leave afterward, the air between us changes in a way I can’t put my hands around without wanting to break something. It’s nothing obvious. He still sleeps in my bed, eats whatever Tally puts in front of him, sits in the office when Moth calls him in, and still lets Demo talk until the kid runs out of breath or gets dragged into work by someone with less patience. He still wears my cut when he’s in the main room, and the thin silver ring stays on his finger where I put it. I catch him touching it sometimes, thumb running along the edge while he reads or listens or tries not to react when Sol’s name moves through a conversation.
The structure is the same, but Oisín isn’t.
I can stand behind him at the bar, put one hand on the back of his neck, and feel his pulse under my thumb shift before his expression changes. I can drop my voice near his ear and watch his breath catch while he pretends he isn’t listening with every inch of himself. That part of him is still there, soft under the right pressure, responsive in a way that makes my hands itch when other men stand too close.
The difference is that he no longer offers it automatically. He chooses when to soften now. He chooses when to answer, when to lower his eyes, when to turn his face away because he knows I’m watching and refuses to give me the satisfaction.
It pisses me off more than it should, and the fact that it makes me proud only makes the whole thing worse.
I find Oisín in Moth’s office late in the afternoon with his sleeves rolled to his forearms and a marker in one hand. The door is open, which is already strange enough to stop me in the hallway. Moth doesn’t leave sensitive boards visible unless he trusts the person in front of them or expects to dispose of them before they can become a problem. Oisín is standing beside him, head tilted slightly as he studies the logistics board, the silver ring on his hand catching the overhead light every time he gestures toward a route line.
“You’re still treating the southern pickup like a fallback,” Oisín says, tapping the end of the marker against a blue-pinned path, “but it reads more like a tell. Nobody uses that road unless something else is wrong, so every time you send a vehicle through, you’re announcing pressure on the primary route. If the Reapers are watching the breaks instead of the product, that road gives them more than the drop does.”
Moth stands with his tablet tucked against his side, eyes moving between the board and Oisín’s face. “The southern pickup has been clean for eight months.”
“Clean roads make people lazy.” Oisín reaches past him and draws a small circle around a timing window. “The buyer complaint wasn’t meant to prove bad product. It was meant to watch our reaction. Who showed up, how fast Sol moved, whether Obsidian overcorrected, whether we changed routes too visibly afterward. If we respond to every touch by shifting the entire pattern, we teach them which parts matter.”
I lean against the doorway and keep my mouth shut as Moth studies the board for a long moment. Most men talk too much when Moth looks at them like that. They overexplain, apologize, qualify every thought until the useful part gets buried under fear. Oisín waits. He doesn’t feed those nerves to the room. He lets his work stand where he put it.
Moth finally shifts one of the pins. “You see patterns the way I see numbers. That’s rare.”
The praise hits Oisín before he can guard against it, his face opening by a fraction, surprise moving through him before caution closes over it. Canon missed that face for twenty-seven years.
“Thank you,” Oisín says.
“Don’t thank me,” Moth replies, already marking the change on his tablet. “It means I’m going to give you more work.”
Oisín’s mouth curves. “That sounds more like you.”
Moth makes a faint sound that might be amusement if someone were feeling generous. “Pull the secondary pickup history for the last quarter and flag every route change that followed external pressure by less than forty-eight hours. I want to know how often we trained our enemies by reacting efficiently.”
Oisín reaches for the folder on the desk without asking whether he should. “Paper or digital?”
