Page 81 of Rogue’s Mark

Instead, we built lives here. She found whatever's blooming with Kade, and I found three men and my dad and a version of myself I’m pretty okay with. Somewhere in all of it, we stopped being two women clinging to each other in the dark and turned into two women who chose to stay.

"Hey." Mara sets her cup down. "The guys are planning something for you. I don't know what ’cause nobody'll say, but they all get this look when it comes up." She meets my eyes. "Whatever it turns out to be, you earned it. I wanted to say that now, before it happens."

"Good lord. I wonder what they have up their sleeves?” Honestly, this makes me a little nervous.

She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand once, hard, the way she did the night everything fell apart and the way she's done a hundred times since, and neither of us says anything else. We don't have to.

Twenty-plus years. Some things outlive everything.

Then she lets go, and picks up her terrible coffee, and we sit a while longer in the corner that's ours, in no hurry at all to be anywhere else.

55

VI

I can't find Sting anywhere.

The other two I can always find. But Sting, when he’s working through something, goes someplace even the Rot can't see him, and tonight, after the best week any of us has had in longer than I can remember, he's nowhere. Not the ops room. Not his quarters. Not the hub.

It's Armen who finally tells me. "Roof," he says, like it's obvious, like everybody but me knew Sting had a place up there. "East stairwell, all the way to the top. It's where he goes when he doesn't want to be found." He gives me a look. "You've never been up there."

"Didn't know there was an up there."

"There's an up there."

The top of the east stairwell ends at a heavy door that sticks, which I shove through into open air. My first thought is that nobody has loved this place in a very long time.

It's a disaster. Gravel and grit and the rusted bones of old machinery that quit working before I was born. Puddles that never fully dry. Bird droppings streaked over everything, white and ancient, because the pigeons have run this roof for years and have no plans to give it back. The wind comes across it hard and cold, straight off the dead city. I understand immediately why nobody comes up here.

And why Sting does.

He's at the far edge, in the one corner that looks lived-in—a folding chair gone soft with rust, a milk crate, a folded blanket on top of it like he keeps it for this. His spot. Of course he has a spot nobody knows about. It's the most Sting thing ever. He doesn't turn when I come up behind him. He knows my step by now.

He's looking out at Rothwell, all those dark blocks, the ruin Lydia Vance made and walked away from, and he's so still he could be part of the building.

"You disappeared," I say.

"Needed air."

I come up beside him. I don't push. I learned that from him, actually, how to stand next to somebody and let the quiet do the work. So I wait.

It takes a long time. The wind moves. Below us, the city sits there being dead.

"My mother," he says finally.

He doesn't have to explain. I know about his mother and Rothwell Elder Care and all the years she gave to that nursing home, loving her job and her patients. It came to an end the day the funding got pulled and the doors closed. Then her health insurance went bye-bye. I know about the insulin she skipped and stretched because the money wasn't there, and how her heart finally gave out under it all. He told me this a while ago, in pieces, the way Sting tells a story.

"Took Lydia Vance down today," he says, still looking out at the dead city, "and the whole time, the only thing in my head was her. My mother. Who died thinking she just had shitty luck."

His jaw works. "Right to the end, she figured she'd gotten unlucky. Wrong place, wrong time. She never knew there was a person behind it. A decision. A business decision that said her life was worth less than somebody's profit. She died angry at the wrong things. Because nobody ever gave her the right ones."

I don't say I'm sorry. Sorry is what you say to strangers. Instead, I move into him and put my hand flat over his heart, the way these men have done for me more times than I can count, and hold it there.

"I've carried my mother's bad luck for years, knowing it wasn't luck and not being able to do a damn thing about it. This week, I finally did something about it. Because of you."

His voice has gone rough. "We took her down and all I could think about was my mother, who never even got to know who to hate." He covers my hand on his chest with his own, big and warm and not quite steady, which from Sting is like watching a wall come down. "You did that. You put the name to it. The one thing nobody ever did for her, you did. I've watched you turn into something nobody saw coming, and today you got my mother the one thing she never had.”

He goes quiet, and under my palm I feel him decide something.