Page 61 of Rogue’s Mark

“Good.”

"One other thing,” he says quietly, to avoid interfering with the reunion, “a messenger came through from the Rot. Kade says it's done. Fischer's been handed off, confirmed. And the spy's gone, hasn't surfaced anywhere since the trade. Like he was never here."

"Okay. Thanks,” I say, as Sting heads back out.

So that's that. The trade's closed. Fischer's somewhere I don't have to think about, paying a bill he ran up a long time ago. Vi got her father. Everybody got what the deal promised.

And I still don't like it.

Because the spy's gone. Gone-gone, never-coming-back-gone, vanished, and I never figured out where I knew him from. A man walks into my building, hands me the exact thing that turns Vi’s world upside down, and evaporates without ever once revealing who sent him or why he made it so easy. People don't do you favors that big for free. Somewhere there's a price tag I still can't see, and the fact that everyone in this room feels like they just won is what worries me most.

I set it aside. It can wait. It has to, because across the room, Renner has gone still in a new way, not the wariness from before, something more deliberate. He's looking at the documents stacked on his table, then at Vi, then, for the first time since we came in, he lets his eyes travel to me and Armen like he’s measuring. Deciding.

He guides Vi to one of the two chairs and lowers himself into the other, slow, like a man whose body hasn’t moved much in recent years. He folds his hands on the table over the piles of paper he's been collecting for this moment, for the day someone finally walked through that door who could do something with it.

"Please sit," he says. His voice is steady now, and quiet, and underneath it, there's the weight of a man about to say something he’s been carrying around for a long time. "All of you. There's a great deal you don't know yet."

Vi sits. Her hands are flat on the table, braced.

I stay on my feet, my back to the wall, where I can see the door.

And I listen.

38

VI

Here's something nobody tells you about getting back the thing you wanted most: it doesn't feel the way you think it will.

I thought there'd be one clean feeling. Relief. Joy. Something that floods in and washes everything else out. Instead, I'm sitting in a folding chair in a room that smells like burnt coffee, looking at my father's actual, living face, and I'm feeling all of it at once, every feeling pushing and shoving to get to the front.

I'm so happy, I could throw up. I'm so angry, I could throw up. I'm terrified this is a dream and I'll wake up back in my room with a photograph and a hole in my chest. I keep waiting for it to sort itself into something I can deal with, one problem at a time. It won't.

He's older. He's thinner. He's real. He's here. He's been here the whole time.

I don't know whether to climb into his lap like I'm six or walk out and never look back.

So I do the only thing I can manage. I sit. I grip my knees. And I wait for him to explain how the hell we got here.

Dad folds his hands on the table and starts at the beginning. I sit still and listen, which turns out to be really hard.

"I knew they were coming for me," he says. "A long time before they did."

His voice is older than I remember. Quieter. But it's his, the same voice that read to me at night and talked me down off a hundred ledges and later, after I was grown, called me every Sunday morning without fail.

"For about a year," he goes on, "I'd been building a case. You know that part. You found the documents." A small nod toward me, toward the work I did to get here. "What I didn't tell anyone, what I couldn't, was how far it went. I thought, at first, it was Fischer and a handful of people around him. Greedy men skimming. I was wrong. It went up. Way up. Past the people you could name, to people you couldn't, people who never signed a thing and never will."

The ceiling. The ones above Fischer. The ones we've been chasing.

"And once I understood how high it went," he says, "I understood something else. That there was no version of this where I won. Not by the rules. The rules belonged to them because they were written by them. Every office I could have taken my concerns to, every person who could have done something, was either in their pocket or too scared to cross them. I had the truth and nowhere to put it." He shrugs, his face covered in sadness.

"So I made a choice," my father says.

And here it comes. My stomach knows it's bad before he even says it.

"I knew if I stayed, they'd kill me, and the case would die with me. So I disappeared before they could. Not in a panic. I planned it. I chose the day.”

“But your records stop before you disappeared. I've lost whole nights to that gap, trying to work out what they did to you in those six weeks."