Page 71 of Rogue’s Mark

I stop. They don't notice me, which says how gone they both are.

I think about the look that passed between them the night we got back, the one Rogue thought I didn't catch. I think about how long Mara's spent pretending she hadn't noticed Kade, and how long Kade's spent pretending he hadn't noticed her right back.

I raise one eyebrow at nobody, since neither of them is looking.

And I keep walking.

I don't say anything. Don't giggle, don’t clear my throat, don't make a joke, don't give Mara the satisfaction of catching me see her. There'll be time for that later, and I intend to enjoy every second of it. For now, my oldest friend is happily sucking face with a cute guy in a dead mall, and after everything we've been through, that feels like a small miracle I'm not about to make a mess out of.

Good for her. Good for both of them. In a place built out of everything people lost, the two of them found something. I know how that is.

I take the stairs up to the landing with the window over the loading dock, the one that's become a thinking spot for more than just me, and stand there a minute looking out at the gray day. I'm tired in a way sleep won't fix, the kind that comes from a day that’s held a lifetime in it. My father found, then gone again in the space of a few hours. A whole new shape to my life, decided out loud in front of four men who didn't blink.

But underneath the tired, there's something I haven't felt in longer than I can remember.

I'm not waiting anymore. Not for rescue, not for permission, not for the other shoe to drop. I came here with nothing but a dead father and a stubborn refusal to believe it. Now I've got a plan, a family, and the first real shot anyone's had at the people who fucked up Rothwell.

Behind me, a footstep. Unhurried, deliberate, one I'd know anywhere by now.

Armen.

"You got a minute?" he says.

Always.

47

VI

He doesn't say anything right away.

So we stand there a while, the two of us, looking out at the gray.

"You ran that room," he finally says.

"I did."

"I want to be sure you noticed."

I look at him. "I did. Of course I did."

He nods slowly, his eyes still on the window. In profile, he's all hard lines, the jaw, the set of his mouth, the stillness he wears like it's part of his body. Most people in the Rot are careful around Armen and I understand why. He's the one who decides things. He's the one nobody pushes. I’ve seen him angry twice, and both times it showed as a man getting quieter, not louder. Somehow, that’s even worse.

I've seen a lot of Armen. His control, his command, the way people arrange themselves around him without him having to ask. What I've almost never seen is what's underneath it.

I'm about to see it now.

"When you came here," he says, "I had you figured for someone we'd be protecting. A problem to keep alive until she stopped being our problem." He says it flat, no apology in it, just the truth as he saw it then. "I'm good at reading people. It's the thing I do better than anything else. And I read you wrong."

"That's practically a love letter, coming from you."

The corner of his mouth moves, and that's the first crack. Armen's control is a thing he keeps level, almost all the time, in every room. And right now, standing at this window, it isn't level.

I’m loving that.

"Here's the part I don't say out loud," he goes on, and I go still, because Armen prefacing anything with that is like the ground shifting under me. "I run things. The Rot, the guys, every piece of this. Not because I love being in charge. Because there was a time I couldn't control a single thing that happened to me or to the people I cared about, and I swore I'd never be in that spot again. So I built a place where I decide. Where nothing happens that I didn't see coming." He turns and looks at me, finally, full on. "And then you walked in. And from the first week, you were the one thing I couldn't run. I'd plan around you and you'd do something else. I'd decide how a thing should go and you'd blow it up. It drove me out of my mind."

"I remember," I say softly. "You hated me a little."