Page 76 of Rogue’s Mark

"Say it again," Vi whispers.

The woman says it again.

"Lydia Vance."

I know the name. Everybody from Rothwell knows the name. Lydia Vance, who funded the shelters and the scholarships, who cut the ribbon on the children's wing, who stood next to Vi's father at every podium that mattered and called him a friend of the city. Lydia Vance, who sent flowers when the mayor died and gave a lovely speech about what Rothwell had lost.

Lydia Vance, who has been the answer this entire time.

Vi puts both hands flat on the table like she's holding it down. When she looks up at me, her eyes are wet and bright and absolutely lethal.

"It was her," she says. "It was her the whole time."

And somewhere out on the clean, bright street where nothing bad is supposed to happen, I feel it again, eyes on the back of my neck, patient and unhurried, the same stillness I've been failing to place since the day this started.

This time, I think I'm finally about to.

51

ROGUE

He's waiting for us when we come out of the coffee shop.

Not hiding. Standing across the street with his hands in his pockets, easy as you please, watching us. And now that he's letting me see him straight on, in daylight, the thing that's been scratching at the back of my skull since the Rot finally stops scratching and stands all the way up.

I know him.

Not from the Rot. I mean, yeah, I know him from the Rot but also from before the Rot. Before all of it. From a block six streets over from my house, back when we were both kids with nothing and too much time. Same cracked sidewalks. Same hard luck. We weren't friends, but you know the faces you grow up next to, the ones who came up in the same dirt you did. You don't forget how they stand.

And you don't forget a spy from the Rot.

"Oren," I say when he approaches me.

Something moves across his face. Almost a smile. "Took you long enough," he chuckles as if we’re friends.

"Tell the others to give us a minute," I say to Armen, not looking away from Oren. Armen doesn't love it, but he reads the situation and pulls Vi and Sting a couple doors down, close enough to step in if necessary but far enough away to let me have a moment.

And in that moment, I finally put together the part I should've caught the second I placed his face. Oren's the spy, the one who walked into the Rot, the one who traded Fischer for a dead mayor who wasn't dead. And the spy never worked for himself. He always answered to whoever sat at the top of this whole thing. Ten minutes ago, in the coffee shop behind me, we learned who that is. So, Oren isn't just a ghost from my old block. He belongs to Lydia Vance.

Oren nods and pats me on the shoulder like a man with all the time in the world. Up close, he's the same but different. Older, harder, dressed better than anybody from our block has any business dressing. The expensive look of a man well paid.

"You sold us out, didn't you?" I say.

"I got paid," he says, like those are the same thing, like there was never a difference. "You want to do the speech? The one where you're the good one and I'm the sellout? Go ahead. I've heard it."

He shrugs. "We came up in the same gutter, you and me. Difference is, somebody offered me a way out of it and I took it. You're telling me you wouldn't have?"

"Somebody offered you a way out," I say. "And the price was everybody else still stuck in it. Your own people. You took money from the woman who burned the block we grew up on."

"I took money from the only person who ever offered me any." His jaw tightens, the first real reaction I've seen in him. "Don't stand there with your shithole dead mall and tell me about loyalty, Rogue. Loyalty's a thing you can afford when you've got something. We had nothing. I made sure that stopped being my problem."

And there it is. The whole difference between us, laid out on a clean sidewalk in a city built on our hometown's bones.

"You're right," I tell him. "We came up the same. Had the same nothing. The same nobody-coming-to-save-us." I take a step closer. "I didn't fix it by selling the next guy down. That's the only part that matters, and it's the part you'll never get back. Money buys the coat. It doesn't buy back the person you were before you put it on."

He doesn't have anything for that. For just a second, under the good coat, I see the kid from six streets over who knew better, before he taught himself otherwise.

Then it's gone, and he's the messenger again.