Page 84 of Rogue’s Mark

Armen looks at the ring for a long moment. Then he looks at me, and something passes between us that doesn't need a single word. He reaches out and turns Vi's hand toward the light, and in seconds realizes what it’s made from.

"Wow. Delaney Street," he says.

"Yup. Delaney Street," I say.

Sting doesn't say anything at all. He just steps in, takes Vi's face in both hands, and kisses her forehead, slow, the way you'd handle something you'd kill to protect. Then he claps me on the shoulder and grips it hard. That's Sting showing approval.

There's no jealousy in any of it. There never has been, not with us, which is the part people on the outside could never understand. The ring is mine to give because this was always going to be my moment, the same way they'll have theirs, the same way she belongs to all of us and we belong to her, and none of it ever needed to make sense to anybody but the four of us.

"She say yes?" Armen asks me, dry.

"I didn't ask a question," I say. "I just gave her the truth and let her decide what to do with it."

"He's learning," Vi says, and the three of them almost smile. She reaches back and takes my hand and Armen's at the same time, and the night turns into the only thing it was ever going to turn into.

We take her to Armen's room, the four of us, the way we have dozens of times. But it's different tonight, and we all feel it. The last time we did this, it was before we walked into the worst danger of our lives, and there was something desperate in it, something holding on. Tonight, there's nothing chasing us. Nothing waiting in the morning but more of this. For the first time since any of us landed in this dead place, we have all the time in the world, and we take it.

Nobody's in a hurry. That's the difference.

Armen undresses her slow, the way he does everything, his mouth at her throat while Sting kisses her and I get my hands in her hair. She's already gone soft and wanting between us, the ring catching the low light every time she moves. I keep noticing it, my mark on her hand while we guys work her over.

"Look at you," Armen murmurs against her skin. "All of us, and you still trying to run the room."

She laughs, breathless, and then Sting's mouth finds her breast, and the laugh turns into something better.

We lay her down between us. I take my time with my mouth on her, the flat of my tongue and then the point of it, her thighs falling open, her hand fisting in my hair while Armen and Sting work the rest of her, four hands and two mouths. She comes fast the first time, loud, not caring who hears, because this is the Rot and it's hers now, and she's got nothing left to be afraid of.

Then Sting slides into her while she's still shaking, slow and deep, and she arches up off the bed with a sound that goes straight through me. Armen feeds her his fingers to quiet her, and she sucks them and looks up at all of us with those eyes, wrecked and adored and completely owning every man in the room.

We trade her between us, gentler and greedier at once, like men who finally get to keep the thing they were sure the world would take away. Armen, then me, then Sting again, and her hands and her mouth never idle, giving back everything we give her. When I finally push inside, she wraps her legs and pulls me deep, saying my name against my jaw. I feel her new ring press into the back of my neck where her hand grips me, the metal of my whole history warm against my skin, and I lose whatever was left of myself to her.

She shatters around me and I go with her, and Armen and Sting are right there, the four of us tangled into one thing, and for a long moment after, nobody moves at all.

We end up the way we always end up, too many of us for the space and not one of us willing to give an inch of it back.

I lie there in the dark and do something I haven't done in years. I think about the future, and it doesn't scare me.

I think about the shop, gone, and the ring, here. I think about my father, somewhere out there, and the fact that someday soon I'm going to go looking, and that I won't be going alone. I think about a girl who lost a Hunt and a city and everything she had, who walked into the worst place in Rothwell with nothing left, and somehow became the thing that holds the four of us together.

I came to the Rot to disappear. To be a man nobody looked at twice, hiding in a dead mall, carrying a scrap of metal I couldn't explain and a grudge I couldn't put down.

Instead, I got found. We all did. By her, and by each other, and by this broken, impossible place that turned out to be the only home any of us were ever going to get.

Vi shifts against me in her sleep, and the ring catches the last of the light, my mark, on the woman who marked all of us first.

I press my mouth to the top of her head.

Nothing chasing us. Nothing but this, for as long as we get to have it.

It's everything I never let myself want. And it's ours.

EPILOGUE

VI

The gate still grinds the same ugly way it always has.

Metal on metal, the same complaint it's made since the first day I walked through it with new boots and a worse plan. I stand there a second and let it clang shut behind me the way I've done a hundred times now. Six months since we ended Lydia Vance, since her name went everywhere and her money froze and my father's name got said out loud again by people who'd spent years calling him a disgrace. Six months, and in here nothing has changed at all. Same dim corridors. Same stale electrical smell. Same busted light outside the old sporting goods unit that nobody will ever fix, because fixing it would mean admitting we live here.