Chapter 3
Oisín
Rain ticks steadily against the narrow windows above my desk while I stare at the same spreadsheet for the fourth time in twenty minutes, trying to make myself care about fuel percentages instead of the memory that’s been living under my skin for six days.
The accounting office sits above the Rogues’ clubhouse like an afterthought, all exposed pipes, yellowing lights, and filing cabinets that have probably survived more presidents than I have years on this earth.
Downstairs, music pulses through the floorboards beneath my boots, muffled by distance and old wood, while laughter rises and falls in rough bursts from the bar.
Up here, everything sounds softened at the edges, and I usually like that.
I usually like being somewhere the noise can’t quite reach me.
Numbers make more sense than people. They don’t ask me to be harder before they cooperate, and they don’t look disappointed when I’m quiet.
A shipment either arrives or it doesn’t.
A payment clears or it fails. A loss hides somewhere in the ledger until I find it and drag it into the light.
There’s comfort in that kind of certainty, especially inside a club where half the men downstairs would rather shoot through a problem than admit they don’t understand it.
Tonight, though, my focus keeps slipping no matter how many times I pull it back.
Every time I glance away from the screen, I’m back in that club almost a week ago, standing beneath dim lights with bass moving through my ribs and a stranger’s attention fixed on me so completely it felt like being touched before his hand ever landed.
I don’t remember him in clean details so much as impressions... how much larger he was than me, those beautiful tattoos across his dark skin, the certainty in his voice, and the way he looked at me like softness wasn’t a flaw he had to tolerate but the exact thing he wanted from me.
That’s the part that keeps undoing me.
Not the danger of it. Not the stupidity. Not even the fact that I let a stranger see more of me in twenty minutes than my own club has managed to see in twenty-seven years. It’s the relief I can’t stop thinking about.
For once, I hadn’t needed to perform hardness badly enough to embarrass myself.
I hadn’t needed to sharpen my voice or square my shoulders or pretend I knew what to do with all the aggression men like my father, Canon, mistake for worth.
I’d just stood there, nervous and wanting and too honest for my own good, and the stranger had wanted exactly that.
I rub both hands over my face and force my attention back to the laptop before the memory can pull me any deeper.
The Rogues’ quarterly financials glow across the screen in neat rows that look far calmer than they should.
Fuel costs are up again along the eastern corridor.
Security payouts have nearly doubled since the feds started sniffing around our usual routes.
Two shipments disappeared somewhere between Albany and Syracuse last month, and nobody’s officially admitted what that means because admitting weakness inside the Rogues is like cutting yourself open in a room full of hungry dogs.
The club isn’t collapsing, but it’s leaning harder on reputation than actual strength, and that never ends well.
Canon can swagger through the clubhouse with his rings flashing and his voice carrying over everybody else’s, but the numbers don’t care who raised them.
They don’t care about his pride, or my sister Varina’s temper, or the way men move aside when a Ward walks through a room.
The numbers say we’re bleeding. Slowly enough to hide. Steadily enough to matter.
I save the report into the encrypted drive Canon likes pretending only he understands, then begin stacking the physical copies into folders.
My handwriting runs along the tabs in small, precise letters because if I’m going to be invisible, I might as well be efficient about it.
Shipment manifests go first. Then revenue projections.
Then route losses, inventory discrepancies, enforcement payouts, and the revised cash reserves Canon won’t thank me for calculating honestly.
The last folder sits half-buried under a stack of old invoices, and my fingers pause when I see the label.
OBSIDIAN.
For a moment, I just stare at it while the rain drags silver lines down the glass behind my desk.
“So the whispers are true,” I mumble.
I’ve heard pieces for weeks, though never anything concrete enough to trust. Obsidian sightings near the eastern corridor.
Varina disappearing into closed-door meetings and coming back with a look on her face like she wanted to punch a hole through the nearest wall.
Canon taking calls outside instead of in his office, which means either money or pride was involved, and with him it’s usually both.
Still, I never thought he’d actually do it.
My father would rather choke on his own tongue than admit the Rogues need another club’s help.
I should put the folder with the rest and walk away.
I know that. I’ve survived this long by understanding exactly when not to ask questions, when not to stand too close to the machinery while it’s moving, when not to look at the thing everyone else is pretending isn’t there.
Curiosity has never been safe in my family.
But the folder is already under my hand, and I’m tired enough tonight that my self-preservation is quieter than usual.
I open it to find that most of the paperwork is logistics, which is probably why it ended up in my stack in the first place.
Shared security runs. Corridor support. Enforcement rotation.
Projected distribution windows. Territorial boundaries.
The language is dry and corporate in that ridiculous way men use when they’re trying to make crime look like business and business look like destiny.
Then I find the XR3 projections, and my stomach tightens.
Everybody knows what XR3 is, even if they pretend they don’t.
Obsidian’s synthetic miracle. Their empire in little glass vials.
Half the city talks about it like salvation, clean focus and clean euphoria and all the sharp edges of life suddenly polished.
The other half talks about it like the end of the world dressed up as progress.
Either way, people can’t stop wanting it, and Obsidian has figured out how to make wanting profitable enough to turn a motorcycle club into something closer to a sovereign power.
I skim the numbers slowly, trying not to react, but the figures are too obscene to ignore. One quarter of Obsidian’s XR3 revenue outpaces almost everything the Rogues made last year outside weapons trafficking, and even then, the comparison barely holds.
No wonder Canon is entertaining this.
I keep reading before I can talk myself out of it, turning another page until a heading near the bottom catches my attention.
Alliance Integration Proposal.
The first page is exactly what I expect. Shared appearances. Combined operations. Public loyalty displays dressed up as mutual respect. Then the phrasing shifts into something older, uglier, and more familiar: long-term stability through familial integration.
I don’t need to read further to know what that means.
Marriage.
Of course.
Clubs like ours love pretending we’re kingdoms instead of criminal organizations because kingdoms sound noble and history makes monsters easier to swallow.
Marriage means loyalty. Marriage means leverage.
It means tying two power structures together tightly enough that betrayal starts costing blood on both sides.
It means someone’s body becomes a treaty and everybody else gets to call it honor.
My eyes drift lower until they land on my sister’s name.
Varina Ward.
I lean back slowly in the chair and stare toward the ceiling while rain keeps tapping at the windows.
Something bitter coils in my chest, though it isn’t simple enough to be jealousy.
Varina deserves power more than most people in this club deserve oxygen.
She’s smart, ruthless, and terrifying in ways Canon understands.
She walks into rooms and men twice her size move before she has to ask.
Canon spent years sharpening her into something hard enough to survive him, and somewhere along the way, she became sharper than all of us.
I learned a different kind of survival.
Varina became louder. Harder. Mean enough that nobody could mistake her for weak.
I became useful. Quiet enough to overlook. Soft enough that people stopped seeing me as a threat. Careful enough to keep the club running in ways nobody notices unless something goes wrong.
The roles settled between us so long ago that sometimes I think we both forget there were ever children underneath them.
There was a time Varina used to crawl into my bed after Mom died because she hated how quiet the house got at night.
There was a time I knew how to make her laugh so hard she’d snort into her pillow and shove me with both hands.
There was a time before Canon looked at us and decided which child was worth building into a weapon and which one could be left to manage the receipts.
I close the folder carefully, but the ache doesn’t close with it.
For one dangerous second, I think about the stranger again.
I think about the way his attention had landed on me.
He hadn’t asked me to be louder. He hadn’t seemed disappointed that I wasn’t harder.
He’d looked at the exact things Canon spent years dismissing and wanted them with a hunger that still makes my cock twitch when I remember it.