Chapter 7 #2
“Wasn’t meant to be. Comfort comes after food.” She slides the eggs into a tortilla, adds something green from a container, and sets the plate in front of me. “Eat first. Panic after.”
I’m trying to decide whether taking a bite will make me cry for reasons too pathetic to survive daylight when a prospect appears in the doorway.
He has a bruise darkening near one elbow, hair sticking up in the back, and the expression of a man who started speaking before deciding whether speech was safe.
“Tally, have you seen the—oh. Hey. Oisín. Morning. Good morning, I mean. Not just morning like I’m announcing the time.”
“Demo,” Tally says without looking away from the stove. “Breathe.”
He takes an exaggerated breath, then immediately ruins it by pointing toward the plate. “Are you okay? Wait, am I allowed to ask that? Saint didn’t say not to ask that. Saint didn’t say anything, actually, which is usually worse, so maybe I should’ve waited until someone official said—”
“Stop talking,” Tally says.
Demo closes his mouth, nods once, then whispers, “Right.”
Despite myself, I say, “I’m fine.”
Tally snorts softly.
Demo looks at her, then back at me. “People never say that when they’re fine.”
A voice from the hall answers before I can. “Kid, stop trying to adopt the hostage before breakfast.”
Demo’s face flushes. “He’s not a hostage.”
The man who steps into view isn’t Bricks, though for one second my brain reaches for that comparison because he’s large enough to block most of the doorway.
He’s broad through the shoulders, blond, with a trimmed beard and a tattoo climbing one side of his neck.
His cut identifies him as patched, his gaze moving over me with the kind of lazy appraisal that makes my stomach go cold before he even opens his mouth.
When he smiles, there’s no warmth in it. “No? Saint really left a piece of ass sitting in the kitchen and we’re calling that diplomacy now?”
The room gets smaller around the sentence.
My hand tightens around the fork, and I hate that the first thing I feel isn’t anger but the old instinct to become less visible, to lower my eyes and let the insult pass over me because fighting it will only give it a place to land.
Demo looks horrified enough for both of us.
“Cade,” he says. “Don’t.”
So his name is Cade.
Tally turns from the stove slowly, spatula still in hand. “You want to try that again?”
Cade leans against the doorframe like size is a legal argument. “I’m saying what everyone’s thinking.”
“No, you’re saying what the stupid ones are thinking.
” She sets the spatula down with such care that the soft tap of it against the counter sounds more dangerous than if she’d thrown it.
“The alliance between the clubs has been cemented. It doesn’t matter how, and it sure as hell doesn’t matter whether your delicate feelings got bruised because Saint brought home the pretty brother instead of the scary sister. ”
Cade’s smile twitches. “Pretty brother. So you agree.”
“I agree you’re about ten seconds from making your morning worse.”
His eyes slide back to me. “He Rogue or Obsidian now?”
I don’t know the answer. I’m wearing Saint’s clothes, standing in Obsidian’s kitchen, carrying Rogue blood and Saint’s marks in the same body. Nobody asked me where I belong before making belonging a matter of signatures.
Tally steps between his line of sight and mine before I have to answer.
“He’s under Saint’s roof, wearing Saint’s mark, and carrying Saint’s name in the contract.
You hurt a hair on Oisín’s head, and Saint will make you pay for it whether he likes the Rogue or not.
” She pauses and clears her throat. “Let me rephrase. You touch a hair on his head and there will be a problem.”
Cade lifts his hands, though the smirk on his lips stays. “Didn’t touch him.”
“You looked like you were thinking about it.”
“I think about a lot of things.”
“Try thinking about how attached you are to your teeth.”
Demo makes a strangled sound that might be a laugh and turns it into a cough so quickly he nearly hurts himself. Cade glares at Tally, then at me, then pushes off the doorframe. “Welcome to Obsidian, sweetheart.”
I keep my face still until his footsteps fade down the hall. Tally turns back to me and pushes the plate closer with two fingers.
“Eat.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. If Saint finds out Cade opened his mouth before he came back to establish whatever ridiculous rules he’s planning to establish, I’m going to have to listen to Bricks laugh about it for three days.”
Demo drops into the chair across from me and then sits up straighter, as if he’s remembered I’m not technically company. “Cade’s an asshole.”
“Demo.”
“He is.”
“He’s also useful with a wrench, so we tolerate the rest until he crosses a line.” Tally looks at me more carefully. “You tell Saint.”
I shake my head. “No.”
“That wasn’t phrased like a suggestion.”
“I don’t want to start anything.” I stuff my face with a bite, trying to give me something else to focus on but her gaze feels like it’s going through me.
Demo looks genuinely confused. “You wouldn’t be starting it. Cade started it when he opened his mouth.”
“That’s not how clubs work,” I say before I can stop myself.
Tally’s expression changes just slightly, not pity exactly, but something that lands close enough to make me look down at the food. “Maybe not with the Rogues.”
She lets the silence sit as I stuff the rest of breakfast into my mouth, avoiding both her and Demo’s glances.
The rest of the day unfolds in small, disorienting pieces.
Nobody tells me where to go, but everyone notices where I am.
Tally gives me what she calls a practical tour, which means she shows me the clean towels, the laundry room, the kitchen pantry, the bathroom that doesn’t flood, the hallway not to use unless I want to interrupt people counting cash or stitching somebody up, and the door to the basement she tells me not to open unless Saint or Moth says so.
Demo joins us for part of it, apparently under the impression that commentary is helpful if delivered with enough panic.
“That’s the game room,” he says, pointing through a half-open door. “Pool, darts, cards. Don’t play cards with Bricks unless you like losing money and hearing about how you lost money for the next six months.”
Tally adds, “Don’t play darts with Moth.”
“Why?”
Demo glances around before answering, like Moth might appear through the wall. “He doesn’t miss, and he remembers if you do.”
We pass a closed office near the back hallway, and Tally’s pace shifts by half a step. It’s subtle enough that Demo doesn’t notice. I do.
“That’s Moth’s office,” she says. “Knock if you’re expected. Don’t go near it if you aren’t.”
Demo lowers his voice. “He keeps the route board in there.”
Tally gives him a look.
“What?” Demo says, spreading his hands. “Oisín’s logistics too, right?”
I glance through the narrow window set into the office door.
A corkboard covers most of the far wall, layered with maps, colored pins, delivery windows, coded initials, and three routes marked in red along the eastern corridor.
Obsidian’s system is cleaner than ours, less duplication, fewer middlemen, less ego baked into the movement pattern.
But there’s a bottleneck near the quarry spur that makes my fingers itch. Three red marks cluster too close together near an old access road, and if those mean surveillance points, splitting the escort won’t fix the exposure. It’ll just create two smaller targets.
Tally watches my face. “You saw something.”
“No.”
Demo perks up. “What did you see?”
“Nothing.”
Tally smiles faintly. “Terrible liar.”
I just clear my throat and keep walking. If they intend to use my knowledge here, I’m sure I can be useful but I’m not offering anything up on a silver platter. Especially since I still don’t know where I belong.
Names come with the hallways. Cade is the blond asshole from the kitchen. Ash runs one of the garage crews and speaks so little that Demo lowers his voice around him without realizing it. Pike watches the front entrance like he expects war to knock politely before coming in.
Halo is not to be called Halo unless someone wants a detailed explanation of why the nickname is inaccurate, outdated, and insulting, which of course means everyone calls him Halo whenever he enters a room.
Tally offers it casually, Demo filling in the gaps with unfiltered affection, mostly for people who would probably cuff him for sounding sentimental if they heard him.
Bricks appears often enough that I start tracking him without meaning to.
He drifts near the side entrance before a call comes in from the lot, then moves to the garage hallway when Moth passes with his phone pressed to his ear, then settles near the main room where he can see both entrances and the stairwell without appearing to watch any of them.
At first I think it’s coincidence. After the third time, I know better.
“He always does that?” I ask Tally quietly while Demo is distracted trying to explain why Halo once got banned from naming poker nights.
“Does what?”
“Positions himself near Saint’s path.”
Demo stops mid-sentence and looks toward Bricks. “Huh. I never noticed that.”
“You don’t notice chairs either,” Tally says. “That’s why you keep tripping over them.”
Demo glances at the nearest chair as if it might have plans.
Tally’s attention moves back to Bricks, and something in her expression softens.
“Bricks has kept Saint alive more times than either of them will admit. Saint doesn’t ask for much, or acts like he doesn’t. Bricks makes sure he has it anyway.”
“What does Saint need?”
I shouldn’t have asked that.
Tally offers me a small smile, but before she can answer, two men at the bar start talking low enough to think they’re being discreet and loud enough for me to catch every other word.
“Saint’s been worse since the corridor mess.”
“He’s always worse.”
“No, this is different. Moth said he didn’t sleep for two days after the Jersey batch hit wrong.”
“Shut up.”
“What? Rogue already knows about XR3.”
“Not that. About Saint.”
A chair leg scrapes sharply, followed by a pointed cough from Pike, who doesn’t look at me when he does it. The conversation dies so abruptly it leaves a space behind. I stare down at my feet, trying not to look like I was listening, while Tally sets a hand briefly on my shoulder.
“You’re going to hear a lot of half-sentences in this place,” she says. “Men love talking until someone interesting can understand them.”
“Does Saint sleep?”
Demo snorts softly. “Sometimes in chairs.”
Tally gives him a look, but she doesn’t correct him.
That doesn’t track with what happened last night.
I don’t remember much after Saint fucked me into his mattress but the feeling of his arms around my waist, pulling me back into his chest is still running through my head.
It’s the reason I fell asleep. For as scary and chaotic as the Obsidian world is, Saint was there.
And he held me.
And he slept.
Tally raises an eyebrow, running her tongue across her top lip.
“Something tells me you’re way more than a pretty face.
From what I heard of that meeting, you’ve got a lot of information in that head of yours.
I’ve seen part of that this morning. However, I have a feeling you’re going to be good for Saint. ”
I mumble a thanks, unsure of what else to say as I trudge back toward the kitchen for more coffee. Maybe the caffeine will help. It probably won’t.