Chapter 9
Oisín
By the third morning, I understand the pattern well enough to hate myself for waiting for it.
Saint doesn’t come to bed like other men might.
There’s no softness to his arrival, no attempt to pretend the room is anything but his, no easing into the dark with apology or explanation.
He comes in late, long after the clubhouse has shifted into that deeper nighttime quiet where even the bar sounds muffled by walls and smoke as he brings the outside in with him, cold air, leather, gun oil, whiskey, and sometimes blood.
He says my name if he feels like it. Sometimes he doesn’t.
Either way, my body knows the sound of the door opening before my mind decides whether to resent him.
Every night, I tell myself I should resist harder. Every night, the thought dissolves the second his hand closes around the back of my neck.
That’s the part I don’t know how to forgive.
The wanting would be easier if it felt simple, if I could call it lust and file it away with every reckless decision I’ve made in dark rooms where no one knew my name.
But Saint doesn’t touch me like a stranger anymore, and he doesn’t touch me like a man asking for anything.
He handles me like he’s already memorized the places where I’ll bend and then he just leaves before I wake up.
The first time, I told myself it was business.
The second, I told myself it was habit. By the third, I understand that Saint doesn’t want to be there when the quiet wears off.
He wants the relief my surrender gives him, the stillness afterward, and the way I stop fighting long enough to make his thoughts stop racing.
Then he leaves before either of us has to look at what remains.
I wake alone in his bed with the sheets twisted around my hips, my entire body sore.
I shower, dress, and put myself back together as much as the mirror allows.
The mark near my collarbone is fading, though not quickly enough to spare me Tally’s eyes or Cade’s mouth if either of them bothers to look too closely.
I tug the collar of my shirt higher, then stop because there’s no way to hide everything Saint has done to me, and trying only makes me feel like I’m helping him prove a point.
Slowly, I make my way into the main part of the clubhouse, already having mapped Obsidian’s natural rhythm.
The front bar wakes late unless there’s a run.
The kitchen belongs to Tally until noon, and anyone stupid enough to argue with that ends up fed badly on purpose.
Demo gets assigned the worst jobs and performs them with the desperate devotion of someone who thinks usefulness might turn into approval if he earns enough of it.
Bricks appears wherever violence might become necessary before anyone admits they’re expecting trouble.
Moth is either everywhere or nowhere depending on what the room needs to believe.
Everyone else is mostly background noise, avoiding my presence so that Saint doesn’t ridicule them about it later.
However, I try to make myself as useful as possible, working with Moth where I can.
His intelligence is far larger than the Rogues’ ever was but my knowledge comes from an entirely different perspective, one Moth never accounted for.
Instead of trying to butt into conversations or start discussions, I just do. And by the third day, I’ve successfully created an overlay of their maps with everything I’ve found ‘wrong’. My father would have killed me for it and I’m hoping Saint will see my usefulness and accept it.
The door opens slowly, Moth stopping in the doorway, tablet tucked under one arm, and looks at the board for a long time before he looks at me. I keep my hands visible because I’ve learned enough about Obsidian to know that calm men are often the most dangerous ones.
“I didn’t remove anything,” I tell him.
“I can see that.”
He steps inside, sets the tablet on the desk, and studies the changes without giving me any relief of expression.
Moth’s silence isn’t like Canon’s, meant to make someone shrink.
It’s quieter and worse in a way, because he doesn’t need intimidation to make a room feel examined.
He follows the new pin structure from the quarry spur to the Fulton watch point, pauses over the blue-marked fallback, then reaches past me and moves one red pin two inches north.
“You missed this.”
I lean closer before I can stop myself. “I thought that point was inactive.”
“It was active again as of this morning.”
“Then your Wednesday redundancy is worse than I thought.”
For the first time, the corner of his mouth shifts. It isn’t a smile exactly, but from Moth it feels close enough to make my chest tighten. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
Moth then just takes a seat and starts studying my work, no more conversation passed between us. I remove myself from the office and wander into the main room before snagging a coffee. Tally finds me later at the bar with a coffee gone cold between my hands.
“You look like a man who’s either solved a problem or caused one,” she says, setting a plate in front of me.
I glance down at the sandwich. “Do those usually look different?”
“Depends who’s bleeding afterward.” She slides onto the stool beside mine instead of standing across from me. “Eat before Saint comes back and decides glaring counts as nutrition.”
“He does do a lot of glaring.”
“He considers it communication.”
I take a bite because Tally has the kind of presence that makes refusal feel childish. The silence lasts just long enough to get me through half the sandwich before Tally strikes up a conversation.
“You grew up in the Rogues’ clubhouse?” she asks.
“Mostly.”
“Your mama too?”
I go still around the next bite, because for once the question isn’t harsh.
Most people ask about Canon first. President, bloodline, father, power.
Men like him make gravity around themselves, and everyone assumes his orbit explains the rest of us.
Tally asks about my mother like she already knows there are parts of me Canon didn’t build.
“No,” I say after a moment. “She wasn’t club. Not really.”
“What was she?”
“Irish.” The word comes out small, so I set the sandwich down and try again.
“She was born there and came over when she was in her 20s. Married Canon before the Rogues became what they are now, I think. Or maybe before I was old enough to understand what they were. She spoke Irish at home when she didn’t want the club in the room with us. ”
Tally leans her forearms on the bar, giving the answer the kind of attention that makes it harder to pretend it doesn’t matter. “Is that where your name comes from?”
My fingers tighten around the mug.
She sees the reaction and doesn’t rush to fill it. That’s one of the things about Tally that keeps catching me off guard. She knows when silence needs company and when it needs space. “No one’s asked you that in a while,” she says as I shake my head. “Alright, then I’m asking.”
For a moment, the clubhouse blurs under memory.
My mother in the kitchen, flour on her hands, rain against the windows, her voice turning my name into something beautiful.
Oisín, she’d say, correcting Canon when he shortened it wrong, smiling like the correction was love and not defiance.
After she died, my name became something men stumbled over, mocked, shortened, or avoided.
Sín was easier in dark rooms because Sín didn’t have a dead mother attached to it.
Oisín belonged to a home that stopped existing when Maeve Ward did.
“It’s from the old stories,” I mumble, keeping my eyes on the bar.
“Oisín was a warrior and a poet. His father was Fionn mac Cumhaill, leader of the Fianna. Oisín fell in love with Niamh from Tír na nóg, the land of eternal youth, and went with her across the sea. He stayed there for what felt like three years.”
Tally hums in response.
“When he came back to Ireland, hundreds of years had passed. Everyone he loved was gone. The Fianna were dust. The world had moved on without him, and he couldn’t touch the ground without losing everything that kept him young.
In some versions, he falls from his horse and becomes an old man.
In some, he lives long enough to tell the stories before he dies.
My mother liked the part where he remembered.
She said forgetting would’ve been the real death. ”
The silence afterward is almost painful so I take another bite, needing something to do.
Tally reaches over and squeezes my wrist once. “Your Mom had good taste.”
My eyes burn so fast I have to look away. The clubhouse keeps moving around us, but for one dangerous second I’m back in my mother’s kitchen with her fingers in my hair and my name in her mouth like something worth keeping.
“She was the only one who called me that like she meant it,” I push out.
Tally’s hand leaves my wrist, but the warmth stays. “Then we’ll have to do better around here.”
I take another bite of the sandwich because I don’t trust myself to answer.
***
That evening, I know the second he enters the clubhouse because the room adjusts itself around him before I hear his boots.
Voices lower, chairs shift, and the front bar pulls its attention inward.
Tally glances toward the hall, then back at me.
The creak of Saint’s office door hits my ears and I brace myself for the worst.
“You touch Moth’s board?” she asks.
“Maybe.”
“You alive?”
“So far.”
“Then either Moth liked it or he’s saving the murder for Saint.”
Saint appears in the doorway a moment later, still in his cut, dark shirt stretched across his shoulders, jaw set in a way I’ve learned means controlled irritation rather than active rage. His eyes find me, moves briefly to Tally, then returns to my face.
“Office,” he says.
Tally raises her brows. “He ate.”
Saint’s mouth moves faintly. “Good.”