Chapter 9 #2
“And you’re welcome.”
This time, his eyes cut to her. “Thank you.”
The words are so blunt and unexpected that I stare at him too long.
Saint catches the look and steps aside, making the hallway available with one small motion of his head.
I go because refusing in front of Tally would turn the moment into theater, and because some part of me has been waiting for him all day.
He doesn’t touch me on the walk to his office.
Somehow that’s worse. Without his hand on my neck, I’m too aware of every step, every shut door, every muffled voice.
His silence has weight, and by the time he closes us inside, my nerves are tight enough that I speak before he can.
“I didn’t erase anything.” Saint grunts in response as I let out a small sigh.
“If you’re angry because I touched the board, say that. ”
“I’m angry because you fixed something my own people missed.”
I swallow nervously, pausing where I stand, waiting for the anger that usually comes with these moments. It never comes.
Saint drags a hand down his face and then turns to me, anger threaded through his expression. “Which means, I underestimated how much you know.” His gaze stays on mine. “How many production locations does Canon know about?”
My stomach drops. “What?”
“XR3. How many production locations does Canon know about?”
“I don’t know. Canon doesn’t share guesses with me unless he needs them organized.”
“But he has guesses.”
“Everyone has guesses. Obsidian keeps pharmaceutical-grade product moving in three states, and every idiot with binoculars and ambition thinks that means they can find the source if they watch enough roads.”
“What did Canon think?”
I fold my arms across my chest, partly because I’m cold and partly because I need to keep my hands from fidgeting.
“He thought your lab wasn’t mobile. The consistency is too clean for a moving setup, and your batch windows don’t show the drift he’d expect if you were relocating synthesis every few weeks.
” I pause as Saint raises an eyebrow. My shoulders fall in defeat and I know I can’t hold back the information now that he’s asked.
“Old medical laundry facility outside Utica. Decommissioned bottling plant near Rome. Storage complex south of Rochester.”
“Were they right?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they’re too obvious. Men like my father think a lab has to look like a lab or hide inside something that used to be one. Your routes don’t protect buildings. They protect people and windows. Whatever matters most isn’t where everyone thinks it is. It’s attached to who can access it.”
I realize too late how close I’ve stepped to something Saint doesn’t let people touch. Saint watches me for a long moment, and I can feel him rearranging me in his head. Liability, spouse, pressure point, asset. Maybe all of them at once.
“How much have you told Canon?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“Varina?” He tilts his head to the side a little.
“Nothing.”
“Moth?”
“Only what he asked about the corridor.”
His eyes narrow slightly at that. “Did Canon send you here to collect pipeline intelligence?”
“No.”
“Did Varina?”
I sigh, tired of the circular questioning. “No.”
“Did anyone tell you to report back after the signing?”
“No.”
The questions keep coming, but he doesn’t pepper them fast enough for it to turn into a shallow back-and-forth.
He circles the subject, watching where my answers tighten, where my breathing changes, where hesitation comes before I speak.
He asks about escort windows, dead drops, buyer routes, surveillance points, which men on the Rogue side liked which theories, and who had access to the alliance files before Canon called the meeting.
At some point, I start pacing. The office is too small for the amount of information he’s dragging out of me, and movement is the only thing keeping the pressure from spilling through my skin. Saint lets me cross the same strip of carpet three times before his voice cuts through the room.
“Stop moving.”
I stop immediately, the obedience humiliating me before he even reacts. His gaze drops to my feet, then to my hands, then returns to my face.
“You reorganized Moth’s board without being asked,” he says.
“You identified redundancies, exposure points, and a false-safe route we’ve been treating like a fallback.
You know Canon’s assumptions about the XR3 pipeline, you know why those assumptions were wrong, and you were planning to stand around my clubhouse pretending all of that wasn’t sitting in your head. ”
“I wasn’t pretending.” My voice comes out quieter than I intend. “I’m overwhelmed.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“I didn’t know what you wanted from me,” I push out, my voice wobbling a little bit. With Canon, there was never any interrogation. I did my job, handed off the documents, and then disappeared to my apartment. Here, I am very much in the limelight at all times.
Saint pushes away from the desk and steps up to me, his body heat reaching me before he touches me. My breath catches in my throat, his eyes flicking briefly to my mouth.
“Yes, you did.”
The words hit the same place they always do when he says them like that as if he’s naming something I’ve been hiding from myself.
Saint lifts two fingers beneath my chin and tilts my face higher. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you?”
My mouth parts a little as my hands twitch at my sides, reaching for nothing because I don’t know what I’m allowed to touch.
Saint’s eyes darken as he watches me fail to hide the reaction. “Oh,” he says softly. “That’s dangerous.”
“Don’t.” My voice barely works.
His thumb rests against the edge of my jaw. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t use that if you don’t mean it.”
For the first time, something moves across his face that doesn’t immediately turn into calculation. It’s gone too quickly to understand, but I see it. Then his hand drops. “I’ll be gone tonight.”
The change is so abrupt I almost lose my balance. “What?”
“Warehouse issue. Moth’s coming with me. Bricks will be downstairs. You stay here.”
The office still feels charged from his hand under my chin, and now he’s already somewhere else, business locking back over whatever the moment almost became. “Here as in the clubhouse?”
“Here as in my room, unless Tally has you eating or Bricks has eyes on you.”
“I’m not a prisoner.”
“No. Prisoners get searched before they lie to me.”
“I haven’t lied to you.”
Saint looks at me for a long moment, the silence feeling less like suspicion than a warning. “Keep it that way.”