Chapter 12
Oisín
Nearly a week into living with the Obsidian club and people still watch me like they’re waiting for my edges to show.
The staring has changed since the first day.
No one lowers their voice every time I walk into the room anymore, and Cade has kept his mouth shut since Tally warned him with a spatula in one hand and murder in her eyes.
The prospects have mostly stopped looking at me like Saint might appear from a shadow and break their wrists if they stand too close.
Demo has decided I’m safe, which means he speaks to me with the open, relentless enthusiasm of someone who has never once met a silence he didn’t feel morally obligated to fill.
Still, the wariness stays. It sits beneath conversations, inside glances, in the slight pauses that happen when I enter a room already occupied by patched men who don’t know whether to treat me like family, leverage, temptation, or an active threat wrapped in Saint’s clothes.
I’m Rogue blood under an Obsidian roof. Saint’s husband by contract, Saint’s lover by implication, Saint’s problem by every practical measure.
They don’t know what I’m here for, and since I don’t know either, I have no right to resent them for it.
Most days, I stay out of the way because it’s the skill I learned early enough to trust. If Tally is in the kitchen, I sit at the island and chop whatever she puts in front of me while she complains that I dice onions like I’m apologizing to them.
If Saint is gone and his room feels too much like waiting, I drift into his office and sit in the chair near the wall with a book I rarely manage to read.
Sometimes Demo finds me there and talks until the silence is full of harmless nonsense.
Which prospect got locked out naked after a poker game, why Halo hates his nickname, how Bricks once convinced a drunk buyer that Moth was an accountant for a church charity just to watch Moth suffer through the conversation.
It should feel peaceful, maybe. It doesn’t. The boredom is strange because part of me likes having no immediate demand pressing on my throat, no accounts to reconcile before dawn, no Canon snapping my name because a shipment went sideways and someone quiet needs to absorb the first wave of blame.
Another part of me can’t stand it. My mind has never known what to do with open space except fill it with patterns, dangers, and questions I don’t want answered. Lately, when there’s nothing else to occupy me, it starts looking for Saint.
I know the weight of his boots now. I know the difference between the silence that means he’s gone and the silence that means he’s in the building and everyone else has adjusted around him.
I know his office feels different when he isn’t in it as if the room is holding itself in reserve until he returns.
The problem is that this arrangement can’t become anything more than what it is.
Saint doesn’t love me. I don’t love him.
People don’t build love out of contracts, criminal alliances, and nights that leave me aching too deeply to pretend I didn’t want them.
Saint wants control. I want quiet. The fact that those hungers fit together in the dark doesn’t make them tender, and it definitely doesn’t make them safe.
Lunch arrives around noon because Tally has apparently decided my continued existence requires supervision. She walks into Saint’s office without knocking, carrying a plate covered with a dish towel and a mug of coffee balanced in her other hand.
“You planning to haunt this room all day?” she asks with a crooked smile on her face.
I look up from the book I haven’t turned a page of in twenty minutes. “Is haunting one of the things I’m not allowed to do?”
“Depends how annoying you are about it.” She sets the plate on the desk and pulls the towel away to reveal a sandwich, sliced apples, and a pile of chips she will absolutely deny arranging with care if anyone accuses her.
“Eat before Saint comes back and decides my head is on the chopping block for forgetting to feed you.”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
Tally gives me a flat look so I pick up a chip and throw it in my mouth.
She visibly relaxes but I don’t even get to take a bite of the sandwich before the desk phone rings.
I freeze, unsure of what to do. Saint’s office phone has rung twice since I started spending time in here, and both times someone else answered before I had to decide whether touching it would get me yelled at, shot, or silently judged by Moth.
Tally glances toward the hallway, then back at me.
“Well?” she says.
“It’s not my phone.”
“It’s ringing in the room you’re sitting in.”
“That doesn’t make it mine.”
“No, but if Saint didn’t want you near anything breakable, he wouldn’t keep leaving you in here.”
The phone rings again. I set the sandwich down and pick up the receiver before I can think myself into paralysis. “Saint’s office.”
There’s a pause on the other end, then Moth’s voice comes through. “Is he there?”
“No.”
“Is Tally there?”
Tally leans her hip against the desk and raises her brows as if she already knows the call is about to become my problem.
“Yes.”
“Good. Make yourself useful. Look through the folder on the desk.”
The line goes dead.
I stare at the receiver for a second before putting it back. “He hung up.”
“That’s Moth’s version of a warm hug,” Tally says. “What does he want?”
“He said to make myself useful.”
“Did he specify how?”
“No.”
“Then he’s either testing you or too busy to be polite.”
“With Moth, can you tell the difference?”
“Sometimes. Usually, after it’s too late to matter.”
There’s a file on the left side of Saint’s desk, partly tucked beneath a stack of route notes and clipped invoices.
I’ve avoided touching it all morning because the top sheet carries Saint’s handwriting, and because sitting in his office already feels intimate in a way I’m trying not to acknowledge.
Opening his files feels like stepping deeper into him without permission.
But Moth called, and if he meant some other file, he can learn to use more words.
I pull the folder closer.
The moment I open it, Saint’s scent rises from the paper and the leather blotter beneath it, smoke and clean soap and the darker undertone that belongs to him rather than the room.
It steadies me before it distracts me, which is another thing I don’t intend to think about.
I force my attention onto the first page and find purchase in the numbers.
Tally notices immediately. “That bad already?”
“No,” I murmur, scanning the first sheet. “It’s just his handwriting.”
She leans her hip against the desk. “Careful, sweetheart. That sounded dangerously close to fond.”
“It’s just an observation.” I force myself lower on the page. “Secondary distribution chain. Not synthesis.”
“That supposed to mean something to me?”
“It means this isn’t the heart of XR3. It’s support movement. Glass vials, droppers, packaging, stabilizing agents under supplier codes, fuel charges, vehicle rotations.” I turn the page and follow the columns with my finger. “Important, but not the formula. Nothing to do with the lab.”
Tally’s face settles into something more serious. “So why would Moth tell you to make yourself useful with that?”
“Because Moth doesn’t waste tests.” I glance at the clipped invoice beneath the manifest. “And because if someone wants to touch the pipeline without getting close enough to lose a hand, this is where they’d start.
Supply, not product. Packaging, not chemistry.
Little numbers nobody important wants to read. ”
“Except you.”
I huff a quiet breath. “Except me.”
Tally steps closer but doesn’t crowd me. “Looks clean?”
“Cleaner than Rogue records.” I tap the corner of the page. “Obsidian actually tracks custody properly. Supplier to storage, storage to staging, staging to route. The Rogues would have three men swearing they remembered and one receipt with beer spilled on it.”
“That sounds about right.”
“Most of this is fine,” I say, though my voice slows as my eyes catch on the route note in Saint’s handwriting.
“Glass count matches one batch movement. Droppers match projected vials. Fuel charges are normal for the distance. Vehicle rotation makes sense if they’re trying to avoid pattern recognition. ”
Tally watches my finger stop. “But?”
I don’t answer right away as I flip back one page, then forward again, the faint smell of smoke and leather rising from the file as the papers shift under my hands. “But this route adjustment doesn’t belong with this supply number,” I say quietly.
Tally’s brows pull together. “Explain it like I don’t spend my days making sure grown men eat vegetables.”
“The packaging order is too high for the listed movement, but the stabilizer quantity doesn’t rise with it.
That means either someone over-ordered vials for no reason, under-logged product, or moved the route note to make a small mismatch look administrative.
” I look up at her. “Canon used to do that.”
Her expression sharpens. “Your father?”
“His people.” I look back down, my stomach tightening. “It’s a small distortion. Nothing worth starting a war over if it’s caught, but enough to see who notices. Enough to test whether a lane is soft.”
Tally goes quiet beside me and I trace the number again, already knowing what I’ll find.
“This isn’t a mistake,” I say. “It’s a feeler. I think someone wants to know whether Obsidian watches the little numbers or only the big ones.”
“And you know this because?”
“Because I watched Canon’s people do it when I was nineteen.
” I look down at the file again, throat tight with the old, ugly memory of that meeting room and the men arguing over a tactic I’d already understood before anyone thought to ask me.
“They ignored me afterward, so I read the notes while they congratulated each other.”
Tally is quiet long enough that I look up.