Chapter 24
Oisín
I don’t know how much time has passed by the time they put the screen in front of me.
It stretches between questions, snaps around pain, disappears in gray patches when my head drops forward, and comes back all at once when someone grips my hair or slaps my face hard enough to drag me out of whatever shallow darkness my body keeps trying to fall into.
The room has narrowed to light, concrete, blood, metal, and the chair holding me upright because my own strength is long gone.
My left eye is swelling badly enough that the room tilts if I try to look through it.
Everything on that side has gone blurred and heavy, skin pulled tight around the socket where Rook’s fist landed too many times for me to remember which hit started the damage.
My lip is split. My ribs feel like each breath is being dragged over something sharp, though I don’t think anything is broken.
Canon has been careful about that, or maybe Rook has.
Bruises heal cleaner than fractures. Cuts can be explained away if they aren’t too deep.
Pain can be inflicted with almost endless variety before the body crosses a line it can’t be dragged back from, and the Rogues know exactly where that line is because they have always understood cruelty better than mercy.
My forearm burns where the knife opened skin in shallow, parallel lines. Blood has dried in streaks toward my wrist, sticky under the leather strap, and each time my fingers twitch, the cuts pull open enough to remind me they’re there. There are more than there were before.
Someone threw water on me when my head stayed down too long, soaking through my shirt, mixing with blood, and leaving me shivering beneath the yellow workshop lights while Canon watched with the disappointed patience of a man waiting for faulty equipment to start working again.
He hasn’t asked a question in a while, and that frightens me more than the questions did.
Rook had dragged a metal cart across the concrete, the wheels shrieking loud enough to make me flinch before I can stop myself.
A laptop sits on top with a cable running from it to a small black receiver.
He sets it beyond reach and flips the screen open.
Blue-white light hits my face and turns the room behind it into shadow, making Canon’s expression harder to read and Varina’s easier.
Canon steps beside the cart and folds his arms. “Wake up.”
I try to lift my head, but my neck won’t cooperate. Rook solves the problem by catching my hair and yanking until pain tears along my scalp and my spine arches against the chair. I choke on a sound I don’t want to make, and Canon’s mouth curves as if the sound confirms something he already knew.
“There you are,” he says. “Still with us.”
My mouth tastes like blood and old fear. “Unfortunately.”
Rook laughs under his breath. “Still cute.”
Canon doesn’t laugh. He looks at the screen, then at me. “I thought you might like to see what usefulness looks like when it finally serves the family that made you.”
The laptop feed stutters, then clears into grainy night footage of a road cut between two industrial buildings.
It takes my mind several seconds to understand what I’m seeing because fear keeps trying to reject the shape of it.
Then the angle shifts, and the eastern corridor arranges itself on the screen at the support junction, the place I tried to protect with old timing and partial truths.
Rogues are already moving along the outer edge of the road, two near the fence, a van tucked behind the building. I whisper no before I can stop myself, and Canon tilts his head like he has been waiting for the exact shape of that sound.
“You see, that’s always been your problem.
” He pulls a chair closer and sits beside the cart like we’re reviewing accounts together, like this is one more ledger he expects me to correct.
“You think refusing reality changes it. You were always going to give us something. Men like you do. There’s no shame in being what you are. ”
I look at him through the blur of my bad eye. “There’s shame in being you.”
Rook hits me across the mouth before Canon can answer. My head snaps sideways, pain bursting through my lip, and blood spills fresh over my tongue.
Canon sighs. “Don’t mistake a little defiance for strength. You already gave us what we needed.”
The screen flickers as one of the Rogue men on the feed lifts a hand, signaling someone out of frame.
A vehicle passes in the distance, just some unlucky civilian moving through a road that has no idea it’s become part of a war.
I search the image desperately for anything that tells me Saint knows.
A counter-position. A wrong shadow. A hint of Obsidian waiting where Canon doesn’t expect them.
The feed is too grainy, though, fear making every dark shape look alike.
“And you see, while you were giving us this, I forgot to mention… Saint isn’t coming for you. None of Obsidian is. We’re not stupid, son. We fixed what we needed to, to ensure that they’d think you chose this.”
I’m sure Saint knows I wouldn’t do that but that doesn’t change the truth.
I don’t know if anyone is coming and I don’t know what Saint actually thinks.
Maybe Sol got to him first. Maybe Saint is standing in the clubhouse right now with that cold, empty look on his face, letting my absence become proof because proof is easier than faith.
Maybe he thinks the silence in his office was the last answer either of us needed.
I close my eyes because the screen hurts worse than the light. Rook grips my jaw and turns my face back toward it, fingers pressing into bruises with enough force to make my stomach roll.
“Watch,” he says.
I open them because I have no choice and the feed jumps again, refocusing on the road.
Canon watches me watch it. “There’s the face.”
“What face?” Rook asks.
“The one he makes when he finally understands he isn’t special.
” Canon leans back, satisfaction settling into him.
“Obsidian doesn’t love you, Oisín. Saint doesn’t love you.
He loves control, and you gave him a prettier version of it.
After tonight, he’ll realize you were just a leak wrapped in a ring. ”
I force myself to breathe through the pain in my ribs. “You don’t know him.”
“I know men like him better than you do.”
“No,” I say, and the word barely reaches past the blood in my mouth. “You know men like you.”
Canon’s face tightens, and Rook’s fist curls, but Canon lifts one hand before he can strike. “Leave that one. I want him awake for the strike.”
The side door opens before Rook can answer.
Varina comes in with two men behind her—I’m not even sure when she left, a phone in one hand and her hair pulled back so tightly it makes her face look sharper.
She stops when she sees the screen. Her gaze cuts to the live feed, then to me, moving over my swollen face and the blood drying beneath my chin, and I watch her try to make her horror into anger because anger has always been easier for her than grief.
“You look terrible,” she says.
A laugh drags out of me before I can stop it, then turns into a cough that makes my ribs flare so badly the room spots black at the edges. “You always did know what to say.”
Her mouth trembles for half a second before hardening. “All you had to do was obey.”
“All I had to do,” I repeat.
Varina’s eyes flash. “Yes. You could have listened. You could have stayed where you were supposed to stay. You could have remembered what family means instead of letting Saint Masters put a ring on your finger and turn you against your own blood.”
I pull against the restraints without meaning to, and pain answers from every direction. “This is what family means to you?”
“This is what survival means.”
“No,” I say, and the word comes out stronger than I feel. “This is what he means.”
Canon’s eyes move toward her. Varina sees the look and bristles under it, anger finding her before the shame. “You think Obsidian is different?” she asks. “You think Saint is different because he kisses the bruises after he puts them there?”
Something ugly moves through my chest, hot enough to cut through exhaustion. “He would never have wanted you.”
A slap comes fast across my face, her palm cracking across my already-swollen cheek, and pain floods my eye until the room blurs white.
My head turns with the force of it, and for a second I can’t hear anything but the ringing in my skull and the wet sound of my own breathing.
When I look back, she is breathing hard, and Canon is smiling faintly because he knows exactly where that sentence landed.
Varina steps closer. “What happened to the boy who listened?”
My throat tightens. There are tears again, and I hate that my body keeps producing softness for people who have never deserved it. “He learned he was never wanted by anyone in his family.”
“Saint doesn’t want you, either,” she muses.
“He wants to own you. He put a ring on you because it pissed Dad off. He calls you husband because it makes his club look strong. He drags you around in his cut because men like him like everyone knowing what belongs to them. But after tonight?” She leans closer, voice low and shaking now, cruel because she needs it to be true.
“After tonight, he’ll realize you’re just a fucking prop. ”
The screen glows beside us while Rogues continue moving into position. I close my hand as much as the strap allows until the ring bites into swollen skin.
“You don’t believe that,” I whisper.
Varina’s expression twists. “I believe what I see.”
“Then look at me.”
She doesn’t.
“Varina,” I say, and my voice breaks in the middle of her name. “Look at me.”
She does, finally, and I let her see everything. The blood, the tears, the swollen eye, the shaking I cannot stop, the family she says I betrayed standing around the room where they tied me down and carved pieces from me.
Rook scoffs from behind Canon. “Jesus, he’s still doing it.”
Canon looks amused. “Doing what?”
“Making everybody feel bad because he’s soft.”
Canon’s smile thins. “That was always his only talent.”
Varina looks away from me again, and this time something in me gives up on the part of her I kept trying to reach.
Canon stands and checks the screen. “Almost time.”
On the feed, one Rogue lifts a hand and crouches lower behind the van. The road remains empty for several seconds, then headlights appear at the far edge of the image.
My heart stops because I know the shape of the vehicle even through grainy footage.
One of the escort trucks. Maybe not the primary product vehicle, maybe a decoy, maybe a support pass that has already been adjusted because Moth and Saint knew enough to move the heart of the route.
I try to tell myself that but the screen shows Rogues waiting with guns, and the fragments in their hands came from my mouth.
Canon smiles. “Watch closely.”
I strain against the straps so hard the leather cuts deeper into my wrists. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Of course I do.”
“Canon, please.”
“You should have thought of that before you chose them,” he says.
The escort truck rolls closer on the feed, and my breathing turns ragged enough to make every inhale a fresh punishment.
The Rogues on the screen shift, one man moving too early, another signaling him down.
I lean forward as much as the straps allow, trying to see beyond the frame, trying to find the trap Saint must have built, the sign that he knew, the proof that what they pulled from me was not enough.
The first shot on the feed is silent. The laptop speakers lag half a second before the sound comes through, nothing like real gunfire and somehow worse because it makes the violence feel far away from my ability to affect it.
Muzzle flashes bloom along the fence. The escort truck swerves.
Men move in the grainy dark. Someone in the room behind me laughs, and that sound breaks something open in my chest.
The feed shifts violently as whoever holds the camera moves.
The image catches a second vehicle cutting in from the side, headlights off until the last second.
Obsidian, maybe. I can’t tell. The screen blurs, clears, then fills with movement I can’t parse.
Someone fires from behind the van. The escort truck’s side door opens, and a figure leans out with a weapon.
Canon’s smile fades by a fraction.
“What?” Rook asks.
The feed jolts again. A Rogue near the fence goes down. Another turns too late. The camera swings toward the road, catching a flash of black vehicles where there shouldn’t be any. Obsidian had moved.
Saint knew, or he guessed, or he trusted enough of what I gave him before I was taken to build around what they might pull from me after.
Canon’s face goes hard. “Turn it off.”
Rook grabs the laptop, but for one beautiful second before he shuts it, I see the shape of the trap closing. Rogues scramble where they expected Obsidian to bleed. Vehicles cut in from the wrong angle, each of the fragments they beat out of me pointing them to their death rather than their victory.
Canon turns on me slowly, whatever satisfaction he carried into the room stripped down to something meaner. “What did you tell them?”
I almost laugh. It hurts too much, so I smile instead. Blood pulls at the split in my lip. “Enough.”
Rook hits me for that too, and the world fractures around the impact. This time, I don’t come back quickly. I drift somewhere just beneath the room, hearing voices through water, feeling pain as light rather than shape.
Canon’s voice comes close again, breaking through the haze. “If he comes for you, I’ll make him watch what you became.”
I force my swollen eye open as much as it will go and breathe through the hurt. “He already knows,” I whisper.
Canon leans closer. “Knows what?”
My voice barely reaches him, but it reaches. “What I am.”