Chapter 33
VI
It's barely morning when I shake Mara awake.
"Get up," I tell her. "We're going to talk to Rogue."
To her credit, she doesn't argue. She just looks at my face, reads whatever's written there, and finds her shoes.
The guys are in the ops room, all three of them, like they never went to bed, which knowing them, they probably didn't. Rogue's the first to look up when I come through the door with Mara on my heels and the photograph in my hand.
I don't bother with hello. "Where did this come from? All of it. Start to finish."
Rogue and Armen trade a look. I hate that look. It's the look that means how much do we tell her, and I am so far past being managed.
"Don't," I say. "Don't do the thing. I held it together last night so you wouldn't have to wonder if I could handle it. I handled it. Now talk."
Rogue nods, slow, and something in him settles, like he's been waiting for permission to stop softening it.
“To make the trade, I gave up where Fischer was hiding. They'd already sent the proof, that photo in your hand. Once we handed Fischer’s location, the spy gave us your dad’s and walked. That's the whole of it.”
The room goes quiet.
Nobody asked me to sign off on this. The guys made the call while I was on Mara's floor falling apart.
My hands never touched the decision. They did it for me.
So I can tell myself I'm clean all I want, but a man got handed to people who came for him in the dark, and somewhere at the bottom of this is me.
"Fischer didn't go easily."
It's Sting who says it from the corner, in that flat, even voice of his, the same voice he used weeks ago to lay Fischer's crimes out one page at a time. "When they came for him, he understood what it meant. He wasn't composed." A small pause. "He begged, actually. At the end."
And there it is. A cold little wave of something that might be guilt, washing right up over me. Because Fischer held the supply room door for me once when my hands were full. He made me coffee. He was nice.
But he begged.
No matter what he did to destroy Rothwell, there's a version of me that flinches at handing him over. That flinches at the thought of him begging.
For about four seconds.
Then I think about Rothwell Elder Care. Forty-two people put out of the only home they had left, some with nobody to come get them, because Fischer signed the paper that sent their nursing home money somewhere else.
I think about the Saturday market dying one booth at a time while men like Fischer got rich off the wreckage.
I think about my father, scrubbed off the face of the world, made to seem dead, while Fischer played Tommy the friendly supply guy and slept just fine.
Fuck that guy.
"Okay," I say, and my voice doesn't shake. "Okay. Good."
Mara's hand finds my shoulder. Rogue's watching me like he's bracing for me to break, and I don't, because I'm not going to.
Not over Fischer. I've got my proof. I've got my father's little paper boat sailing out of a photograph, and now, somewhere on the other side of this dead city, I've got a place where he's waiting.
He's real. He's findable.
And I am absolutely, bone-deep terrified, because there's nothing left between me and the one thing I stopped letting myself want.
Just a door somewhere, and my father behind it.