Chapter 37
ROGUE
Renner and Vi don't let go of each other, but the shaking eases.
The grip loosens into something steadier.
He pulls back just far enough to look at her face, both hands on her shoulders now, and he says her name again.
She laughs, surprised, and wipes her face with the heel of her hand.
He reaches up and does the same to his own face.
They're both a mess and neither of them cares.
I should keep watching the door. That's my job. The door, the windows, his hands.
But somewhere in the last few minutes, I stopped being the man holding the perimeter and turned into a man watching a father get his daughter back. The first one keeps his eyes on the door. The second one can't look away.
I had a father once, too.
A good one. An honest one, the kind of honest that's almost a handicap, the kind that won't cut a corner even when cutting it is the only thing that'll save him.
I looked up to him the way you look up to someone before you're old enough to see the cost of how they live.
He worked hard. He played it straight. And when the same people who hollowed out this whole city came for what he'd built, he found out what playing it straight is worth when the other side doesn't play fair.
They took everything from my father, and there was nowhere for him to turn.
No honest cop, no clean judge, no court that hadn't already been bought.
I watched a good man stand in the wreckage of everything he'd done right and have no recourse at all.
I watched it humiliate him. That's the part that's never stopped grating on me like fucking barbed wire. It’s not that he lost but that losing made him small, and he'd never been small a day in his life until then.
I wanted him to fight. God, I wanted it.
I was young and angry, and I begged him to make them bleed for it, to make noise, to make it cost them something.
And he looked at me, tired down to the bone, and said no.
Said you can't beat people like that, Son, you can only survive them. He said it like surviving was enough.
It wasn't enough. Not for me.
We said things, that last time. Hard things. The kind you don't get to take back, and then, because of how it all went, I never got the chance to take them back anyway.
And now I'm standing in a dead building at dawn watching Renner, a man who got hit by the town’s corruption and did the opposite.
He didn't fold. He built a case in the dark, then let the whole world think he was dead rather than quit so that eventually his own daughter had to claw her way across a ruined city to find out he was still breathing.
Renner is the man I wanted my father to be.
That's what's been coming loose in my chest since we walked in.
Not just grief that I'll never get what Vi's getting right now.
Something meaner and more honest underneath it: I've spent years furious at a man for not being like the one standing in front of me.
I'm only now seeing how much of my fury was really me just missing him. My dad.
I breathe through it. I put it back where it lives. I've had a lot of practice.
Sting's voice comes from the doorway, flat and low.
"Street's clear. Nothing moving," he tells Armen and me.
“Good.”
"One other thing,” he says quietly, to avoid interfering with the reunion, “a messenger came through from the Rot. Kade says it's done. Fischer's been handed off, confirmed. And the spy's gone, hasn't surfaced anywhere since the trade. Like he was never here."
"Okay. Thanks,” I say, as Sting heads back out.
So that's that. The trade's closed. Fischer's somewhere I don't have to think about, paying a bill he ran up a long time ago. Vi got her father. Everybody got what the deal promised.
And I still don't like it.
Because the spy's gone. Gone-gone, never-coming-back-gone, vanished, and I never figured out where I knew him from. A man walks into my building, hands me the exact thing that turns Vi’s world upside down, and evaporates without ever once revealing who sent him or why he made it so easy.
People don't do you favors that big for free.
Somewhere there's a price tag I still can't see, and the fact that everyone in this room feels like they just won is what worries me most.
I set it aside. It can wait. It has to, because across the room, Renner has gone still in a new way, not the wariness from before, something more deliberate.
He's looking at the documents stacked on his table, then at Vi, then, for the first time since we came in, he lets his eyes travel to me and Armen like he’s measuring. Deciding.
He guides Vi to one of the two chairs and lowers himself into the other, slow, like a man whose body hasn’t moved much in recent years.
He folds his hands on the table over the piles of paper he's been collecting for this moment, for the day someone finally walked through that door who could do something with it.
"Please sit," he says. His voice is steady now, and quiet, and underneath it, there's the weight of a man about to say something he’s been carrying around for a long time. "All of you. There's a great deal you don't know yet."
Vi sits. Her hands are flat on the table, braced.
I stay on my feet, my back to the wall, where I can see the door.
And I listen.