Chapter 47
VI
He doesn't say anything right away.
So we stand there a while, the two of us, looking out at the gray.
"You ran that room," he finally says.
"I did."
"I want to be sure you noticed."
I look at him. "I did. Of course I did."
He nods slowly, his eyes still on the window.
In profile, he's all hard lines, the jaw, the set of his mouth, the stillness he wears like it's part of his body.
Most people in the Rot are careful around Armen and I understand why.
He's the one who decides things. He's the one nobody pushes. I’ve seen him angry twice, and both times it showed as a man getting quieter, not louder. Somehow, that’s even worse.
I've seen a lot of Armen. His control, his command, the way people arrange themselves around him without him having to ask. What I've almost never seen is what's underneath it.
I'm about to see it now.
"When you came here," he says, "I had you figured for someone we'd be protecting.
A problem to keep alive until she stopped being our problem.
" He says it flat, no apology in it, just the truth as he saw it then.
"I'm good at reading people. It's the thing I do better than anything else. And I read you wrong."
"That's practically a love letter, coming from you."
The corner of his mouth moves, and that's the first crack. Armen's control is a thing he keeps level, almost all the time, in every room. And right now, standing at this window, it isn't level.
I’m loving that.
"Here's the part I don't say out loud," he goes on, and I go still, because Armen prefacing anything with that is like the ground shifting under me.
"I run things. The Rot, the guys, every piece of this.
Not because I love being in charge. Because there was a time I couldn't control a single thing that happened to me or to the people I cared about, and I swore I'd never be in that spot again.
So I built a place where I decide. Where nothing happens that I didn't see coming.
" He turns and looks at me, finally, full on.
"And then you walked in. And from the first week, you were the one thing I couldn't run.
I'd plan around you and you'd do something else.
I'd decide how a thing should go and you'd blow it up. It drove me out of my mind."
"I remember," I say softly. "You hated me a little."
"I did not hate you." His voice drops. "That was the problem. I couldn't control how much I didn't hate you."
For a second, I forget how to breathe.
This is the thing he keeps locked down. Not anger, not some dark secret. This. A man who organized his entire life around never being at anyone's mercy, telling me I'm the one thing he can't manage and never could.
"And just now," he says, "in that room, watching you run it — watching you not need me to run it — I felt the same thing I felt the first week.
That I can't control you. That I can't control what you do to me.
" He shakes his head, slow. "The difference is, this time I'm not fighting it. This time I watched you take that room and all I could think was, there she is. Vi’s the woman I didn't see coming. "
I've been undressed by this man. I've been held down by him, taken apart by him, put back together by him. And none of it, not one second of it, was as naked as Armen is right now, standing fully clothed at a window with his control finally switched off.
I reach up and put my hand against the side of his face, the way he's done to me so many times, and for once, I'm the steady one and he's the one who leans into it.
"I see you," I tell him. "All the way down. And I'm not looking away."
Something moves through him, and he closes his eyes, just for a moment, this enormous controlled man letting me hold his face at a dirty window in a dead mall.
I think about how many people have stood in front of Armen and never once seen what I'm seeing right now.
I don't take it lightly. It's more intimate than anything we've ever done with our clothes off, and we both know it.
"I'm not going anywhere," I say. "I already chose. In that room with my father, I chose this. I chose you."
"I know. I watched you do it." A pause, and then, quiet: "I'll spend a long time being grateful for that."
We stand there awhile longer, his forehead coming down to rest against mine, neither of us in a hurry to move. Outside, it's the same gray morning over the same dead loading dock. Nothing out there has changed.
Everything in here has.
Eventually he straightens, and I watch him gather his control back up and put it into place, but it's different now. I've seen behind it. He knows I've seen behind it. That door doesn't fully close again, and from the look on his face, he's all right with that.
"Rogue's waiting to take you to Alice," he says.
"Cool. I’m ready."
"Go find the name, Vi." And there it is, the steel sliding back under the voice, but warmer than it used to be when it points at me. "Then we go take it to them."
I push off the window. There's a firm to crack, a ceiling to drag into the light, a father’s name to clear, and a city to answer for.
But I take one more second first, and just look at him.