Chapter 55
VI
I can't find Sting anywhere.
The other two I can always find. But Sting, when he’s working through something, goes someplace even the Rot can't see him, and tonight, after the best week any of us has had in longer than I can remember, he's nowhere. Not the ops room. Not his quarters. Not the hub.
It's Armen who finally tells me. "Roof," he says, like it's obvious, like everybody but me knew Sting had a place up there. "East stairwell, all the way to the top. It's where he goes when he doesn't want to be found." He gives me a look. "You've never been up there."
"Didn't know there was an up there."
"There's an up there."
The top of the east stairwell ends at a heavy door that sticks, which I shove through into open air. My first thought is that nobody has loved this place in a very long time.
It's a disaster. Gravel and grit and the rusted bones of old machinery that quit working before I was born.
Puddles that never fully dry. Bird droppings streaked over everything, white and ancient, because the pigeons have run this roof for years and have no plans to give it back.
The wind comes across it hard and cold, straight off the dead city.
I understand immediately why nobody comes up here.
And why Sting does.
He's at the far edge, in the one corner that looks lived-in—a folding chair gone soft with rust, a milk crate, a folded blanket on top of it like he keeps it for this.
His spot. Of course he has a spot nobody knows about.
It's the most Sting thing ever. He doesn't turn when I come up behind him. He knows my step by now.
He's looking out at Rothwell, all those dark blocks, the ruin Lydia Vance made and walked away from, and he's so still he could be part of the building.
"You disappeared," I say.
"Needed air."
I come up beside him. I don't push. I learned that from him, actually, how to stand next to somebody and let the quiet do the work. So I wait.
It takes a long time. The wind moves. Below us, the city sits there being dead.
"My mother," he says finally.
He doesn't have to explain. I know about his mother and Rothwell Elder Care and all the years she gave to that nursing home, loving her job and her patients.
It came to an end the day the funding got pulled and the doors closed.
Then her health insurance went bye-bye. I know about the insulin she skipped and stretched because the money wasn't there, and how her heart finally gave out under it all.
He told me this a while ago, in pieces, the way Sting tells a story.
"Took Lydia Vance down today," he says, still looking out at the dead city, "and the whole time, the only thing in my head was her. My mother. Who died thinking she just had shitty luck."
His jaw works. "Right to the end, she figured she'd gotten unlucky.
Wrong place, wrong time. She never knew there was a person behind it.
A decision. A business decision that said her life was worth less than somebody's profit.
She died angry at the wrong things. Because nobody ever gave her the right ones. "
I don't say I'm sorry. Sorry is what you say to strangers. Instead, I move into him and put my hand flat over his heart, the way these men have done for me more times than I can count, and hold it there.
"I've carried my mother's bad luck for years, knowing it wasn't luck and not being able to do a damn thing about it. This week, I finally did something about it. Because of you."
His voice has gone rough. "We took her down and all I could think about was my mother, who never even got to know who to hate.
" He covers my hand on his chest with his own, big and warm and not quite steady, which from Sting is like watching a wall come down.
"You did that. You put the name to it. The one thing nobody ever did for her, you did.
I've watched you turn into something nobody saw coming, and today you got my mother the one thing she never had.”
He goes quiet, and under my palm I feel him decide something.
"I love you."
Three words, flat and precise, the way Sting says anything that matters. No buildup. No speech. Just the facts.
"I've known it since the night I told you about your father. I wanted to say it then and couldn't," he says. "I don't say things I can't take back. So I waited until I was sure." His hand presses mine harder against his chest. "I'm sure, Vi."
I laugh and my eyes spill over at the same time. Only Sting would treat loving me like something that needed proof before he'd say it out loud.
"I love you too.” I say. “Actually, I love all of you. Just don’t tell anyone, okay?” I laugh.
Then he kisses me.
It's nothing like the way Sting usually touches me.
Normally, he's the controlled one, the one who holds me still and sets the pace and gives me as much as he decides to, ferocious and precise and never once unsteady.
Not now. Now, he kisses me like the wall's already down and there's no point pretending otherwise.
His hands come up to my face, then my hair, then pull me to him.
"Vi," he says against my mouth. Just my name.
He makes a low sound in his chest, and then the careful, contained man I know is gone.
He pulls the blanket off the crate and drags me down onto it with him, the cold of the roof at my back and the heat of him over me.
He strips my shirt off and gets his mouth on my breasts, sucking a nipple hard while his hands drag down my body and shove my pants off my hips, hands everywhere at once, like he can't decide which part of me he needs first.
So I slow him down. I push him onto his back, get him out of his shirt, open his belt, and free his cock, and when I wrap my hand around it, he groans, thick and helpless, his head dropping back against the blanket.
He's hard as iron and already slick at the tip, and I stroke him slow, root to tip and back, watching the most controlled man in the Rot unravel by inches because for once, I'm the one with my hand on the throttle.
"Vi—" he groans.
"Let me," I tell him, and I slide down his body and take him in my mouth, as deep as I can, and the sound he makes is one I'll be hearing for weeks. I work him with my mouth and my hand until his fist is in my hair and his hips are lifting off the blanket. Right before he goes over his edge, he hauls me up his body so I’m straddling him.
"Need to be inside you," he growls. "Now."
He gets the rest of my clothes off fast. Reaching between us, I line the head of his cock up against my pussy.
I'm already soaked for him, and I sink down slow, taking him inch by inch until he's buried deep, both of us groaning at the fit.
His forehead meets mine and his hands lock on my hips hard enough to bruise.
Then I ride him. Slow and deep at first, grinding down on every stroke, his cock filling me so completely I lose my breath.
I watch his face the whole time, this man who never lets anyone see anything.
He drives up to meet every roll of my hips, harder now, deeper, his thumb finding my clit and working it in tight circles until I'm shaking.
"That's it," he rasps. "Just like that. Take it."
And I do. I take all of him, faster, in the wind blowing over the Rot, until the roof and the dead city drop away and there's nothing left but the wrecked, wide-open look on his face.
I come first, clenching down around him so hard he curses, and that's all it takes.
He drives up into me one last time and holds there, buried to the hilt, and comes with a sound I've never heard from him, pulsing hot inside me, his arms crushing me down against his chest as he shakes through every second of it.
And the quietest, hardest man in the Rot holds me a little tighter. I don’t say anything. I don’t have to.