Chapter 2
VI
We bring Mara in. Behind her, Armen shuts the door and locks it, two bolts, one after the other, the sound heavy and serious in the small room.
Mara doesn’t flinch. She’s past flinching.
Rogue hands her a blanket without being asked.
I watch her register the gesture, the slight widening of her eyes, the half-second delay before she accepts it with a nod, as if that’s all she can muster in thanks.
She wraps it around her shoulders and helps herself to the edge of the mattress with her knees drawn up.
For a moment, she looks so small inside the fabric that my throat clogs with a lump.
She’s no longer my kick-ass, ball-busting bestie, but something I don’t know.
I don’t bother with introductions. They are out of place in my new world.
I take a seat next to her, close enough that our legs touch. I need the contact, that’s how afraid I am they’re going to kick her out on her ass.
Like I could stop them.
Armen hands her a water bottle, and I whisper a thanks his way in case Mara can’t or won’t.
She holds it in both hands like something precious and drinks in small, careful sips, the way you drink when you know good water is hard to come by and something to be rationed, not gulped down, no matter how badly you want it.
The guys settle into position. Not sitting.
None of them sit. Armen stands near the door, arms crossed, expression flat.
Rogue leans against the far wall with his ankles crossed, head tilted, studying Mara with an openness that could pass for either friendly or lethal depending on what side of him you’re on.
Sting stays on his feet near the window, weight balanced, shoulders square. Still.
Three points of a triangle. Mara and me at the center.
I can feel the load, the pressure of their attention.
Not so much directed at me but at Mara. The new variable.
The unknown quantity sitting on their mattress, drinking their water, potentially aware of things about their operation that nobody outside this room is supposed to know.
It’s not enough that I can vouch for her, I realize.
Until she proves herself as a trustworthy entity, they will assume she’s trouble, no matter what I say.
Which irritates the shit out of me.
I ignore them and turn to Mara. “Tell me everything,” I say.
She doesn’t start from the beginning. She starts from the middle, the way people do when they’ve been carrying something too long, and it just spills out like verbal diarrhea.
She leads with guilt.
Our fight. Our last conversation a year or so ago, before I entered the Hunt.
When she said my father was part of the corruption that killed this city, and I said she didn’t know what she was fucking talking about.
She said I was being an idiot, and I told her she was being a bitch.
Standard Mara-Vi detonation. Loud, ugly, both of us saying the thing calculated to land hard and with maximum damage.
We’d done it before, and always recovered.
Except this time it was different. She’d talked shit about my father, pushing us past the point of no return. Too many ugly words said. Our lifelong friendship ended right there on a dime.
“I thought you were dead,” she says, eyes fixed on the water bottle like she’s afraid to look directly at me.
Or maybe it’s just shame coupled with the uncertainty of whether forgiveness is coming her way.
“For a while I was sure you were dead. And I kept thinking the last thing I said to you was that your father deserved what happened to him.”
It still stings, after all this time. But things are different now.
“Mara—”
“Don’t.” She shakes her head. “Don’t tell me you forgive me. Don’t tell me to just forget about it. I deserve the guilt I’ve lived with. Am still living with.”
She fills me in piece by piece. After I vanished, she tried the normal routes. Called people, asked around, showed up at places I used to hang out. Nobody knew anything. Nobody wanted to. These days, Rothwell makes people go quiet.
So she came looking on her own.
She doesn’t give me a clear timeline and I don’t push for one. The details come in bits and pieces, like her sleeping in the dead zone outside the Rot’s footprint, the area that nobody claims, where you can camp out if you’re lucky and can put up with the misery.
She ate what she found, and avoided people when she could, running when she couldn’t.
I don’t mention her mother’s visit to the Rot, not yet.
“There was a man,” she says. “Just outside. Older guy, scar on his chin. Wouldn’t give me his name.”
I know the type. The low-level Rotters who patrol the edges. They’re not important enough to make decisions but important enough to know things. Lots of things.
“I described you to him,” Mara says. “And something in his face changed. Like he knew exactly who I was talking about but wasn’t sure he should say so.”
She pauses. Takes another sip. “He told me you were alive. And that you were bound.”
The word sits differently in Mara’s mouth than it does in my new world. Here, bound means claimed, protected. A specific arrangement between people, with rules and a kind of permanence that most in the Rot would kill for.
But in Mara’s voice, stripped of that context, it just sounds like a leash. A prison. A creepy arrangement I could not possibly have consented to.
I don’t correct her. Not yet.
Her eyes widen. “So the guy told me if I went deeper, I’d either find you or I’d disappear, but that most people who go looking for someone disappear.”
“But you looked for me anyway.”
She stares at me. Really stares, past the surface, past the room, past the three men arranged around us like watch dogs. Her eyes are bloodshot and hollowed out, but underneath there’s the same stubborn, reckless, unbreakable friend I’ve known since we were kids.
“Of course I did. You know me.”
I have to look away for a second. Blink hard. Swallow. I do know her. But I still don’t understand why.
She describes tonight. She’d been circling closer for days, she says, learning the patterns, watching the exits, trying to figure out which faces came and went and which ones stayed.
She saw us leave the Rot. Three men and a woman, moving together in a way that made people step aside without being asked.
“I recognized your walk before I could see your face. Can you believe that? So crazy.”
The lump in my throat grows but I don’t want to cry, at least not right now.
She followed us from a distance, watching us enter the club, but was smart enough not to try to get in, herself.
After all, she might be reckless but she isn’t stupid.
She waited, sitting in the dark outside the building for hours, back against a wall, watching the door.
When we came out and headed here, she followed.
When the lights went off, she waited a while, then knocked.
She throws her hands up. “I didn’t have a plan.” This is not like Mara. The woman always has a plan or three, like a backup for her backup. “I just needed to find you.”
I take her hand, and she squeezes back hard until it hurts my fingers.
I want to be angry. Part of me tries, the part that’s still insulted by how she talked about my father, the part that knows how dangerous this stunt was, and the part that’s spent weeks watching how the Rot devours people whose luck has run out.
She could have been taken, followed by God knows what.
She walked into a territory run by men who don’t answer to anyone, and she did it with nothing but stubbornness and my name.
Things could have gone badly for her.
But she’s here. Shaking and real. And I don’t have enough room in me for anger and relief at the same time.
So relief wins, like it always does with Mara.
Armen hasn’t moved from the door. He’s watching, not Mara specifically, but everything happening in the room.
He’s got this gaze, one that takes in everything and saves it for when he needs it.
No doubt, he’ll eventually have questions that he’ll ask them when he’s ready. I know that much about him.
Rogue has shifted his weight twice, which I’ve learned, in his case, means interest.
And Sting hasn’t moved at all. He stands at the window perfectly still, like a statue, communicating the same thing he always does: I know what’s going on and I’m not telling you shit until I’m ready to.
The guys’ energy swirls around Mara and me while we do our own thing, reuniting and figuring out what the hell is going on with each other.
The guys on the other hand, they’re not hostile but they sure as hell are not welcoming, either. They’re working inside their heads, weighing risks and rewards and what the price of keeping Mara around versus getting rid of her might be.
She squeezes my hand again. She doesn’t know these guys—but she knows enough. Her future is in their hands, and I’m not part of whatever comes next.