Chapter 4
STING
This woman, this “friend” of Vi’s, has seen the safe house.
She knows its location, its access point, the route we took from the Rot to get here.
She’s seen the club. She watched us enter and watched us leave, which means she knows we use it, which means she can place three high-level Rotters at an establishment that depends on discretion like it’s life or death.
That’s currency in our world.
She’s figured out by now that Vi is bound to us guys.
She might not call it that, but she knows there’s a commitment, a relationship of sorts, even if it’s not one she understands.
I mean hell, she heard as much from the big-mouthed guard outside the Rot and now, she’s sitting in our safehouse room watching the four of us, confirming every detail with her own eyes.
So… we’ve got location, association, and hierarchy at stake. Three categories of information that do not leave this room.
Ever.
I lay it out in the corner with Armen and Rogue standing close enough to hear me without the women catching the words. I keep my voice flat, my comments brief. Everything about our carefully constructed lives, everything we’ve fought so hard for, is at stake.
“She’s a security breach,” I say. “Every minute she’s alive and uncontained, the exposure window widens.
She knows where we sleep when we’re outside the Rot.
She can identify us. She can describe the club’s location to anyone who asks.
One conversation with the wrong person and we lose this safe house, the club is in jeopardy, and we put a target on Vi that we can’t control. ”
Armen listens like he always does. That’s the difference between us. I arrive at the conclusion and deliver it. He often arrives at the same conclusion but waits to see if anyone else gets there before he speaks. The man has infinite patience.
“You’re talking about eliminating her,” he says. Not accusatory. Just clarifying.
“I’m identifying the problem. Now, I’d like to talk about solutions.”
“Go on.”
“We remove her. Permanently. Clean. No trace.” I hold up a second finger. “Or we dump her outside with a warning and hope she’s smart enough to stay gone. And smart enough to keep her mouth shut.”
Armen rubs his chin. Not disagreement, processing. “Option one is off the table.”
“Why?”
“Because Vi would never forgive us. And an uncooperative Vi inside the Rot is a bigger liability than one woman outside it.”
Fuck all. He’s right. I know he’s right. That doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.
“With option one, a body creates questions, and that can mean new problems. But option two isn’t clean either,” Armen continues.
“She’d be a loose end. If she talks to anyone about anything, we don’t control the narrative.
And if she disappears and someone comes looking for her, like her mother again, we’ve doubled the problem instead of solving it. ”
Armen’s boxing out my options with the same precision I used to present them, which I respect, even though it sucks.
I feel a headache circling like a hungry vulture. Goddamn, when I woke up this morning, I wasn’t expecting any bullshit like this.
Rogue’s arms are crossed, his weight on one leg. His head is angled toward the conversation but his eyes keep drifting to the two women on the mattress. He’s watching them the way he watches everything, with an ease that hides how much he’s actually taking in.
“So what,” he scoffs, “she just lives with us now?”
The question lands and sits there.
I don’t want to answer it because every answer is wrong.
Killing her is clean but costs us Vi. Dumping her is fast but leaves a live wire we can’t monitor.
And keeping her, hell, keeping her means absorbing another person into an arrangement that was already more complicated than we ever planned for.
Three Rotters. One woman. That is our makeup. Tight. Defined. Every variable accounted for.
And now, out of nowhere, there’s a fifth element sitting on the mattress, wrapped in our blanket, drinking our water, holding our woman’s hand with a grip that says I’m not letting go and you can’t make me.
“She can’t live with us,” I say. “But I suppose she could live inside the Rot. Under supervision. We contain the information by containing the source.”
Rogue’s eyebrows lift a fraction. “You want to bring a civilian into the Rot. A girl who hasn’t entered via the Hunt?”
“I want to bring a known quantity into the Rot. She’s already been circling the place.
She’s already been talking to guards. If she’s inside, we control what she sees, who she talks to, and where she goes.
If she’s outside, we control nothing. And fuck it, we always need more able bodies.
The Hunt as a recruiting tool only brings in so many workers. ”
Armen is thinking, his arms crossed and pulled in tight. My guess is, he’s close to a decision he isn’t entirely happy about.
“Vi will want this,” he says.
“Vi’s wants are not a priority.”
“But her cooperation is,” he replies. “And right now, the fastest way to lose it is to take that woman away from her.”
Rogue snorts. “You talk about her like she’s a pet.”
I side-eye him and he chuckles. “All right,” I say. “She stays, even though it feels like extortion. But the terms are ours.”
Armen holds my gaze, then nods. Rogue offers a silent agreement, or at least the absence of objection. We’ve chosen the least bad option from a bucket of even worse options.
It’s done.
Except it isn’t because while the operational problem is solved, underneath is another. There’s always another fucking problem.
The way Vi looked at her.
When that door opened and the woman was standing there, wrecked, filthy, and half-starved, Vi’s face did something I haven’t seen it do once in the weeks since she came to us.
It wasn’t the anger I’m used to, not the snarky bravado she uses when she’s unsure of herself.
Not the careful, measured acceptance she’s learned to wear inside the Rot, nor the heat that surfaces when my hands are on her.
What I saw that I hadn’t before, was relief. Pure, uncut, full-body relief. The kind that changes someone’s face, the kind you can’t fake.
She looked at Mara like she was air. Like she could finally hope for some happiness and some sanity in her life that isn’t just about survival or some transaction.
It seems the weeks Vi’s spent with us, the nights where she stopped fighting and started reaching for us, were just things she’s endured.
Not chosen. Endured. That shit does not feel good.
And Mara is proof of that. Because you don’t look at someone with that much relief unless everything else in your life is shit.
This shouldn’t bother me. Shouldn’t.
I don’t operate on approval. I don’t need Vi to want this arrangement, but I do need her to survive it. Whether she looks at me with heat or hatred is irrelevant to whether she’s breathing tomorrow.
That’s what I tell myself. I almost believe it.
Almost. Except for the image I can’t shake, that of Vi’s face when she pulled that woman against her chest. Eyes closed. Arms locked. Every wall she’d built inside the Rot collapsing in a single second because someone from before showed up.
Is that all it takes?
Goddammit, I’ve touched her. I’ve held her. I’ve pressed her against walls and pulled sounds out of her she’d never admit to in the light of day.
She’s never once had that look on her face.
I turn back to the mattress. Vi’s watching me, her hand locked in Mara’s, chin up, shoulders back—and everything about her posture says Try to take this from me.