Chapter 57
VI
There’s a knock on my door around seven. It’s not Sting’s knock. He knocks once, hard, like the door personally offended him. This knock is lighter. Playful. Two taps and a pause.
Rogue.
I open the door and he’s leaning against the frame, arms crossed, head tilted. Reading me. Behind the easygoing posture, his eyes are sharp. And sexy.
“Heard you and Sting had a moment,” he says.
“Is that what we’re calling it?”
“Armen’s word, not mine. I’d have called it a bloodbath but I wasn’t there.” He pauses. “Can I come in?”
I step back. He walks in, closes the door behind him, and sits on the edge of my bed like he belongs there, which he kind of does.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Everyone keeps asking me that today.”
“That’s because you look like shit.”
I almost laugh. “Thanks, Rogue. Really helpful.”
“I’m not here to be helpful. I’m here to make sure you’re not sitting in this room alone hating us.”
“Just one of you.”
“Fair.” He reaches out, takes my hand, and pulls me toward the bed until I’m standing between his knees.
His hands settle on my hips, light, not demanding, but just there.
“For what it’s worth Vi, he’s wrecked. I’ve never seen him like this.
He’s in the Skylight Room staring at the wall like it owes him money. ”
“Good.”
“Mean.”
“He earned it.”
Rogue looks up at me and his thumbs trace circles on my hipbones through my shirt. “Yeah,” he says. “He did. But he’s trying, Vi. In his own fucked-up way, he’s trying. That man doesn’t know how to do feelings. It’s not an excuse. It’s just the truth.”
“I know.”
“So don’t give up on him. On us. Okay?”
The way he says “us” makes me hurt. Not Sting. Not me and Sting. Us. The four of us. Like it’s one thing, one unit. One relationship with four people in it, and if one part breaks, the whole thing feels it.
“I’m not giving up,” I say. “I’m just… pissed. There’s a difference.”
“Big difference.” He grins, pulls me closer, and I go. End up in his lap, straddling him, his hands sliding up under my shirt to the bare skin of my waist. His palms are warm and his grip is sure. “There she is,” he murmurs. “My girl.”
I begin to melt in spite of myself. “Don’t start something we can’t finish. Mara could walk in any second.”
“Who says we can’t finish. And as for Mara, I’ll just tell her to hit the road.
” His mouth finds my neck, teeth grazing the spot below my ear that makes me lose track of any objections I might come up with, not that I have any.
His hands move up my ribs, thumbs brushing the undersides of my breasts. “I can be fast when I need to be.”
“You’re never fast.”
“Not true. I’m extremely fast when properly motivated.” His hand cups my breast and squeezes. His hips buck underneath me, pressing up, and he’s already hard. “See? Motivated.”
I laugh. Actually laugh. The first real one since this morning. His mouth is on my collarbone now, his other hand sliding down the back of my jeans, gripping my ass, pulling me tighter against him. I’m grinding into him before I make a conscious decision to.
“Rogue.”
“Yeah?”
“We don’t have time.”
“We have a little time.” His hand slides around from my ass to the front of my jeans, pops the button, and slips inside.
His fingers find me and I’m already wet because apparently, my body doesn’t care that I spent this morning in an emotional free fall.
His fingers know exactly what to do and where to do it.
“There,” he says against my neck. “Just let me do this. You need it.”
I do need it.
His fingers work me steady, two of them inside, his thumb circling my clit. I’m rocking against his hand, my face buried in his shoulder, making sounds I’d be embarrassed about if I had any pride left. He’s murmuring things against my hair, filthy, sweet things. “That’s it, baby.”
I come fast. Faster than I expect. It rolls through me, hot, sharp, my whole body clenching around his fingers while he holds me with his other arm. I bite his shoulder to keep from being loud and he makes a satisfied sound.
“Fast,” he says. “Told you.”
“Shut up.” I’m breathing hard and my face is still in his shoulder. He smells good. He always smells good. “What about you?”
“I’ll live.” He pulls his hand out of my jeans, buttons me back up, and kisses the top of my head.
“You’re too nice.”
“Don’t tell anyone. It’ll ruin my reputation.”
I climb off his lap. He stands, adjusts himself with zero shame, and grins at me one more time. “Don’t give up on us,” he says and then he’s gone.
I sit on the bed feeling loose and warm and a little less like the world is ending. That’s what Rogue does. He reminds me I’m alive. He reminds me that not everything has to be a crisis.
Ten minutes later, Mara walks in.
She’s got that look. The one she gets when she’s been thinking about something and needs to talk it through. She sits on her side of the bed, cross-legged, and starts fiddling with her hair.
“So Tommy asked about your papers again,” she says.
My stomach drops. “Oh? What did he ask?” I ask casually.
“We were just talking. He asked how you were doing and I said fine, you know, keeping busy. And then he said something about how it must be hard, not having the full picture. Like, not knowing how the story ends. And I was like, what do you mean? And he said, you know, Vi’s dad’s papers. The missing pieces.”
Missing pieces. The full picture. How the story ends.
I didn’t tell Mara about missing pieces. I told her something was off, a while back. Before I shut her out. She doesn’t know about the six-week gap. She doesn’t know about the last dated entry. She doesn’t know that Dad’s papers end clean in the middle of an investigation with no final page.
So she couldn’t have told Tommy about missing pieces because she doesn’t know there are missing pieces.
“What did you tell him?” I ask, careful, keeping my voice level.
“Nothing, really. I told him I didn’t know much about it. But, Vi…” She stops fiddling with her hair and looks at me. “It was kind of weird, how said it. Like he already knew the answer and was checking to see if I knew too.”
My blood goes cold.
“That is weird,” I say. Neutral. Calm. The opposite of what’s happening inside me.
“Right? I don’t know. Maybe I’m overthinking it. He’s probably just being nosy. Some people are like that.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Probably.”
She shrugs and moves on to something about the work-hub schedule. I nod in the right places and make the right sounds, my face doing a good impression of a person having a normal conversation. But inside, my brain is moving fast.
Tommy knows about the gaps. He knows there are missing pieces.
He framed it as “how the story ends,” which is a very specific way to describe an investigation that stopped midstream.
That’s not gossip, that’s not Mara paraphrasing, that’s a man who has independent knowledge of what’s in those papers, or at least what’s not in them.
Two conversations and two slips. Once could be loose phrasing, but twice is a pattern.
I don’t tell Mara what I’m thinking. She’d panic and feel guilty and possibly go straight to Tommy and confront him, which is the worst possible move right now.
I need Mara to keep being Mara. Normal, open, and unsuspecting.
If Tommy continues to believe his cover is solid, he’ll keep talking.
And the more he talks, the more he’ll give away.
I’m thinking the way Sting thinks, now. The irony is not lost on me.
I smile at Mara, ask about her day, pour her some water, and act like nothing has changed.