Page 6 of Obsession
I skim the numbers slowly, trying not to react, but the figures are too obscene to ignore. One quarter of Obsidian’s XR3 revenue outpaces almost everything the Rogues made last year outside weapons trafficking, and even then, the comparison barely holds.
No wonder Canon is entertaining this.
I keep reading before I can talk myself out of it, turning another page until a heading near the bottom catches my attention.
Alliance Integration Proposal.
The first page is exactly what I expect. Shared appearances. Combined operations. Public loyalty displays dressed up as mutual respect. Then the phrasing shifts into something older, uglier, and more familiar: long-term stability through familial integration.
I don’t need to read further to know what that means.
Marriage.
Of course.
Clubs like ours love pretending we’re kingdoms instead of criminal organizations because kingdoms sound noble and history makes monsters easier to swallow. Marriage means loyalty. Marriage means leverage. It means tying two power structures together tightly enough that betrayal starts costing blood on both sides. It means someone’s body becomes a treaty and everybody else gets to call it honor.
My eyes drift lower until they land on my sister’s name.
Varina Ward.
I lean back slowly in the chair and stare toward the ceiling while rain keeps tapping at the windows. Something bitter coils in my chest, though it isn’t simple enough to be jealousy. Varina deserves power more than most people in this club deserve oxygen. She’s smart, ruthless, and terrifying in ways Canon understands. She walks into rooms and men twice her size movebefore she has to ask. Canon spent years sharpening her into something hard enough to survive him, and somewhere along the way, she became sharper than all of us.
I learned a different kind of survival.
Varina became louder. Harder. Mean enough that nobody could mistake her for weak.
I became useful. Quiet enough to overlook. Soft enough that people stopped seeing me as a threat. Careful enough to keep the club running in ways nobody notices unless something goes wrong.
The roles settled between us so long ago that sometimes I think we both forget there were ever children underneath them. There was a time Varina used to crawl into my bed after Mom died because she hated how quiet the house got at night. There was a time I knew how to make her laugh so hard she’d snort into her pillow and shove me with both hands. There was a time before Canon looked at us and decided which child was worth building into a weapon and which one could be left to manage the receipts.
I close the folder carefully, but the ache doesn’t close with it.
For one dangerous second, I think about the stranger again. I think about the way his attention had landed on me. He hadn’t asked me to be louder. He hadn’t seemed disappointed that I wasn’t harder. He’d looked at the exact things Canon spent years dismissing and wanted them with a hunger that still makes my cock twitch when I remember it.
I know better than to romanticize a stranger in a club. I’m not stupid, even if everyone here occasionally treats me like I am. He didn’t know me. He didn’t see my childhood or my grief or the ledger-shaped hole where my place in the Rogues should’ve been. But for a little while, he saw the part of me I’ve spent years hiding in plain sight, and he didn’t flinch.
That shouldn’t matter as much as it does.
I stack the Obsidian folder with the rest and shut down my laptop. My apartment is three blocks away, and every practical part of me wants to go home, lock the door, crawl under a blanket, and pretend I don’t know my sister is being traded into an alliance like a crown jewel. Instead, I gather the folders into my arms because Canon will want them tonight, and if he has to ask where they are, the inconvenience will somehow become my fault.
The clubhouse reveals itself the moment I head down the stairs. Smoke hangs under the lights in a gray film. Men crowd the bar in cuts and leather, their voices rough with whiskey and the kind of confidence that comes from never wondering whether a room was built for them. The whole place smells like beer, sweat, gun oil, and wet denim.
I move through it, body angled slightly to avoid shoulders, eyes lowered just enough not to invite conversation. Nobody stops me. A few men glance over and away again once they realize it’s just me. Canon’s son, but not the one anybody worries about. The bookkeeper. The soft one. The one they learned to file under necessary and harmless.
By the time I reach the staircase to the private offices, Varina’s voice is already cutting through the hallway above.
“Tell him yourself.”
I frown, slightly curious. Canon says something too low for me to catch.
Varina lets out a laugh with no humor in it. “That’s exactly the fucking problem.”
Every instinct I have says to leave the folders outside the door and disappear before whatever fight is happening decides to include me. But Canon hates people hovering in hallways almost as much as he hates being interrupted, and I’m already close enough that retreating would look like fear.
So I climb the rest of the stairs and knock twice before stepping inside.
Canon’s office is dim except for the desk lamp, which throws warm light across scarred oak, old smoke, and the framed newspaper clippings lining the walls. The Rogues appear in most of them only as rumor or implication, which is how Canon prefers it. Suspected. Questioned. Never convicted. His whole life arranged as proof that power is only useful if nobody can quite pin it down.
