Page 8 of Obsession
Her mouth curves up into a sharp, humorless smile. “Of course we are.”
The air between them is ugly enough that I almost disappear out of habit. Stand still. Stay quiet. Let the storm pass around me. I know how to do that better than almost anything. Then Canon looks back at me.
“Do not embarrass this club,” he says.
Something inside me twists at the command. I’ve never once done anything to make him think I would, but I’m over it. Maybe it’s just that I’m twenty-seven years old and still standing in front of my father waiting to be told what shape I’m allowed to take. Whatever it is, it slips loose before I can stop it.
“I’m not your fucking pet.”
My sister goes completely still as Canon’s eyes lift to mine very slowly, and the child in me recognizes the danger before the man in me can pretend not to. I’ve seen that look end arguments. I’ve seen men twice my size stumble over apologies when he turns it on them. Every instinct I have tells me to take the words back and make myself small enough to survive the room.
But I’ve already started, and for once, disappearing feels worse than being hit.
“You don’t get to move me around whenever it suits the club,” I tell him, my voice quieter now, but it doesn’t break. “I’m not furniture. I’m not some extra piece you send along with Varina because the real heir needs someone to keep the files organized.”
Varina mutters my name under her breath, half warning and half plea.
My father just stands, unhurriedly, rounds the desk and stops in front of me, close enough that I can smell cigar smoke and whiskey and the leather of his cut. Even now, grown and patched and technically a man, my body still remembers being a boy under that stare.
His voice stays calm. “You’ll bewhateverthe Rogues need you to be.” A chuckle bubbles up from his throat. “You think I care whether you like it?” he asks. “This club fed you. Protected you. Put a patch on your back when plenty of men said you didn’t deserve one. You don’t get to grow a spine now because your feelings are bruised.”
Heat climbs my neck and face so fast my eyes sting with humiliation because some awful, starving part of me still wants him to look at me and see more than an obligation he found a use for.
Canon leans closer. “You’re not Varina. You were never going to lead this club. That doesn’t mean you’re useless. It means your value is elsewhere, so stop acting like a spoiled fucking child and do your job.”
The room blurs at the edges, just enough that I have to focus on the lamp behind Canon’s shoulder and the soft amber ring it casts across the wall. “I understand.”
Canon steps back immediately, already finished with me now that compliance has been restored. “Good. You’ll have the updated files ready before the meet. Varina will brief you on anything else you need.”
Varina’s expression hardens at being dragged back into it, but she still doesn’t speak.
I turn before either of them can read whatever is happening on my face and head outside, attempting to disappear from this fucking place. Canon’s words follow me.
You’re not Varina.
You were never going to lead this club.
The worst part is that he’s right. I don’t want what Varina wants. I don’t want men to move because they fear me. I don’t want a room to go quiet when I walk into it, and I don’t want power badly enough to carve myself into something brutal just to hold it. What I want is smaller than that, softer than that, and somehow more impossible because I don’t even know how to say it without sounding pathetic.
I want to be seen without being corrected.
I want to be wanted without being useful first.
I think about Varina, trapped into a marriage she didn’t choose because she’s valuable enough to trade.
I think about myself, sent along behind her because I’m useful enough to include but not important enough to ask.
Then I think about him again.
I try not to, but the memory rises anyway, warm and humiliating and impossible to kill. That stranger’s voice. His certainty. The way his attention had wrapped around me until the rest of the world went quiet. I don’t let myself replay the details because that way lies stupidity, but I remember how it felt afterward, standing in the wreckage of my own want with my heart beating too hard and my whole body gone loose with a kind of peace I didn’t know I was allowed to have.
I’d spent years making myself smaller so men like Canon wouldn’t notice the wrong things about me.
That night, someone noticed them and wanted more.
I know I won’t go back to the club.
I can’t.
