Savage Saints Mc : Claimed By Four Monsters

Chapter 9

Isolde

I found Soren at six in the morning. He was exactly where I expected him to be, at his desk, three screens open, coffee untouched beside him. He didn't look surprised when I walked in. He didn't look anything. He just watched me cross the room and sit down in the chair across from him like he had been waiting for the appointment.

I put the note on the desk between us.

"Tell me everything," I said. He looked at the note for a moment, Then he looked at me. "How much do you want?"

"All of it."

He nodded once. He folded his hands on the desk and he told me.

He told me about my father the way you read a case file, in order, without softening, each fact placed carefully before the next. My father had been a financial investigator. He had spent two years untangling the Voss money structure from the inside of a legitimate consulting contract they had hired him for, not knowing what he was. He found things they had buried carefully for over a decade. Money laundering on a scale large enough to reach into government. He knew he couldn't take it to the police without it disappearing.

So he came to Kael. He laid his evidence on a table and made a deal. Kael would use the information to bring Voss down. My father would provide whatever support was needed. Together.

"When?" I asked.

"Three years ago."

Three years ago I was in London designing a client's kitchen extension and calling my father every Sunday and he sounded exactly like himself every single time. Tired sometimes. Happy sometimes. Normal. He sounded completely normal.

"He was dead within a month of meeting Kael," Soren said.

The room didn't move. I kept my hands flat on my thighs and I looked at Soren's face and I did not cry. I don't know why. Maybe because crying required a kind of release and what I felt right now had no release valve. It was just pressure, building behind everything, looking for a shape to take.

"Did Kael know it would get him killed?"

Soren stopped, That pause lasted four seconds.. I counted.. Four full seconds of a man who always had an answer sitting in complete silence, and in those four seconds I got everything I needed.

"I see," I said.

"It's not that simple," Soren said carefully.

"I know." I stood up. "Thank you for telling me."

"Isolde."

I was already at the door. The roof access was a narrow staircase at the far end of the east corridor. I had found it three days ago by accident. I pushed through the door at the top and the morning air hit me hard, cool and sharp, carrying the smell of the city waking up below. I sat on the low ledge at the far edge and I looked at nothing in particular and I let it come.

Not the tears. The grief was quieter than crying. It moved through me in waves, each one carrying something different. The first wave was for my father. The shape of him. The specific way he laughed at his own jokes before the punchline. The Sunday phone calls. The way I thought I had already finished grieving him because I had done it properly two years ago, flowers at the grave and everything.

Except I had been grieving the wrong death. I had been grieving a heart attack that never happened. The second wave was worse. It was for the version of my life where his death was just a terrible random thing that bodies do sometimes. Where there was no Kael and no Voss and no deal made over a table with evidence spread between two men. Where I could keep the grief clean and directionless and not aimed at anyone.

That version was gone now. I heard the roof door open behind me. I didn't turn around, Heavy footsteps. Riot sat down beside me on the ledge, not close enough to crowd, just close enough to be present. He looked out at the same stretch of city I was looking at and he didn't say a word.

We sat like that for a long time.

The city moved below us. A bird somewhere. The sun climbing. I was aware of him the way you were aware of something solid when everything else felt unstable. He wasn't trying to fix anything. He wasn't asking questions. He just sat there with all that contained heaviness of his and let me exist in whatever state I was in.

An hour passed. Maybe more.

"You don't know what Soren told me," I said eventually.

"No," he said.

"You came up anyway."

"You were on the roof alone." He said it like that was the complete explanation. Like the logic was so obvious it barely needed saying.

I looked at his profile. The scar through his brow. The jaw set like concrete. There was something underneath all that hardness that I had started to see in the last few days, something careful and worn-down and very old, like a bruise that had never quite healed.

"Does it get easier?" I asked. "Carrying something you can't put down."

He thought about it. He didn't rush the answer. "You get stronger," he said. "It doesn't get lighter."

I nodded, I looked back at the city.

Another long silence. Then he said: "Whatever it is, you're still standing."

I thought about that. I thought about what standing meant when the ground had just completely changed underneath you. When the map you had been using turned out to be for somewhere else entirely.

"That's not always the victory people think it is," I said.

He didn't argue with me. He just sat there, solid and quiet, and somehow that was better than anything he could have said.

Below, the yard gate opened. A black SUV rolled in slowly and stopped near the center of the yard. The driver's door opened but I wasn't watching the driver. I was watching the passenger side.

She stepped out and the morning light caught her immediately, she was tall, dressed entirely in black. The kind of composed that wasn't just confidence, it was something practiced and deliberate and very aware of itself. Dark hair pulled back. A face that looked like it had never made an unintentional expression in its life.

Kael came out of the main building and crossed the yard toward her. She saw him and something changed in her face. Not much. Just enough. She raised one hand and touched his face, her palm against his jaw, slow and certain, like she knew exactly the geography of it and had simply been away from it for a while.

Kael went completely still, I watched from the roof and said nothing.

Beside me, Riot had gone quiet in a different way..