Her Obsession (by Sheridan Hartin) novel Chapter 56

I Watched, I Listened, I Helped.

Ari

I was born in a cell. People like to romanticize beginnings, cradle songs, soft light, a mother’s hands. Mine were concrete, bleach, and a bare bulb that buzzed like an insect trapped in glass. My mother was a ghost. My father was a ghost. I was their consequence. Yakov doesn’t allow consequences, but he allowed me. They kept me with her for the first year because she could feed me and because breaking a woman too soon ruins her utility. After that, I was moved two doors down and taught the rules. Don’t ask. Don’t want. Don’t keep. If a feeling starts, smother it fast or someone will smother it for you. They didn’t tell me that last part; I learned it when they found the way my mother’s eyes searched the yard for my father. He looked back once. Yakov saw. They were reassigned on a mission together, rare, deliberate. Only one body came back. I was six when I understood fully that love in this place is not a language; it’s a verdict. I learned quickly. Obedience first, then excellence. They call it training, but that word is too clean. What they do to the young ones in the basement is simpler: they break you into parts and then choose which parts are allowed to grow back. Pain is instruction; deprivation is doctrine. You survive by becoming sharper than the hands that cut you. I did. I watched. I listened. I made myself useful. By twelve I could strip a rifle faster than most grown men. By fifteen I could read a building’s bones through a floor plan and tell you where a kill–box would live. By eighteen I had a voice that made people stop moving and a way of speaking to Yakov that never smelled like petition. I never asked; I delivered. He started giving me lists. Targets, debts, messages that needed to travel without ever touching paper. I became his courier first, then his ledger, then his leash. By twenty–one I was the one who handed contracts to ghosts and the one who watched to make sure they came back. I could make a file vanish or make a man vanish. The trick, I learned, was knowing when not to use either. Sage arrived when I was twelve. Smaller than the others, quiet in a way that wasn’t emptiness but pressure. They tried the same tools on her they used on everyone, cold, hunger, isolation, water, the whip. She didn’t scream. She didn’t shatter. She didn’t bend because bending is a choice, and she was too young to know choices were allowed; she simply endured. When the breaking didn’t produce the desired shape, Yakov changed angle. He turned her into edge and called it success. I stood next to her on the firing line when she could barely lift the rifle. I watched the way she counted exits in every room. When she was five years in, he sent her out and she didn’t miss. Numbers climbed on my ledger beside her code name. Specter. There are ghosts who love the silence. Sage was a different kind. She loved the order. Until she didn’t.

I saw it when it happened. The shift. There was a job that put her in the path of an Irish crew and a particular Irish boy with a name that sounds better on the tongue than it looks on the page. Conner O’Neill. She should’ve abandoned the sightline. She didn’t. She watched him as if the act of observing might alter the outcome. Later, she started bringing me results too quickly, too cleanly, like someone who’d lost interest in the hunt but not the housekeeping. I am not stupid. I followed the trail and found not gaps, Sage doesn’t leave gaps, but substitutions. A weapon that cleans itself. A camera that blinks at the wrong time. People like to think obsession burns bright. Hers was a pilot flame, banked and careful and absolutely steady. I did not tell Yakov. Loyalty is a tool; so is mercy. I keep the ones that are useful. Why didn’t I tell him? Because I know what happens when you point at a ghost and say, Look, she’s feeling. The compound eats her and calls it policy. So I watched Sage. I trimmed edges from the reports I sent upstairs. I made certain her numbers stayed beautiful. I made certain Naomi stayed near her on the board, because Naomi is chaos wrapped in glitter and blood, and chaos draws attention like a wound. As long as Naomi was dazzling, Sage was uninteresting in the way that keeps you alive. And then the Mirov contracts flared through the network like a fever. Aleksei believed the world is a ledger you can buy, and he’d lost a fortune when a nameless hacker shredded his surveillance empire. He wanted red leveled into ash. He paid accordingly. Yakov didn’t buy into politics; he buys into leverage. He accepted the money and said, Teach my girls to run hotter. He doesn’t use the word girls. I do, privately, because I remember us before we learned to be edges. Sage burned Mirov, again, and in burning him revealed a corner of herself she never should have, she defended O’Neill’s crew out loud. Not to us. To them. That’s when I saw where the ledger led. Here is where I say the quiet thing: I am loyal to Yakov because loyalty keeps people like me alive. And because I can divert the river when I know where it’s going. When a hit came down for Sage, external, ugly, wide–reaching, I took the contracts and stacked them sideways so they wouldn’t fall the way he wanted. I redirected some. I delayed others by “losing” a courier for a night. I kept her head above a tide she didn’t know was rising. When she cut O’Neill’s access to her cameras, I smiled despite myself; she’d finally chosen a piece of herself over the work. That’s also when I left a pea–sized grain in her safehouse system, nothing that would compromise her; just a vibration on the line that would hum if someone less elegant than her brushed it. Insurance, not against her, but for her. People like to imagine security as walls; it’s really just alarms you design to tell you where to look.

Nico looked. That’s the only reason he saw anything at all. He’s not bad. He’s young. But he listens, and more importantly, he did what Sage told him. He looked below the noise floor. When he found the artifact, I knew the next steps because I’ve played this game longer. You don’t go charging gods with knives; you buy time.

So I called Matteo.

Chapter Comments

Pakalana Piper–somalinog

2 hours ago

huh…. so DOES she know Matteo?

10

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