Chapter 278: Alliance Talk with Marlon [3]

"You’re staying here. With us. Until we move on the hotel."

"...What?"

The words landed in the room and silken followed.

I looked sideways at Molly, Maribel, and Rico instinctively. But their expressions told me everything. Molly’s eyebrows had climbed slightly. Maribel looked genuinely caught off guard. Rico had that face he made when something happened that he hadn’t been briefed on either.

So this wasn’t pre-planned. Marlon had just decided this. Right now. At the table.

"What are you saying exactly?" Cindy blurted out, dumbstruck.

"You heard me well enough, little blond head," Marlon said, without any particular urgency. "I’m keeping your boyfriend here, with us until we’ve taken back the Golden Nugget and secured the State Marina. After that, he’s all yours again."

"B...But Ryan is with us!" Daisy said, and there was more firmness in her voice than she usually let through. For Daisy, that basically counted as slamming a fist on the table.

Marlon looked at her with something warm and patient behind his expression. "And he will be again. I’m only borrowing him. Temporarily."

I hadn’t said anything yet. I was watching him, reading his face, trying to find the angle. Because Marlon didn’t strike me as someone who made moves without reasons behind them, and the comfortable, slightly amused expression he was wearing told me this wasn’t a power play. He wasn’t trying to hold leverage over me or keep me contained. He actually believed this was necessary.

"My people will fight," he said, settling his forearms on the table and shifting into explanation mode. "A good number of them, more than you’d think are already at the point where they want Callighan’s group gone more than they’re afraid of what it’ll take to do it. Every attack, every threat, every morning they wake up not knowing if today is the day something hits them again, that fear has been building for three months. They want an outlet for it." He paused. "But an alliance with an outside group is a different matter entirely. That asks them to trust strangers. People they’ve never seen before, don’t know the first thing about, who are suddenly going to be fighting beside them and sharing intelligence and being counted on when things go wrong." He looked at me evenly. "That kind of trust doesn’t come from a handshake and a good speech. It has to be earned on the ground."

I stared at him. "So you want me to stay here and get friendly with everyone."

The idea settled over me like a cold, uncomfortable blanket.

I wasn’t built for that. In situations like the one we’d just had, high stakes, clear objective, serious conversation — I could maybe talk for hours and not feel the drain just like now. But casual? Bonding? Making rounds through a community, making small talk, trying to get people to like me through proximity and personality alone? That was a different skill set entirely, and it was not mine.

Marlon must have read something in my face because he chuckled.

"I’m not asking you to charm anyone," he said. "You don’t have to win a popularity contest. Just be present. Work alongside them. Take part in what the community does day to day, the maintenance, the watches, whatever needs doing. Let them see what you’re made of in ordinary circumstances, not just in a knife fight." He tilted his head. "You’re the leader of your group, even if you don’t introduce yourself that way. The people who follow you will take their cues from how others here respond to you. So do this, not for the next week, just for the time we need and it builds the foundation for everything that comes after. Not just the attack. After. When both our communities have to figure out how to actually coexist."

He wasn’t wrong. I hated that he wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t.

"You’re the leader here, though," Cindy said, her voice carrying a reluctance she wasn’t bothering to hide. "Can’t you just tell your people this is happening and they have to deal with it?"

Marlon laughed, a real one, generous and unbothered. "I can order my people into a fight. I cannot order them to trust someone. Those are different commands."

Cindy didn’t have an answer for that.

I sat with it for a moment, running through the full picture in my head. On one side of the scale, the obvious problems. Kunta was back at the hotel, and Kunta was a variable that required watching and managing. Lucy was there too, technically our prisoner, and a Starakian could drop in at any moment with no warning whatsoever. There were a hundred moving parts back there that I didn’t love leaving unattended.

On the other side, Marlon was right. Not just tactically right for the next week, but right in the longer sense. Building a bridge between two communities wasn’t something you could rush or fake. You had to put yourself into it, physically, consistently, in a way that people could see and measure and eventually trust. If I wanted a future where Margaret’s people and Marlon’s people could move freely, share resources, look out for each other without politics getting in the way every five minutes, then someone had to lay the first brick.

I also wasn’t going to be stranded. If something went badly wrong, really wrong I could cover the distance back fast enough that it wouldn’t matter.

I looked up at Marlon.

"Fine," I said.

"Ryan?!" Cindy turned sharply.

Daisy made a small, startled sound beside her.

"I won’t be far," I said, offering them both what I hoped was a reassuring expression and not just a tired one. "It’s not like I’m leaving the city."

"It’s not about the distance!" Cindy said, her voice pitching with a frustration that had more underneath it than just logistics. "We need you there. There’s Lucy, and Kunta, and what if Gaspar—"

"Rachel and Christopher will handle it," I said. "Both of them are more than capable of keeping things steady for a week. You know that. And if I Gaspar comes, I will jump and come."

She did know that. I could tell she knew that. It didn’t seem to be helping.

"Then I’ll stay here too," she said, turning to Marlon with a decisive expression. "The more of us here, the faster your people get comfortable with us, right? That’s the logic?"

"I don’t mind," Marlon said simply, with the easy openness of someone who genuinely didn’t.

"No," I said.

Cindy looked at me.

"I need you there," I said, keeping my voice serious. "You, Rachel, Christopher, Sydney, I need you guys holding things together while I’m here."

I didn’t say the rest of it out loud. Cindy had a Dullahan inside her, same as me, and that made her one of the few people I’d actually trust to deal with whatever might come through the door unannounced, a Starakian at worst, Gaspar making a move, something going sideways with Kunta or Lucy in ways nobody could predict. The hotel needed that kind of presence. Wanda was there too. Too many variables concentrated in one place for me to pull everyone capable out of it at the same time.

Cindy looked at my expression for a moment, reading it the way she’d gotten good at doing.

She let out a slow breath and pressed her hand flat against her forehead, closing her eyes for exactly one second.

"I have no idea how I’m supposed to explain this to the others," she muttered.

"You don’t have to," I said, already turning toward Marlon. "I’ll go back myself, explain everything, and be back here before evening. I’d rather say it directly than have it filtered through someone else."

Marlon nodded. "Go ahead. Take the time you need."

"Marlon." Maribel’s voice came in from the side, quiet but pointed. She’d been holding her silence for a while, but she chose to speak now. "Are you serious about this? Keeping him here?"

"Completely," Marlon said, without a flicker of hesitation. "And not only because I want to see what he’s actually made of when there’s no knife fight to judge him by." He glanced toward Rico with something that was amusement. "Setting aside his talent for putting certain people on the ground."

Rico made a low, wounded sound.

Molly laughed.

"Fine," Maribel said, settling back with the expression of someone accepting something they don’t entirely endorse. "If that’s what you think is needed."

"It is," Marlon said. "And there’s one more thing." He turned to look at Maribel directly. "I want you to take care of him while he’s here."

The silence that followed was quite deafening.

"...W..What?!" Maribel said. The word came out stripped of everything except pure, unfiltered shock.

"You’re senior in this community," Marlon said, calmly. "Show him around. Walk him through how things run here, what needs doing, who the key people are. Introduce him properly, not as an outsider, but as someone who’s here with purpose and trust behind him. You’re the right person for it." He paused. "And you’re not exactly strangers. He already knows you well enough that he won’t feel lost."

"We are not close!" Maribel said. She’d straightened up in her seat, something defensive coming into her posture. "We spent a few hours together once. That’s it."

"You went into a fight with him against a Hybrid," Marlon said, counting it off calmly. "He kept you alive through it. You came back in one piece because of decisions he made in the field." He looked at her with that steady, immovable expression. "That’s closer than most people get in three months of living in the same building. I’m not asking you to be his friend, Maribel. I’m asking you to be his guide for one week so he can find his footing here. That’s it. For the future, for both our communities."

Maribel held his gaze for a long moment.

Then she grumbled. Low and thoroughly unimpressed.

Then she sat back down.

"Fine," she said, the word landing like something dropped from a height. "Fine. But he better keep up and not slow me down. I have things to do and I’m not going to spend this week babysitting." She turned that look onto men, sharp, preemptive, already warning me against being inconvenient.

"Noted," I said.

Beside me, Cindy leaned slightly closer and dropped her voice. "I have a bad feeling about this."

"She’s fine," I said quietly back. "She acts like that but she’s a good person, I’ve seen it."

"That’s not—" Cindy stopped. She glanced past me toward Maribel, who had looked away. She was pulling a strand of dark curls between her fingers, twisting it idly, not really aware she was doing it. Cindy watched her for exactly two seconds, then turned back to me with an expression that was equal parts knowing and resigned.

"I’m not worried about her being a good person," she said, her voice dropping lower. "I’m worried she’s going to fall."

I frowned. "Fall where?"

Cindy looked at me.

It was a very long, very patient look.

"You know what," she said at last, "maybe it’s better you stay exactly as clueless as you are. Carry on."

I opened my mouth.

Closed it.

Decided to leave that alone.

"Right," Marlon said, standing up from the bench before looking at me questioningly. "When are you heading back to inform your people?"

"Soon. I’ll keep it brief," I said.

He glanced over at Cindy. Let the glance linger just slightly longer than necessary, with a faint, knowing upturn at the corner of his mouth.

"Well," he said mildly, "given the circumstances, I’ll allow for a little extra time. Young people these days tend to have longer goodbyes."

"You old pervert!" Cindy’s face went red from the ears inward, and she pointed a finger at him embarrassed and angry.

"Marlon," Molly said from behind, chuckling.

"We’re not a couple," I said clearly, because at this point he’d committed to the bit so thoroughly that a direct correction felt necessary.

Marlon was already stepping out from behind the bench, and he laughed.

"I was in love once, a long time ago," he said simply, moving toward the door. "I know what I’m looking at."

Damn, were we that obvious?

"Before I head back," I said, redirecting, "I want to find Shawn. Check in with him, he might know the area well enough to point us toward optical centers, somewhere we can find glasses for Daisy."

Marlon looked at Daisy briefly, then back at me, and gave a small approving nod. "Good thinking. Go ahead." He glanced sideways. "Maribel."

"Yes, yes, I’m the guide, I heard you the first time," she muttered, already standing, already moving. She looked back at us with an expression that was making its peace with the situation one step at a time. "Come on then. Keep up."