Chapter 328: Marlon’s Offer
Marlon and I stepped outside together, leaving the warmth of the house and the noise of the table behind us.
I walked beside him without saying much at first. I knew Marlon well enough by now to understand he didn’t call people out for small talk. He had a reason for everything, and he’d get to it in his own time. So I kept my mouth shut and waited, already half-certain I knew where this was going.
"You met him again, didn’t you," he said. Not really a question.
"I did," I nodded.
A few more steps passed in silence. The gravel crunched softly under our feet.
"Second time seeing him now," Marlon said, eyes forward. "What do you think?"
I let the question sit for a moment, turning it over carefully. Callighan wasn’t the kind of person you summed up quickly, and I didn’t want to say something I’d have to walk back later. I pulled up the memory of those meetings, the way he’d held himself, the things he’d said and, maybe more importantly, the things he hadn’t done.
"Hard to read him completely," I admitted. "But at least one thing came through clear enough, he keeps his word. When I asked to see Mei, he let me. Just me." I paused. "I was surrounded by his people the whole time. Completely boxed in. If he’d wanted to end things right there, it would’ve been the easiest call he ever made. But he didn’t. He let me talk to her, and then he let me walk away. No moves against me, nothing against the others either."
Saying it out loud, I realized it still settled something in me, some low, restless part of me that had been coiled tight since the moment Mei ended up in Brigantine. It didn’t fix anything. But it meant something.
I genuinely believed he wouldn’t let harm come to her easily. And whatever Gaspar’s intentions were, I had to think Callighan would be a wall between them. I wanted to believe that, anyway. But I just wasn’t stupid enough to count on it.
"Hm." Marlon’s jaw shifted slightly. "So you’ve changed your mind about him then?"
"Not even close," I said.
He glanced at me sideways.
"I want Mei back," I said. "And I want Atlantic City safe. None of that changes because the man didn’t shoot me when he had the chance."
Something in Marlon’s expression settled, like that was the answer he’d been checking for. "Good." He looked forward again. "We’ll raid that hotel soon enough."
"So you’re already planning it," I said, watching him. "How long?"
"Within the week, we should be ready," he replied.
I nodded slowly, running the math in my head. "There’s also a real chance Lucy cooperates with us. If she does, she’d be a serious asset."
Marlon’s brow pulled together at the name. "You managed to bring that woman over?" The doubt in his voice was plain and undecorated.
"She’s not what she looks like on the surface," I said. "She didn’t end up with Callighan’s group by choice. Everything she did, she did it to keep her brother alive. That was the whole of it."
I wasn’t trying to paint her as a saint. Perspectives were a strange thing in this world, everybody had a reason, and most of those reasons made a brutal kind of sense when you saw the full picture. I could hardly hold her accountable for surviving the only way she knew how.
"People from my community died because of her," Marlon said.
Lucy said she didn’t kill anyone innocent but I understood what he meant by that.
"I know," I said. I didn’t try to soften it or argue around it. "I’m not defending what happened. That’s not what I’m doing. When the time comes, you can sit across from her and decide for yourself, that’s fair. But she knows that hotel inside and out. She ran security there. Whatever else she is, she’s useful, and we’d be wasting something real if we threw that away."
Marlon said nothing for a moment. Just walked.
"I’ll see," he said finally.
That was probably the best I was going to get from him, and honestly it was enough for now.
He let another stretch of silence pass before speaking again. "It’s a pity you couldn’t bring your girl back with you."
My hand tightened without me meaning it to, fingers curling into a slow fist at my side. "I’ll get her back. Soon."
The words came out quieter than I intended but steadier too.
In my head I was already working through it, the layout, the angles, the timing. Going straight for Brigantine right now would be reckless. Too exposed, too much open ground under Callighan’s watch the whole way. But once we had the Golden Nugget, the picture changed. From there, the road heading north opened up, and with it the possibility of cutting across the wide stretch of water that separated us from Brigantine, quiet, off their radar, no direct approach through territory they were watching.
A boat would do it cleanly though clearly too visible maybe. Worst case, I’d swim the damn distance myself if it came to that. Either way, it was the stealthiest route I’d been able to map out in my head, and it didn’t fully open up until that hotel was ours.
That was the piece everything else was waiting on.
I had to be careful.
That was the one thought I kept coming back to, the one I had to keep nailing down every time my chest got tight and my mind started running ahead of itself. Impatience was a luxury I couldn’t afford, not with Mei in Brigantine, not with everything balanced the way it was. If I let the urgency override my judgment and moved too soon, too recklessly, I wouldn’t just be risking myself.
I’d be putting her in real danger.
The worst possible outcome wasn’t me getting killed. It was Mei getting killed because I couldn’t hold myself together long enough to think straight.
Smart. Patient. Don’t rush it.
And on top of everything else, the enemy wasn’t some desperate survivor swinging a bat. Gaspar was an experienced Symbiote Host. Whatever I thought I was capable of, I had to factor that in every single time.
"You’re worrying," Marlon said beside me, not looking over.
"Yeah," I said. I didn’t bother denying it.
He was quiet for a moment. Then, in that gruff, matter-of-fact way of his — "I don’t think Callighan is scum enough to let a girl her age die. So don’t lose sleep over that part."
"It’s not just Mei," I said, and my expression shifted into something I couldn’t quite keep clean. "It’s getting Mei back. Getting Emily back. Making sure nobody else dies in the process. Making sure the peace we were barely starting to rebuild doesn’t get torn apart again before it even has a chance to hold."
The thought of Jackson Township moved through me before I could stop it.
I pressed my lips together.
We’d lost too much there. The kind of losses that didn’t sit right no matter how much time passed or how many times you told yourself it couldn’t have gone differently.
Jason.
And Jasmine.
I still wasn’t sure I’d fully processed either of them. Some part of me had just, filed it away, locked it behind the next problem and the one after that, because stopping to sit with it felt like something I couldn’t do yet without falling apart. And I didn’t have the luxury of falling apart.
I wouldn’t let it happen again. That was all I had. That promise I kept making to myself in the quiet moments.
Callighan’s group needed to be dismantled, cleanly, completely so that Margaret’s people, my group, and Marlon’s community could all stop looking over their shoulders. That was the only version of this that ended with everyone still standing.
"You’re making a good face."
Marlon’s voice cut through the noise in my head.
I blinked. "Huh?"
He glanced over at me, and the corner of his mouth pulled into something that was almost a smirk, rare enough on him that it actually registered. Then he reached over and slapped me hard across the back, open-palmed, the kind of hit that rattled your teeth.
I grunted.
"That’s the face of a leader," he said simply. "Now you have to act like one. Be strong enough to face whatever comes and protect your own."
I turned the word over in my head.
Leader. It didn’t sit quite right, or at least it didn’t fit the way he meant it. I didn’t think of myself as the leader of anything. More like one part of something shared, Rachel held as much of it as I did, Christopher too, in his own way. It was never a hierarchy, more like a weight distributed between people who’d all agreed without saying it out loud to not let the others down.
But I didn’t say any of that.
"Wait in Brighton Park," Marlon said then, already turning away. "I’ll find you."
He walked off before I could ask anything, unhurried, hands in his pockets like he had all the time in the world.
I stood there for a second, then headed for the park.
Ten minutes. Maybe a little more.
Then footsteps came from behind me.
I turned.
My eyes dropped almost immediately.
My face did something involuntary.
Marlon was holding what looked like a collar.
Okay. Don’t jump to conclusions.
"Do you have a dog or something," I asked, keeping my voice calm.
"This is for you," he said, holding it out toward me without ceremony. "Put it on."
The silence that followed was loaded.
"Have you lost your mind, old man?" I asked, and I wasn’t entirely managing to keep the edge out of my voice.
"Calm down." He didn’t even flinch. "This is a Starakian product. I got it from the case Zakthar left for me before Gaspar had him taken away. It’s designed to suppress and weaken a Symbiote Host."
That still doesn’t explain why you want me to put it on!
He just chuckled looking at my perplexed expression. Like he’d expected exactly this reaction and found it mildly entertaining.
"I’ve decided to train you, boy," he said.
I repeated the words back carefully. "Train me."
"You’re strong, I’ll give you that. But I watched your fight against Rico." His tone leveled out, stripped of any softness. "You’re inexperienced. You fight on instinct and muscle, no technique underneath it. Against ordinary people, maybe that’s enough. But against someone who isn’t ordinary—" He let the sentence hang there.
"Gaspar," I said quietly.
"You said yourself he’s stronger than you. And you’re going to face him, we both know that’s where this is heading." He looked at me steadily. "So shouldn’t you put every possible advantage on your side?"
I didn’t answer right away.
"In a fight like that, details are everything," he continued. "It doesn’t come down to who hits hardest. It comes down to margins. Small ones. And I can give you that, if you want it."
I looked at the collar in his hand.
"So you want me wearing that," I said, "so I can’t fall back on the Symbiote."
"You won’t always have that strength to lean on. And I’m not as young as I used to be," he replied plainly. "I need the odds to be manageable."
It clicked into place. Training with dead weight. Strip away the crutch and build what was underneath it, so that when the crutch was gone in a moment that actually mattered, there was something real left standing.
Marlon tossed the collar over.
I caught it.
The moment it settled in my hands, something rolled through me, a deep, crawling revulsion that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with instinct. My Symbiote reacting to it before my brain did. I stared down at it, jaw tight.
Then I closed my fingers around it.
He was right. Against Gaspar, there was no room to be underprepared. No room for pride or comfort or the quiet security of knowing I could flip a switch and outpower most things in front of me.
Details count.
I lifted the collar and brought it up around my neck.
The clasp clicked shut.
"Nghh!!"
The sound left me before I could stop it. My knees hit the ground hard, and for a second the whole world lurched sideways. It was like something had reached into my chest and turned off a light, no, not a light, something larger than that. Something structural. The Symbiote went quiet in a way that felt almost violent in its suddenness, suppressed down to almost nothing, and in its place came an exhaustion so total it pressed down on every part of me at once.
I pressed a hand to the collar, breathing through it.
This was... this was something else entirely. It wasn’t pain exactly, more like gravity had just doubled and my body hadn’t caught up yet. Whatever reserves I normally moved through the world with, they were gone. I felt stripped back to the basics. Skin, muscle, bone, and not much else.
Like the first day of the outbreak all over again. Maybe worse.
"Are you ready, boy?"
Marlon’s voice came from above me. I tilted my head up. He was standing over me, arms loose at his sides, his shadow falling long across the ground, expression giving nothing away.
Every part of me ached just from kneeling there.
It was uncomfortable in a way that went past physical, something almost humiliating about it, being reduced like this. Being small again.
But I held his gaze.
And I smiled, strained, lopsided, barely holding together at the edges, but real.
"Yeah."
