Chapter Five
Ethan’s “office” turned out to be nothing like Niko had expected.
The drive took them deeper into the back hills of Oregon, past winding access roads that barely registered as roads at all.
Dense forest pressed in on either side, tall evergreens swallowing sound and light, the world narrowing to damp earth, shadow, and the low hum of engines.
Niko tracked the route automatically, cataloguing turns and elevation changes, already aware that anyone trying to follow them would be hopelessly lost.
When the security perimeter finally revealed itself, it did so quietly.
No visible fences. No obvious checkpoints.
Just men.
Armed. Alert. Professional.
They cleared security in layered stages—biometric scans, visual confirmation, encrypted acknowledgments that passed too fast for anyone but Ethan to follow. Niko clocked the competence instantly. This wasn’t hired muscle. This was infrastructure.
Beyond it, the hangar came into view.
It sat low against the landscape, angular and deliberate, its exterior finished in materials designed to reflect light rather than catch it. From the air, it would vanish. From radar, Niko knew, it would be worse than invisible.
Any aircraft lifting off this strip would disappear into noise and terrain within seconds.
That alone made his pulse tick faster.
They rolled through the hangar doors, and Niko felt the shift immediately.
State-of-the-art didn’t begin to cover it.
The space was vast and immaculately clean, concrete polished to a dull sheen beneath carefully positioned lighting. Two aircraft dominated the interior—one a sleek, predatory jet he recognized instantly.
The jet that had brought him home.
Seeing it here, whole and waiting, sent something tight and emotional through his chest.
The second plane was larger, built for range and flexibility rather than speed. Near the far wall, a helicopter sat poised and ready on a wheeled platform designed to move it in and out of the hangar, rotors still, its presence promising access to places roads couldn’t reach.
This wasn’t a garage.
It was a launch point. They walked over to a set of stairs that led to the second-floor, and there was a floor-to-ceiling window alongside it. It was from here that Niko saw the house.
It was attached to the far side of the hangar, rising in clean lines of glass and stone, cantilevered out toward a massive lake that spread below like a sheet of dark metal.
The structure was settled into the land rather than imposed on it, partially concealed by trees and terrain.
From a distance, it would be almost impossible to see.
Functional. Discreet.
As they moved upstairs, Ethan moved with easy familiarity, shedding tension with each step deeper into his own territory. Niko watched him closely, irritation and something dangerously close to longing twisting together in his chest.
Upstairs, the office space opened into something that made Niko pause.
A modern command center.
Glass walls. A long conference table. Screens built seamlessly into surfaces. Beyond it, a server room hummed quietly behind reinforced glass, lights blinking in steady, patient rhythms.
This was the real nerve center.
Ethan gestured toward the conference room. “Make yourselves comfortable.”
Niko sat, jaw tight, as the others spread out.
Ethan tapped a panel on the wall. “Lucy? Any chance you can bring coffee and whatever you’ve got that resembles food?”
The name landed wrong.
Niko felt a flash of sharp, irrational jealousy before he could stop it.
A moment later, footsteps approached.
Lucy entered with an easy smile—and Niko’s jealousy evaporated instantly.
She was older. Silver-haired, warm-eyed, her presence radiating a kind of calm authority that had nothing to do with weapons or power. She took in the room, the men, the tension, and smiled wider.
“Well,” she said. “You must be the trouble that took Ethan out earlier today.”
Introductions followed—polite, respectful, almost careful.
Names were offered and repeated, hands shaken, small courtesies observed that had nothing to do with rank or reputation.
Even the hardest of Black Tide softened around her, posture easing, voices lowering.
Lucy laughed easily at something Drew said, listened without interrupting when Victor explained who was who, and remembered every name after hearing it only once, as if the men mattered simply because they were standing in front of her.
“I’ll make something proper for dinner,” she promised. “You all look like you need it.”
When she left, the room felt quieter.
The shift didn’t last long.
Kael leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled, eyes never leaving Ethan. “Before we get into anything else,” he said evenly, “I want to understand what we just walked into.”
Ethan’s gaze flicked to him.
“Who owns this property?” Kael asked. “The land, the airstrip, the hangar. On paper.”
Ethan shrugged and took a sip of his coffee. "I do. It is all in my name. Well, companies that I own at least."
“And the men outside,” Kael continued before Ethan could answer. “The ones we took down and the ones still coming. Who are they working for?”
Ethan gave him a look. "Same answer. They were all chosen and hired by me. Most were trained by me."
Silence pressed in again, heavier this time.
Kael nodded once, as if ticking boxes. “And the security here,” he added. “What kind of net did they just hit? Private contractors? Off-book assets? Or something tied into a larger system we haven’t seen yet?”
Ethan crossed his arms and sat back in his chair.
"A lot of the tech was developed by me. I needed a place that I could build for myself, that I could keep the most important person in the world to me safe.
Poppy lives here with Lucy and me. She's only three, so for now, her small world makes her happy and safe. "
Poppy was three. Niko frowned. Ethan must have gotten his wife pregnant the moment he got home. Pain shot through him at that thought, and he shook his head. He could not afford to go down that train of thought. He needed answers himself.
Niko leaned forward, forearms braced on the table.
“Pyre,” he said, slower this time, letting the word carry its weight.
“Not the callsign. The man behind it. The reason people are willing to burn down forests and put bounties on your head. I want to know what you’re really doing, Ethan—and who you’re doing it to. ”
Ethan didn’t answer immediately.
“Not everything is what it seems,” he said finally.
Then—slowly—he looked directly at Niko.
Really looked at him. For the first time since they arrived on the property.
“If I’m going to tell this,” Ethan said, voice low and steady, “I need to start from the beginning.”
Niko’s chest tightened.
He needed to hear it.
He dreaded hearing it.
And he knew—deep in his bones—that whatever came next was going to change everything he thought he understood about the past. But he nodded anyway.
****
Ethan hadn’t planned to tell it like this.
Not in a room full of men who measured truth by threat vectors and probabilities. Not with Niko sitting across from him, close enough that Ethan could see every flicker of emotion he hadn’t managed to bury.
But once the words started, there was no clean way to stop them.
“It started the morning I left you,” Ethan said, his voice steadier than he felt.
Saying it out loud dragged the memory up sharp and whole.
His father standing in the doorway of his apartment like he owned the air itself. No warning. No pretense. Just inevitability.
“My father came and told me I was coming home,” Ethan continued. “That I was done pretending I could have a life that didn’t belong to him.”
Ethan didn’t look at Niko when he said it. He didn’t trust himself to.
“He already had it arranged. My discharge from flight school, the marriage to Cleo, the announcement of the engagement—all of it—it was already in motion. He had certain things he could threaten me with, and he did. I tried to fight him, to find a way to tell you, but his men beat the shit out of me, and dragged my unconscious ass out.”
The reaction in the room was immediate, but Ethan stayed focused on the table, on the weight of the mug in his hands, on keeping his breathing even.
“He wasn’t bluffing,” Ethan said quietly. “He never does.”
“What kind of man does that?” Luca muttered.
“A powerful one,” Ethan replied. “And a sick one.”
Kael leaned forward. “I think I know who your father is. Gregory Rhodes, right?" Ethan shot him a wry smile and a nod. "Yeah, he’s an evil fucker.”
That almost made Ethan smile. Almost.
"And then you married Cleo Pembroke?" Niko asked, and there was tension in his tone.
Ethan nodded. “Yeah, I married her, but not because I loved her and not because I wanted to.” He paused, choosing his words carefully.
“She didn’t want me either. We were both just leverage.
Pawns used by our fathers to make more money.
My father—” Ethan heard the hatred he had for that man in his own tone.
"—kept me on a tight leash, so to speak. "
He didn’t talk about the beatings. About the nights spent calculating how much damage he could absorb before it showed. About learning how to stand so blows landed where they hurt less.
He could see Niko noticing anyway.
“Cleo's father did the same for her, despite her pregnancy, and just after she gave birth to Poppy, she got sick,” Ethan said, flashes of how hard she fought, and how horrific the disease was that claimed her, crossed through his mind.
“It was cancer. Aggressive and terminal. She fought to stay for our daughter, but in the end, it took her. She endured a lot at the hands of her family and mine.”
"You stayed with her, even though you could have left," Niko said, and it was not a question.
Ethan was surprised at just how well Nik knew him.
“I stayed,” he confirmed. “For her. And for Poppy.”
Niko said quietly, “I know you would have.”