Chapter Five
AFTERNOON LIGHT SLANTS through the cabin windows, catching dust motes over the kitchen table where Jake is working. There’s no internet service anywhere near the cabin, but Jake, MIT graduate and professional hacker, is trying to jerry-rig a connection.
He’s hunched over a mess of cables and electronics that he and Damian bought in town this morning: a prepaid phone, a small drive the size of a deck of cards, a cheap router, and an aluminum antenna wired through the open window.
At the center of the table sits a scuffed black tablet that Wyatt grabbed from the paint booth at the O.D.
clubhouse. He says it belonged to Silas.
Damian leans over Jake’s shoulder as if he can make sense of what he’s doing, then snorts. “Black magic,” he mutters.
Jake doesn’t look up. “Anything but. I’m piggybacking the modem in this tablet,” he says, tapping the cracked screen of the tablet, “spoofing a new address, and bouncing the signal off a repeater over in town. Just physics, baby, not sorcery.”
“Lil’ genius.” Damian ruffles his fingers through Jake’s thick hair, making it stand up on end.
Jake swats him away without tearing his eyes from the tablet, and Damian wanders into the living room where Wyatt is asleep in the recliner.
He stretches out on the couch, throws an arm over his eyes, and sighs.
I’m trying to make myself useful, washing dishes and organizing the growing stock of canned and fresh food that Jake and Damian also picked up this morning.
For a while, the only sound is the tinny clatter coming through the open window from outside, where Ryder is stringing a line of empty cans along the treeline, rigging a trip alarm from our recycling and a roll of fishing wire.
Jake’s focus is absolute, shoulders tight, breath held, and then, suddenly, he breaks the silence with a triumphant laugh. “Got it!” he calls out to no one in particular. “One bar, barely, but LTE’s bleeding in.”
From the couch, Damian calls, “Praise be to Saint Silicon,” and pushes to his feet. “It’s working?”
“It’s working,” says Jake, grinning. “Signal’s thin, but it’s real.”
I dry my hands on a towel and drift toward the table as Damian walks back in, curiosity lighting his face. Together we bend over Jake’s shoulder. On the tablet screen, a patchwork of windows flickers—several command prompts with scrolling code.
“Okay,” Jake says, excitement in his tone. “We’ve got maybe ten minutes of stable bandwidth before it drops. I can pull data in short bursts, cache it, scrub, and sift later. What do we need most?”
He glances up at Damian, then toward the living room where Wyatt is sleeping.
Damian leans toward the open window and calls, “Hey, Ryder! We’re live!”
A few seconds later there’s the crunch of boots on the porch, and the door swings open on a draft of cooler air.
Ryder strides into the kitchen, hair knotted back, shirt sticking to the hard planes of his chest, a sheen of sweat on his neck.
He doesn’t look at me when he walks in. We’ve been acting like nothing happened since we woke up.
“Talk to me,” he says to Jake in his deep voice.
“Got a limited connection. I can mirror public feeds and scrape encrypted chatter, but we’ll need priorities.”
Ryder crosses to the table, the floor creaking under his boots, and studies the device in Jake’s hand.
“Okay.” He ticks the points off on his fingers. “One: official incident reports and dispatch logs—what happened at the airstrip. Two: any federal activity—ATF, state police, anyone that bumps this higher. Three: chatter. Club boards, relay channels, wherever the fuck people like this talk.”
“Copy that. Incident, jurisdiction, chatter.” Jake glances up, eyes lit with the thrill of the hunt.
“I’m starting local. Emergency dispatch mirrors, law-enforcement bulletins, anything tagged Redwater or Fremont.
Then darknet relay boards. The O.D. uses a few private channels, which will be loud right now. ”
He picks up the prepaid phone, checks the single flickering bar, and tosses it back beside the tablet.
“We’re crawling through molasses. Connection is intermittently dropping, so I’ll have to cache everything in bursts.”
I can feel Ryder’s heat beside me, his presence igniting a current under my skin.
A faint hint of gasoline clings to him, along with the outdoor smell of earth and pine.
He doesn’t look at me, but I feel his awareness of me too, the briefest shift in his stance, something about the way he folds his arms and steps back.
“Okay,” Jake mutters. “Dispatch mirror’s live. Timestamped call logs from Fremont Airstrip, multiple 911s within minutes of each other. Shots fired, explosion, probable fatalities.” He scrolls further. “And here it is: an ATF flag added twenty minutes later. Locals requested federal jurisdiction.”
The connection hiccups, screen freezing, then updates again.
Lines of garbled text scroll down. Jake narrows his eyes, translating in real time.
“All right…couple of encrypted forum posts…rumor thread says ‘two down at Disordered, boss and VP both confirmed.’ No names yet. Another thread says ‘feds crawling all over the hangar.’”
Boss down. Time slows down. I go very still.
“Checking the county coroner updates…” Jake mutters. He squints, reading. “Two fatalities confirmed on scene, Fremont Airstrip. ATF requested for investigation. IDs posted the following morning…Silas Blackwell…Billy Manning.”
A ringing starts in my ears.
“Confirmed?” Ryder asks.
Jake nods. “County upload time-stamped, mirrored from the morgue feed. It’s real.”
The recliner creaks as Wyatt stands up. “Billy’s dead?” he calls from the living room.
Jake nods and keeps reading. “Cause of death listed as smoke inhalation. Secondary thermal burns. Fuel-line ignition noted.”
The room folds in on itself. For a second I can’t breathe. The world narrows around the rhythm of my pulse.
Billy’s dead.
The shock of it is visceral, like someone punched me in the sternum.
For years his shadow has loomed over every part of my life. Even after I escaped, he still owned the air I breathed, his voice always in my head, his rules always in my bones.
Now, in an instant, it’s gone?
I should feel lighter. Instead I just feel…untethered.
Jake’s still talking, voice distant through the rush in my ears. “No active warrants, no BOLOs matching our vehicle. Local chatter’s all containment and cleanup.”
Ryder moves closer to the table, light catching the blond hairs on his forearm. “So no one’s looking out this way. That’s good.”
The room suddenly feels claustrophobic. Too close. Outside, wind stirs the trees, and for a moment I imagine the sound is the ocean instead of leaves.
“I just need some air,” I hear myself say, half-whispered.
I’m not even sure if I’ve said it out loud.
I get up and head through the living room feeling unsteady on my feet.
When I push the screen door open, I suck back the cool air like there was no oxygen in the cabin.
I breathe deeply until the taste of metal in my mouth fades.
Then I’m walking past the treeline toward the glint of the lake. The cold sand bites my feet through my socks.
Billy’s dead.
My captor, the monster.
Billy who once said he’d never let anything hurt me, and then did everything he could to hurt me himself.
It would be sick to mourn him. But the shock running through me is a kind of grief. There was a time when he was safety. When the world outside his arms was worse.
Wind whips across the lake, making the surface ripple busily. The sky’s pewter-gray, still overcast even though the rain has stopped. I drop into the sand and hug my arms around knees.
I was thirteen when we met. Fourteen when I ran to him. Seventeen when we moved to the clubhouse. He built a whole kingdom I thought was ours, but the higher he rose, the more he looked down on me.
I dig my fingers into the cold sand, and crumble the gritty texture between my fingers. Somewhere deep down, something fragile loosens and moves. A tide shifting direction.
I’m free.
The thought circles cautiously.
Billy will never come for me again.
No one to collar or cage me.
I press my fingers to my throat, half-expecting to feel the leather of his claim, but there’s nothing there.
Just me.
The sound of footsteps crunches behind me and I think it must be Wyatt. It’s always Wyatt when I need him. But when the shadow reaches me, it’s Jake who drops down at my side.
He leans his elbows on his knees and stares out at the gray water for a beat, then turns to me, green eyes startlingly bright in the overcast light, eyebrows knitted.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” I answer.
Like Billy, Jake was a first love. He was the first of these men to hold me and comfort me and help me make a home among them.
But yesterday he could barely look at me.
Now he’s sitting close enough that I can feel the warmth off his arm, and I want nothing more than to lean into him. For him to hold me the way he used to.
“I’m sorry about Billy Manning,” he says.
I sigh. I don’t even know if I’m sad. Everything about Billy is a knot.
“It’s fine,” I say. “I’m just…processing.”
He nods, pressing his lips together, and looks out at the water again. “Wyatt told me some things about him. It didn’t sound great, but I guess you two had a history that could be…complicated.”
I pick at a pebble, flick it into the shallows. “Yeah. We knew each other since we were kids. So…a lot of history.”
“A lot of history to keep quiet about.”
I suppress a flinch.
“I never for a second thought anyone could get hurt. I never would have thought Billy—” I start, but he holds up a hand to stop me.
“I know, Max. I know you didn’t mean any harm. I’m sorry if I seemed dismissive yesterday, but I’m struggling to reconcile the girl I thought I knew with the girl it turns out I didn’t know at all. I’m just trying to figure out who exactly it was that I was looking for these past four months.”
That stings. I look out to the water so he can’t see the flash of heat on my cheeks.
“I’m still the same girl,” I say quietly, and he lets out a heavy breath.
“You know,” he says after a minute, “I don’t believe in black and white thinking.
Good/bad, right/wrong, that kind of thing.
People are complicated. Life is complicated.
But what is important to me is trust. You know me, Max.
I’m not the guy who needs labels or rules.
I don’t care about any of that. Honesty, being real with each other, protecting each other, these are the things that matter to me.
We have to have each other’s backs. That’s all we’ve got in this world. ”
I nod, staring at the water, a pit opening in my stomach.
God, he’s been good to me. Better than I’ve ever deserved. And all I’ve done is make things messy—lie to him, keep things from him, and leave unfinished wreckage between us.
My mind flicks back to the last night at Ryder’s before everything went to hell.
Before I was taken. Damian and Jake walking into Ryder’s house to find me in Ryder’s t-shirt, the two of us nervous and strange around each other in a way we hadn’t been before, and Damian scowling, putting it all together.
And then…no chance to fix any of it. No chance to explain.
Just gone. Ripped away. For months.
A hot twist of guilt knots my stomach.
“I know I’ve let you down,” I say quietly.
“Not just with the O.D. stuff. Even before all of this. There was that last night at Ryder’s…
we never talked about that.” I don’t know how to say it.
When I slept with Ryder. “When Damian and Ryder fought…” I finish small.
Pathetically. I pull my sleeves over my hands. “I’m sorry. For all of it.”
Jake shakes his head with a kind of startled softness. “Max…I’m not carrying that around. What happened that night was between you and Ryder. You don’t owe me anything.” He shakes his head. “You didn’t betray me. You didn’t cheat on me. That was never the deal.”
I blink at him, thrown off balance, and his mouth twitches into a mischievous smile.
“And for the record, last night? That doesn’t bother me either.”
It takes me a second to realize what he means, and then heat snaps up my neck. Ryder and I moving in the dark, his hand over my mouth, his breath against my skin while Jake slept only inches away.
“I’m not the jealous type, Max. I never was,” he says, voice even. “Sharing isn’t a problem. But secrets are.” He tips his head, finally meeting my eyes. “I need the truth. That’s a hard line for me.”
I nod, cheeks burning. “Okay.”
“Okay,” he echoes, like that’s the end of it.
For a while we sit in silence, me processing everything he had to say, listening to the lake shift and sigh against the shore. Then he pushes his palms into the sand and rises, brushing them on his jeans, and holds out a hand.
“Come on.”
I take his hand, and he pulls me to my feet and then doesn’t let go. We walk back toward the house hand in hand, fingers gritty with sand.
For the first time in a while, Billy isn’t somewhere out there waiting to punish me.
My fingers lift again to my throat. Still nothing there but skin and breath. And I’m still standing.