Chapter Seven
THE RAIN HANGS in the air, too fine to fall, but misting heavily enough to cling to everything. The sky is dark and close, pressing in, but the cabin is cozy with the fire burning in the grate and the lamps on to drive away the gloom.
I’m sprawled on the couch reading a paperback I discovered that Wyatt brought with him, about the war in Vietnam. Not the reading material I would choose for myself, but better than staring at the ceiling. From this angle, I can see three of the men where they’re keeping busy in the kitchen.
Damian’s at the table cleaning a gun, pistol parts laid out in tidy rows, working with the kind of concentration I’m familiar with, just like when he was working on cars.
The rag in his hand squeaks against the metal as he rubs it clean.
Wyatt sits beside him, trying to act like he isn’t hurting, spine straight and jaw tight.
Jake’s against the wall, cross-legged on the floor with the diagnostics tablet balanced on his knees, close to the antenna taped to the rain-beaded window. His concentration is as intense as Damian’s.
Finally, he breaks the silence. “Hey, Wy,” he says. “You ever seen diagnostic software that logs in two places at once? One local, one…ghost copy somewhere else?”
“You mean a backup?”
“Not exactly.” Jake frowns down at the screen. “This one’s mirroring to a directory that doesn’t exist. Or maybe it does, but it’s off-network. I don’t know. It’s weird.”
Wyatt shrugs. “Everything about that clubhouse was weird.”
Jake nods, but he’s still scowling. “Yeah. Just feels like somebody built more into this thing than they told the mechanics about.”
Damian snorts without looking up. “Are you suggesting the O.D. doesn’t keep clean books?”
Jake waves him off, saying the timestamps are corrupted.
Outside, the sound of an axe hitting wood cracks. Ryder’s splitting logs.
The cabin is small. There’s nowhere to go that isn’t someone else’s orbit.
I don’t mind it, I just don’t know if this is life now—five people breathing the same air, suspended in limbo.
I don’t know what the plan is, whether we’re going back to Redwater, what any of this means for me…
I’m just going with the flow. I trust these men implicitly, and I know that whatever we’re waiting for, whatever they think the threat is, they have a plan.
I settle back into my book, trying to lose myself in an unfamiliar world of smoke and jungle against the backdrop of small human sounds.
Metal clicking as Damian reassembles his weapon and then lays out another, Jake cursing softly, Wyatt clearing his throat.
Wood cracking outside and falling to the ground with a soft thud.
All the background sounds layered together.
The rustling as I turn a page, and the low humming of the generator… until the humming breaks.
The generator coughs, a deep mechanical stutter that makes every head lift, and then the lights blink—once, twice—and die.
“Oh shit.” Damian pushes back from the table and stands.
“Fuck,” curses Jake, putting the tablet down.
Damian crosses through the living room, footsteps heavy, and swings the front door open, leaning out. “Ryder!” he calls. “What’s up? You doing something with the genny?”
“Nope,” comes the reply. “She just choked.”
“Fuck,” Damian says under his breath, and slips his shoes on and heads outside.
A minute later, the two of them come back in, cold air and the smell of wet earth wafting in with them. Ryder flushed and in a t-shirt despite the cold, Damian frowning.
“Fucking generator’s dead,” he calls toward the kitchen.
“I need the power steady,” Jake whines. “The battery on this thing is half gone.”
“We’re out of gas,” says Ryder. “Generator’s done.”
“I can go,” Wyatt offers, but the words dissolve into a cough.
“No, you can’t,” I say sharply. He tries to wave me off, but I can see the pain behind his eyes.
“I’ll go,” Ryder says, already reaching for the truck keys hanging by the door. He crosses to a cedar chest under the window, where Damian stacked the Walmart haul, lifting a gray sweatshirt from the pile of cotton clothes.
“I’ll come,” I volunteer, tucking a bookmark into my book and sitting up.
“Fine,” says Ryder, grabbing another hoodie from the pile and tossing it to me. “Put that on. It’s cold out.”
It hits my chest with a soft thud, smelling of new cotton. I pull it over my head, the sleeves swallowing my hands, then slip into the slightly too big runners Damian bought for me.
“Let’s go,” says Ryder, opening the door.
Outside, the drizzle is fine and relentless, turning the clearing to mud. I jog after him through the damp, hood up, breath fogging in the chill. The cabin vanishes behind a wash of mist as I pull the door shut.
Ryder starts the engine and reverses, tires squelching in the muck before finding the ruts of the gravel road.
The truck noses onto the narrow track that winds through the pines.
Even in daylight, everything looks dim and washed-out.
Ryder drives with one hand on the wheel and one on the gearshift, eyes fixed ahead.
The wipers dragging across the windshield smear the mist into wet ribbons.
Wyatt’s cabin is a good distance from the main road, so it takes us about five minutes before the trees clear and we hit pavement, and then we drive for another five minutes before I begin to wonder if Ryder is ever going to say anything.
I look at the side of his face—the hard line of his profile against the delicate and absurdly long fringe of eyelashes that frame his dark brown eyes—and feel the familiar aching pull in my center that I always feel when I look at him.
He’s so beautiful it hurts. A god carved from granite.
Strong hands gripping the wheel, trim beard covering a chiseled jaw.
“You’re quiet,” I finally say.
He shifts gears, the engine growling, and says nothing.
I face forward and sigh. Ryder is always quiet, but he broods, too. When something’s bothering him, he has to process it before he can talk about it. And then, eventually, he does. He’s not someone to avoid conflict, but he needs self-control to be ready.
We race down the highway, the spray of water under the tires hissing, and then the rain starts in earnest, hitting the windshield with fat drops.
He flicks the wiper switch and they move faster.
The gray sky looks like it’s dissolving in tears.
There’s no delineation between the clouds and the rain.
“You were in Wyatt’s bed last night,” he says finally. It’s not a question. He darts a look over to me, face unreadable.
“Yeah.” We had woken up later than the others and come out of the room yawning. Everyone knows. “I heard him coughing in the night and went in to check on him. We talked for a bit and I fell asleep.”
He nods once, jaw working. I can practically see the wheels turning behind that still expression.
“Guess you two went through a lot together in the clubhouse,” he says at last.
The words are calm but there’s something underneath, the kind of control Ryder uses when he’s holding back fire.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “We did.”
I keep my eyes trained on the window. For a moment I’m not in the truck anymore. I’m back in the clubhouse. The noise, the fear, the smell of oil and smoke and sweat. “I wouldn’t have survived in there without him. He saved me.”
He looks over again, brow creased with a mix of tenderness and sorrow.
“I’m glad he was there for you. What you went through…” He shakes his head. “I can’t even imagine…” He trails off.
“Yeah,” I whisper.
Memory flashes—seeing Wyatt in that place for the first time, realizing that I wasn’t completely alone. That somehow, there was a thread back to them. To this.
Ryder’s voice pulls me back. “You two must’ve become close.”
The understatement of the century. My throat goes dry. I can hear what he’s not saying, what he doesn’t want to demand outright.
“We did,” I admit. “Closer than either of us planned to.”
The first night we got here, Ryder and I talked for hours.
I told him how Billy claimed me, then tired of me.
How Wyatt stepped in, how he kept me alive.
But we only covered the facts, the surface, the important bits.
I didn’t tell him that Wyatt and I were lovers because we didn’t go deeper. And because it’s hard to tell him.
“Ryder,” I say finally. “I thought you were dead. Wyatt did too. We took refuge in each other, in a place that was nothing but dark.”
He nods once, slowly, already braced for it. “So you slept with him.”
His tone is neutral, but there’s a trace of grit under it.
“Yes.”
He presses his lips together, eyes still fixed on the road. I don’t fill the silence. I’ve learned not to. He has to chew on it, find his footing.
“That’s…kind of fucking with my head,” he admits after a while.
I nod. “I can understand that.”
He glances over, quick, then back to the road. “Did you sleep with him last night?”
The question takes me by surprise. “No,” I say, startled. “Ryder, the man can barely breathe.”
“Oh, so you didn’t because you couldn’t?”
Fuck. Ryder and I have been here before. When the temperature rises between us it turns snippy quick. I take a breath to resist my own temptation to snap back at him, inhaling through my nose and then blowing it out.
“Come on. That’s not fair.”
He exhales hard, scrubs a hand over his jaw. “I know. I just—” The words break off. “It’s hard to picture. Harder not to.”
The truck hums through the rain, wheels hissing over wet asphalt. I stare out at the blur of trees, waiting for the storm in him to settle.
“I don’t want to fight,” I say finally. “But I also can’t apologize for surviving.”