Chapter Ten
RYDER
Never thought I was the kind of guy who wanted a woman barefoot in the kitchen.
Not until Max padded in this morning, hair tied up in a messy knot that keeps losing pieces, gray sweatpants and a white t-shirt hanging too loose on her skinny frame, no socks on.
Max sleepy, casual, and domestic is cute as shit.
She gives me a soft smile and thanks Damian for putting the kettle on, then drops a tea bag into her mug.
When she stretches and yawns, her shirt pulls tight for a second before it settles again, reshaping over her body.
No bra. The fabric peaks and drapes over the high, firm globes of her breasts, outlining everything.
My cock twitches reflexively in my pants at the sight, like it’s got a mind of its own. An animal I can’t fucking tame.
Her toenails are painted a deep purple with sparkles in it, something she must’ve done back at the clubhouse.
I catch myself glancing at them, wondering when she had the time.
A stolen hour between hell and humiliation?
But I guess in the midst of all that chaos there must be normal moments.
Taking a shower, painting her toenails, fucking Wyatt—
Yeah. That thought still saws me open. Feels like every time I close my eyes I picture the two of them together, and it fucking burns me up—jealousy, possession, fury…
But there’s something else underneath it that’s almost worse. Heat. A low, sharp spark that shouldn’t be there at all.
Max’s mouth, her body, Wyatt’s hands on her. The way she’d arch under his touch, open for him…Christ.
The thought knocks me off balance every damn time it intrudes. The shame of reacting that way burns hotter than my jealousy. I have to shove the whole mess down fast before it can turn into anything I have to look at too closely.
A strand of hair falls loose and Max huffs it out of her eyes with a soft breath, completely unselfconscious.
She’s beautiful. Not the polished kind, but bright and improbable and lively in a way that makes everything else look muted and washed out in comparison.
Violet eyes that still light up even after what she’s been through.
A mouth so soft and so full—and so fucking sassy, I think with a small smile.
I’ve known warriors with less fight in them.
And God help me, I don’t know what the plan is.
Am I supposed to give her up forever because she and Wyatt clung to each other when they thought I was dead?
Am I supposed to stand back and watch her drift toward him or Jake or Damian because I pushed her away?
I don’t know. I only know that I can’t live without her, and I sure as hell don’t know how to live with the idea of losing her.
She reaches past Damian for a spoon and steadies herself with a hand on his back like his body is familiar terrain, and there it is again—complication, sharp as a blade.
She was with Damian, too. How did she react when he touched her? What did his hands and mouth draw out of her?
My tongue drags over my lip and I have to look away.
Max as a sexual object is becoming binary for me in a way I don’t understand.
Max’s touch and feel, her skin against mine, the squeeze of her pussy as I fuck her, deep inside…
and Max as an erotic image instead of a sensation.
Max with other men, and what it would be like to watch her.
It’s too much to think about. Too dangerous and twisted and fucked up. She belongs to all of us in her own way, and I clearly just don’t have a map for how that works.
I push back from the table and reach for my boots.
“I’m going to check the water system,” I say, lacing them up. “Make sure the overflow tank isn’t full after all that rain.”
I step outside, letting the door shut behind me, and breathe in the cold until my pulse steadies.
By the time I’m done with the water system and heading back toward the cabin, the rain has completely let up, and the sun is knifing through the trees in icy white streaks. The lake is hammered silver under the glare. The world feels rinsed clean and sharp.
Inside, Jake is still bent over the diagnostics tablet.
“Hey.” He looks up as I walk in, picking up as if we’re mid-conversation. “So…I’ve been banging my head against this stupid rig all morning, and then I thought, hey, maybe check if there’s any news of the senator.”
“Okay,” I say slowly, untying my boots and kicking them off. “And?”
Jake holds up the tablet and reads from it: “State v. Jack Hargrove, Motion to Dismiss Granted on Procedural Grounds. Defendant released pending refiling.”
Ah. Fuck.
Wyatt walks in from the kitchen and leans against the doorframe. “When was he released?”
“Yesterday,” answers Jake.
“Well, shit,” Damian calls from the bedroom, where he’s lying down but clearly listening. A moment later he walks into the room and sinks onto the couch beside Jake.
Max comes up beside Wyatt. She doesn’t say anything, but when I lift my eyes to hers, she’s looking right back at me, violet gaze holding mine steady.
Billy made me bring him drugs and cash at a hotel, she had said yesterday. I was supposed to be—pause—a gift.
This time the thing twisting me up isn’t jealousy. It’s rage. Hot, clean, and aimed straight at a man I’d like to put in the ground.
“Out on a technicality,” Jake elaborates. “Case got tossed. They can refile, I guess, but let’s be real. He’s probably nuking every scrap of evidence.”
My vision narrows, tunneled in on Max’s small, controlled inhale.
Of course he walks. Men like that always do. Senators, club presidents, assholes with shiny bikes and dead girls behind them. The uniforms may change, but the patterns don’t.
“So he’ll wipe everything,” I hear myself say.
Wyatt frowns. “I’m sure he’s already got people tearing through shell companies and burner accounts. Cleaners. They’ll be scrubbing financial trails and clearing out whatever’s in the clubhouse, making sure nothing points back to him.”
Jake looks at me, the expression on his face an appeal. “After the handshake from Silas’s tablet, our location probably isn’t exactly a fucking secret, by the way.”
A cold thread winds down my spine. If someone wanted to clean house, they’d start with the people Silas kept tabs on.
Max would be at the top of that list.
“Okay,” I say slowly. “So what do we do?”
Wyatt exhales heavily and folds his arms over his chest. “What if we got our hands on Silas’s surveillance?”
“How are we supposed to do that?” Damian arches an eyebrow. “If Hargrove got out yesterday, wouldn’t the first thing he’d want to clean up be the surveillance of an outlaw motorcycle club that’s sitting on a federal server somewhere?”
“Wyatt, you said Silas kept offline copies, didn’t you?” Jake asks.
Wyatt nods. “A whole wall of drives.”
“So we go get them,” Jake says, like it’s that simple.
“But Hargrove’s people would probably know about those too.” Damian runs a hand through his hair, scratching his scalp.
“They might,” says Wyatt. “But they don’t know the clubhouse the way me and Max do.”
Jake frowns, thinking his way through it.
“If Silas was tech-minded—and he was—he wouldn’t have left a wall of drives sitting there readable like a fucking scrapbook.
They’re probably encrypted. If it were me, I’d use a separate hardware key, like an HSM token.
Basically a physical key. If we go back, we’re looking for both, the drives and the key.
Without the key, those offline files are probably encrypted garbage.
But with it, we could not only access the files but prove their legitimacy, too.
Device signatures, timestamps. I could restore the whole provenance chain. ”
A moment of silence passes while we look at one another, everyone calculating, weighing.
“So do we go back?” I ask, eyeing them in turn.
Wyatt shrugs. “Either we sit up here in the woods and watch him rewrite the story…or we go back and at least try to stop him.”
By late afternoon we’ve stripped the cabin bare. Gear packed, cars partially loaded, perishable food stashed, and our garbage divided into trash and recycling. Considering we brought almost nothing with us, it’s amazing how much stuff we have to manage now.
There’s no garbage pickup out here, you haul your own shit to the dump. Wyatt ties off the last bag and drops it beside the others with a wince while he and Jake debate tomorrow’s timing.
“It’s gonna add an hour if we take the garbage to the dump first,” Jake complains.
I eye the two piles. “Why don’t we haul the plastics out with us and dump them at home, and burn the rest?”
“Yesss,” Damian says behind me, going for a fist bump. I shut that down with a look.
“Fine,” Wyatt grunts.
“Saves us an hour,” Jake says. “That’s all I care about.”
Once the packing’s done, we throw ourselves into building the fire just to keep busy. Jake and Damian dig a pit and line it with rocks Max collects from the lake. I take a chainsaw to a downed tree near the road, cutting it into sections and hauling the rounds back to make benches.
The cabin is Wyatt’s. It was always meant to be his eventual retreat. But none of that matters right now. There’s no question he’s coming with us until the mission’s done.
And I can’t see him leaving Max. The realization lands without the spike of jealousy I’d expected. I don’t want him to leave us either.
We make salads and sandwiches to use up the fresh food, then head out to the fire pit as the sun starts to drop behind the trees.
Damian lights the kindling with a wooden match and says ceremoniously, “Well, happy Hellbent Eve, everyone!”
Jake actually laughs.
“That’s not a thing,” I tell him.
“Lighten up, grandpa,” Damian smirks. “You haven’t forgotten what tomorrow is, have you?”