Chapter Eighteen
WE ROLL UP to the clubhouse the next day in two vehicles.
“Last chance to turn around,” Jake says over the cheap walkie-talkie we each have in our cars. “No refunds.”
I grin and pick up the device. I’m playing with it too much. It’s stupidly fun. “Roger that,” I answer. “The eagle has landed. Over and out.”
“Ask him if he’s killed the cameras,” Wyatt tells me, eyes on the road.
I press the button again. “Did you kill the cameras? Marshall wants to know. Ten-four.”
Wyatt’s mouth twitches. “You’re terrible at this.”
Static crackles, then Jake. “Working on it.”
I glance at Wyatt. “That means no.”
“It means,” Jake says through the device, patience thin but amused, “I’m about to jack in, but I don’t know what I’m walking into.
Best case, I loop the exterior cams and freeze a clean five-minute window.
Worst case, I kill the upload and wipe today’s timestamped chunk before it goes anywhere useful. ”
I can hear Ryder’s voice at Jake’s end. “You see anything weird, you pull the plug.”
“Boss says be careful out there,” Jake says. A burst of static, then a click as he shuts the walkie off.
Wyatt and I approach the entrance in Damian’s truck.
Jake, Damian, and Ryder park in a clearing down the road.
Jake’s posted up in Damian’s back seat with a laptop and a hotspot, trying to get access to Silas’s surveillance cameras.
And Ryder and Damian are just waiting—ready to jump in if everything goes to shit and Wyatt calls them in.
It’s a fiercely cold October day, but the sun is blazing, not a cloud in the sky.
It’s the type of weather that makes anything look beautiful—except the clubhouse.
As it looms into view, my heart sinks lower and lower.
It’s the weight of all those memories there, almost all of them bad. My palms are sweating.
Wyatt parks the truck out front and we get out.
I can’t help but flick a glance to the treeline for any sign of Ryder, Jake or Damian.
Some reassurance that they’re there. But there’s just the dark line of trees.
Beside me, Wyatt seems stiffer. More contained, like he’s buttoned something up inside.
This is the subtle difference in him as “Ryan Porter.” He’s in role.
The lot in front of the hangar used to be a mess of chrome and noise—rows of bikes, and always music bleeding out of the hangar. The perpetual smell of gasoline and weed. But it’s empty and quiet. No vehicles at all. No music. Just the faint creak of metal in the wind.
“Ghost town,” says Wyatt under his breath.
The big hangar door is propped open. We exchange the briefest of glances before we walk in. Inside, the clubhouse feels even stranger. Quieter than I’ve ever seen it.
It’s ten o’clock in the morning, early by motorcycle club standards, but Cipher and Pluto are seated at a table eating bacon and eggs. They stare at us as we stroll through the front doors, like they can’t believe their eyes.
“Well, holy shit,” says Cipher. “Look who’s not fucking dead.”
Wyatt smiles a little—Ryan’s smile, wry and understated. “Hey, brother.”
They get up from the table, smiling. They’re happy to see us.
“Jesus, girl,” says Pluto, putting a hand on my shoulder. He searches my face like he doesn’t know what to say, and then pulls me into a hug. “Didn’t think I was ever going to see you again.”
“Cockroach,” comes Babydoll’s voice from behind the bar.
She steps out, dish towel over one shoulder. Her eye makeup is smudged like she slept in it, hair twisted up haphazardly.
“Told you,” she says with a wink. “Hard to kill.”
Cipher’s eyes flick between us. “Where the fuck have you been?” he asks Wyatt. “You two just fucking evaporated in the middle of the apocalypse.”
“Had to take off for a bit,” Wyatt answers.
“Things were getting sketchy.” He glances at me briefly.
“Billy was suspicious, you know. Getting paranoid. Had Silas whispering in his ear about me. Wasn’t safe.
So we had to get out of the way, low-key.
” He glances around the deserted hangar.
“Never thought it would come to this, though. Shocking.”
Pluto shakes his head. “We’re still in the fallout, brother. Unbelievable what went down that night. Prez and VP dead, and then we go and find out you’re missing, too.”
“Yeah,” Cipher adds. “Whole club blew up in one night. Just a few of us still here now, trying to figure out next steps.”
Wyatt shakes his head, playing it like he’s just another man coming home to ashes.
“After Max ran into Babydoll yesterday, I figured if there was ever a moment I could come back without lighting myself up, this was it. I wanted to grab what I left behind. Tools, personal shit…And I wanted to see who was left. Close the loop.”
“’Course.” Cipher claps him on the back. “Good to see you back. Guess the clubhouse is yours by rights now, anyway. You’re welcome to stay as long as you want. You two want breakfast?” He looks at Babydoll, who’s apparently the cook, and she nods to let us know we’re welcome.
We both shake our heads.
“Wouldn’t want to put you out,” says Wyatt politely. “We ate earlier.”
Babydoll shrugs and turns back toward the bar. “Suit yourselves.”
My eyes follow her, the pink t-shirt stretched across her back so tight the lines of her bra make indents, and then my gaze drifts to the TV mounted above the bottles. It’s on a local news station, volume low, and what I see on the screen makes me freeze.
Senator Jack Hargrove stands behind a microphone outside a courthouse.
And standing behind him is a man so familiar it’s hard to say which face chills me to the bone more.
Older…mid-forties…
“It’s Maxwell, right?”
Clean-cut, accountant-looking guy. But I know him as someone who associates with bikers.
I never understood who he was. Not O.D. I never saw him in the clubhouse.
But in a suit on TV, standing behind Senator Hargrove, he looks right at home.
He’s not a biker. He’s in politics.
My vision tunnels. The room goes distant, like someone turned the volume knob on reality down a notch, but no one notices. They’re all watching the TV now.
HARGROVE RELEASED AFTER CASE DISMISSED ON PROCEDURAL GROUNDS scrolls along the bottom of the screen. A second line flashes: RELEASED PENDING REFILING.
Cipher snorts. “Can’t turn that shit off fast enough these days.”
Pluto shakes his head. “You hear about this story?” he asks Wyatt.
Wyatt nods.”Yeah.” He keeps watching the TV. “Pretty fucked up.”
Babydoll lifts an arm to point to the screen. “See that guy standing behind him?” She reaches up to tap her nail on the image of the man who took me that night.
Wyatt squints. “Yeah?”
“He’s the one who came through here the other day. They had hired guns with them. Walked right in. Went directly to Silas’s room, Billy’s office, the boardroom. He had a device to get through the locks. And they took out boxes of stuff. Had to load it into two vans.”
I’m still staring at the TV. My mind is racing with memories of that man’s face. How strange and out of place he’d been that night he’d approached me at Dewy’s.
“Having a good night?” he’d asked. Something about his smile made my skin crawl. “It’s Maxwell, right?”
And then the night that they took me. He and Silas yanking me into a van. Silas lifting his gun and shooting Ryder in the chest.
The same hands, the same face, but now he’s standing behind a U.S. senator on the news.
“Well,” Wyatt replies to Babydoll slowly, dragging it out. “That tracks.”
“How so?” asks Cipher.
Wyatt clears his throat. “You know the surveillance Silas was running?” I hear him say. “We have reason to believe it wasn’t just club security. Not the way it was set up.”
“Oh yeah?” Pluto sounds wary.
“Silas downloaded everything. He had it all saved offline, a whole wall of drives labelled by category in the tech room. Usually, with surveillance, you overwrite it regularly because storage gets expensive. You keep a day, maybe two, because you’re looking for a break-in or a fight.
But Silas was categorizing and uploading to an external server.
That’s not security, that’s documentation. ”
“What external server?” Cipher asks. “How do you know this?”
“I took Silas’s diagnostic tablet,” Wyatt confesses. “And I had someone in tech take a look at it. Someone who knows what they’re looking at. It was synced to a government server and copying files over to it.”
Babydoll’s expression sharpens. “Like a mirror.”
“Right.” Wyatt looks at her. “Like a mirror.”
“So what does this motherfucker want with the recordings?” Cipher points at the screen.
“At first, it would have been security,” Wyatt explains.
“Oversight. But now he wants it destroyed. Since his arrest, the feds are investigating whether Hargrove has ties to the club, and they’re going to find them.
He funded Billy, and in exchange Billy ran his side hustles for him.
Money laundering, drugs, weapons trafficking.
That’s racketeering under federal law. A RICO case would mean prison, asset forfeiture, and a public record that ties his name to organized crime forever. ”
“But Billy built this club from the ground up,” says Pluto, a frown in his voice.
Wyatt looks at me, and this time I manage to pull my focus away from the TV screen. I shake my head.
“No.” I have to clear my throat. “Mr. White—Senator Hargrove—paid Billy. He bought the hangar.” Cipher and Pluto look dumbstruck. “I went to their meetings. I watched Hargrove give Billy his first big check.”
“Shit.” Pluto rubs the patch on his leather vest with one hand as if by unconscious habit.
“So why are you really here?” Cipher cuts in. “They took everything, you know. Nothing left here but us chickens.”