Chapter Eighteen #2
“We’re hoping to find anything they might have left behind,” Wyatt answers. “Silas was a paranoid bastard, you know that. He didn’t trust anyone. Plus he loved knowing he could spy on all of us. We think he might’ve kept a private stash. Backups to his backups.”
“Silas was a fucking creep,” says Pluto. “No doubt about that. But I never heard anything about no government money buying this building.”
“Billy lied to you,” I explain. “To all of us. This club was never what he pretended it was. It was just a way for him to become powerful. He helped rich fuckers in the government get richer. Is that what you want on your backs when shit goes down?” The strength of my words surprises me.
It comes out without me thinking about it.
The men just stare back at me, brows drawing tight, resentment and disbelief settling over their features.
“We want to search his room, the office, look around in case anything was missed. And then we want to check the barracks, too.” I look at Babydoll and she nods.
“He did go back there a lot,” Pluto confirms. “He had a room he was using.”
“And if you find anything?” Cipher asks. “Then fucking what?”
“Then we use it to bring down Hargrove and destroy his legacy,” I answer. “The O.D. story becomes we took him down, not we built him up.”
Cipher stares at me like I’ve slapped him.
Pluto’s eyes flick toward the TV again, to Hargrove’s smiling face, to the clean-cut man behind him, and then back to me.
I’ve never spoken this directly to either of them before.
Heck, I’ve probably just said more words to them than I ever spoke in my eight years with the club.
Babydoll just watches me levelly, hip against the bar, dish towel twisted tight in her hands, like she’s waiting to see how this all plays out.
“It’s your prerogative, boss,” Cipher says to Wyatt. “You can search the whole clubhouse if you want.”
Wyatt nods. “Then let’s do it.”
The stairs creak under my weight the same way they always did.
The wood has the same uneven give. The air gets cooler as we climb to the second floor, and the hairs on the back of my neck lift.
It’s exactly the way it always was, and yet it’s completely different.
I’ve climbed these steps a thousand times, but now I’m walking in the ashes of what was.
Upstairs, the hallway is just a narrow plank overlooking the main floor, doors lined up on one side. We stop at the second last door, the room right before Billy’s—me, Wyatt, Pluto, and Cipher.
The door is already cracked open, which I’ve never seen before. Silas’s door was always locked. Always.
Wyatt pushes the door wider, and inside, Silas’s room looks like someone lost their mind in it. Drawers yanked out and dumped. Mattress slashed open. The closet door hangs crooked on one hinge. A lamp lies shattered on the floor, cord torn out of the wall.
“They turned everything over,” Pluto explains.
Wyatt steps in slowly, careful not to kick debris, and I follow, strangely nervous. I’m walking into the haunted house version of my past. I feel like I’ve come with a camera crew to film a documentary about what happened to the feared motorcycle club, the Order of Disorder.
Wyatt crouches and runs his fingers along the bare floorboards, then straightens and moves to the wall. He reaches up, testing a section of drywall that’s already been disturbed, the edge faintly visible if you know what you’re looking for. He peels it back and looks inside.
Empty.
“Nothing left,” he says. “Let’s check downstairs.”
We leave the wreck behind and head back down. Every step away from Billy’s door loosens something in my chest.
Downstairs, the hangar is louder now with voices and movement.
Brandon is sitting at a table in jeans and a hoodie, hair damp.
Cricket stands beside him in an oversized t-shirt, arms crossed tight over her chest. Knox and Jade are behind the bar, pouring themselves coffee.
They come around with mugs in their hands, Knox yawning, and Jade watching us with narrowed eyes.
“Morning,” Wyatt says, his gaze moving over all of them. “Yeah. I’m back.” He lets that hang for half a beat. “And she’s with me.”
Four sets of eyes flick to me, but no one says anything.
“You’ve probably heard by now why we’re here,” Wyatt continues.
“We’re looking for anything of Silas’s those suits missed the other day.
That story about Senator Jack Hargrove isn’t just some made-up tale.
We have evidence that Silas was turning over all club surveillance to the senator.
Now he’s looking to clean up after himself.
Billy was involved from the beginning. The senator was funding the entire club as a front for his own illegal operations. ”
He gestures toward the ground floor doorway to Silas’s tech room. “We’re going room by room. If you’re here, you’re in the loop. But we’re not asking anything of you.”
Knox raises his hand, like he’s in class. “And then what?” he asks.
“Then we get leverage,” Wyatt answers. “Then we stop waiting for suits to write our ending.” His gaze cuts briefly to Cipher and Pluto, then back to Knox.
“Nobody’s getting dragged out in cuffs because Silas wanted insurance.
We find what he hid, we use it to bring down Senator Hargrove.
This club may have operated as a front for government corruption under Billy, but that’s not the way it’s gonna continue now that he’s gone, is it? ”
There’s a shift in the room. Glances exchanged, small nods of the head. A sense of relief. Direction. Someone’s steering the ship again.
Wyatt turns to me and Cipher like it’s settled. “Tech room next,” he says, jerking his chin toward the back.
We start walking again, the four of us—Cipher, Pluto, me and Wyatt. This time Brandon and Knox come too. The old ladies sit together at a table near the bar, watching us as we walk away.
Cipher stops in front of the tech room door. The biometric lock is dead, no lights blinking. The faceplate is slightly crooked, like it was pried off on one side. The door is ajar, too, and like Silas’s bedroom, inside it’s gutted. But this one has been picked clean.
Shelves stripped bare. Dusty outlines on the desks where monitors would have been. Wyatt’s eyes scan every corner. His gaze catches on a single metal bracket still bolted to the wall, where something heavy used to be mounted. He reaches out, touches it, then drops his hand.
“Well, shit,” he mutters. “They sure were thorough.”
Billy’s office is the same story. Biometric lock gone dark, faceplate shifted with a neat little wound of tampering.
The desk drawers are dumped. Cabinets yanked open.
Papers scattered everywhere. We don’t linger.
Wyatt circles slowly, lifts some papers up with the edges of fingers and shakes his head.
Our whole little group heads out and walks through the center of the hangar to the back doors, the old ladies watching us as we pass.
Outside, the cold stings my cheeks. The sun makes me squint.
The barracks sit behind the clubhouse hangar.
Two low wooden outbuildings, built beside each other in parallel lines.
They were built after I first left, while I was living with Ryder and the guys, and they’ve never been used.
I don’t know what their purpose is, but I assume they were intended for storage of some kind.
We reach the first barracks door, and it’s locked. Cipher steps forward and pulls a key ring from his pocket, trying a few until he gets the right key and it turns. The lock clicks open.
The air inside is stale. The barracks is a long hallway with doors on both sides. Empty rooms, most with bunk beds. Halfway down, Wyatt stops at a closed door that doesn’t match the others. It has a new lock that requires a code for entry.
“I don’t have the code for that,” says Cipher with a shrug.
Wyatt leans in, studies it, and frowns. “You got a flat bar?” he asks Cipher.
“In the shop,” Cipher answers.
“Go get it.”
Cipher turns and jogs back down the hall.
While he’s gone, Wyatt crouches, checks the bottom edge of the door, the frame, and the hinge pins. When Cipher finally comes back, breathing a little harder, Wyatt takes the bar and wedges it between the door and the frame, right beside the lock.
“They always cheap out somewhere,” he says, and puts his weight into it. The frame groans, wood cracking, and then there’s a pop as the bolt tears free, the doorjamb splintering.
The room inside is small and organized.
A cot. A desk. A rolling chair. A metal cabinet bolted to the wall. A cheap rug on the floor.
Wyatt crosses the space, eyes locked on the cabinet, and tests it. Locked.
He does a quick scan, then crouches, running his hands over the desk legs, the underside of the chair, the edge of the rug—then he flips the corner of the rug back, and there it is: a key taped to the floorboard.
“Jesus,” Cipher mutters. “Not bad.”
“Silas probably didn’t actually expect anyone to come looking back here,” Wyatt explains.
He peels the tape off, slots the key, and turns it.
The cabinet opens with a soft metal click.
Inside is a hard black case that Wyatt lifts out carefully and sets on the desk, flipping the latches to open it.
It’s lined with fitted foam, holding several metal drive cases labeled in a neat hand, along with a small black brick fitted with a port.
Knox leans closer, looking at the drives in the case. “What is it?”
“They’re storage drives,” says Wyatt. “Probably footage, audio recordings, maybe notes, emails. Who knows?” He taps one of the drives with a knuckle. “This looks like it might be his special treasure, given the effort he put into hiding it. Maybe it’s a curated collection.”
“Fucking freak,” hisses Pluto.
Wyatt tilts his head at him. “Ironically, Silas’s pervy little hobby might be our only chance to redeem this motorcycle club.”
We file back to the clubhouse in silence, cutting across the dried autumn grass. Wyatt carries the case in one hand, knuckles straining. It looks heavy. I hope the effort isn’t hurting his ribs.
We walk down to the bar area and Wyatt swings the heavy case onto a table beside the old ladies.
“We found something,” Cipher tells them.
Babydoll points at the case. “That all his little videos in there?”
“Not by half,” says Wyatt. “But with any luck this is the stuff he thought was valuable. The shit that senator really hopes no one finds.”
“I can’t fucking believe this,” says Brandon with a bitter laugh. “It felt fucked up, you know? These past few years. Like shit kept getting weirder and heavier. If this is what you say it is, then this whole club has been a complete fucking joke.”
“Don’t say that,” says Cipher. He waves a hand around the space. The empty chairs, the quiet bar. “This was still something. For better or worse.”
“But not what we thought,” says Pluto. “We all knew Silas was a creep, but…” He stops and shakes his head. “That’s not a brother. That’s a rat.”
Babydoll’s eyes are bright with fury. “And Billy let him.”
“Billy used him like he used all of us,” Jade cuts in.
“This used to feel like my fucking family,” says Brandon, eyes glistening with emotion. “But instead it was just Billy’s fucking operation.”
Pluto makes a sound like he’s choking and then he reaches up and starts peeling his cut off. He folds it with a kind of sad reverence, like he’s putting something to rest that meant a lot to him, and sets it on the floor.
Then Knox does it too, but rougher. Rips his off and tosses it down like it burns him.
Brandon’s hands shake as he pulls the vest off.
Cipher yanks his off in one violent motion.
Jade—who never wore one, who never got to—laughs softly and cruelly.
Babydoll says nothing. She just watches me with a strange kind of pride, like she’s seeing me finally stand up straight.