Chapter Nineteen #2
“Someone Hargrove would put on TV?” Ryder asks. “That’s bold.”
“There’s more,” says Wyatt. “Max recognized him.”
I nod. “He approached me at Dewy’s once when I was there with Jake and Damian. Knew my name. I think he took the picture for the bounty post. And the night they took me…it was him with Silas.”
No one says anything for a beat.
“We need his name,” Ryder finally says. “And see if he shows up anywhere in the archive. Jake, tomorrow you and Max work together to go through those drives. She’s got the names and intel. And I want the name of that fucking aide.”
“Great,” says Jake, smiling. He turns to me. “We’ll start tomorrow. You can sit with me and we’ll go through it together. Build timelines, cross-reference, get this fucking airtight.”
Jake finally takes a bite of his chicken. He chews, swallows, then looks at me again, bright-eyed.
We start early the next morning. Jake carries a chair up from the basement so I can sit beside him at his bedroom desk, which is a whole command center—triple monitors, a custom-built tower, a big stack of external drives, cables tied up with zip ties, and a little labeled dock of adapters.
A mechanical keyboard in front of the screens, and a neat row of sticky notes along the bottom of one monitor with password hints, abbreviations, and dates.
Wyatt brings up coffee, like we’re about to embark on some deeply taxing work that only we can do and he wants to support us.
Before we even touch the first drive, Jake pulls up a replay of the courthouse clip. He pauses it when the aide steps into frame behind Hargrove.
“Smile for the internet,” Jake says, and takes a screenshot, cropping it tight. He opens another window and does a quick reverse image search.
A second later, he points to the screen. “Oh, he’s sloppy in the normal world,” he says. “Here.”
The same face, tagged in a charity-event photo beside Hargrove. A caption with a name: Adrian Mercer.
Jake drops the screenshot into a new folder labeled Adrian_Mercer.
Then we get started.
Jake creates folders with dates, locations, and names. He copies the categories that Silas wrote on the drive labels.
The first drive contains grainy footage from the hangar. Not one continuous stream, but clipped segments pulled from different cameras and stitched together. Silas has cut it like a reel, with angle changes mid-moment and timestamp jumps.
Jake scrubs through while I sit tight beside him, pointing when I recognize someone. He pauses, grabs a still frame, and drops it into a Faces folder with a timestamp.
After a bit, Jake toggles to the screenshot of Mercer, and then back to the hangar reel.
“I’m going to try something,” he says.
He pulls the Mercer image into a side panel on his screen and clicks through a few options. A progress bar opens up, and a grid of thumbnails loads, the computer running through faces, and then one of them lights up.
“Ah,” Jake says in a low, sing-song voice. “There you are.”
He clicks open the clip. It shows the table in the clubhouse boardroom. Billy is in frame, talking and gesturing. Two men in cuts stand off to the side against the wall. The door opens and a figure in a suit walks in, clearly Mercer. It’s the same posture, the same careful economy of movement.
“I didn’t go to this meeting,” I hear myself say.
I stare at the screen, at Billy’s body language, deferential in a way I don’t know how to articulate. Something about how wide he smiles, how attentive he is.
Jake drags the clip into the Adrian_Mercer folder and labels it with the timestamp. Then he opens his spreadsheet and adds a new tab, labelled Mercer.
Across the top he types: Timestamp, Camera, Location, Names. Underneath that he fills it out with the information from the clip.
He clicks back to the hangar reel and scrubs forward a few seconds. Billy laughs at something, then Mercer turns his head slightly, scanning the room, facing the camera directly for a moment.
Jake captures another still and saves it.
“Okay,” he says, closing the file. “Now we keep going.”
We view clip after clip, face after face. Sometimes I can’t name someone, but I can name the shape of the meeting—who Billy was trying to impress, when he got performative, when he got quiet. Jake marks those too.
On day two, Jake pulls up ledger entries and invoice lines.
“Education fund,” Jake reads aloud, eyebrows lifting. “Vet outreach. Community ride.”
“Education fund means payroll,” I say. “Payoffs. Sometimes weapons. Vet outreach is drugs, moving product through ‘medical supply.’ Community ride is a meeting with outsiders. People who don’t wear cuts.”
Jake nods once, and his fingers fly. He builds a glossary on a second screen, a living translation layer only I can provide.
By the end of day two, Jake can take one ledger entry, match it to an email header, match that to a timestamp, and then match the timestamp to a clip of someone in the hangar. Silas wanted a library, and Jake is turning it into a weapon.
Day three is where I almost break.
Jake pulls out a drive and shows me the label: MAX.
His voice is careful. Respectful. “This one is yours,” he says. “I don’t touch it unless you tell me to.”
My throat goes so dry it hurts. I just nod so that I don’t cough.
Jake keeps his gaze on mine. “I can wipe it, or you can keep it,” he says. “I can set you up to watch it privately if you want. Whatever you want.”
I swallow. “What’s in it?” I hear myself ask.
Jake shakes his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t open it.”
Silas, the creep, the watcher. Of course he saved what Billy did to me. Of course he saved what Billy made me do.
My hands go cold.
There’s a knock at the door, and Wyatt opens it holding two coffees. He looks at me, then at Jake, and frowns.
“You good?” he asks.
I take a breath. “Um…not really. But we’ve got it.”
His eyes hold mine for a beat. “If you need anything from me you’ll let me know?”
I press my lips together and nod, and he ducks back out, giving me one last meaningful look before he closes the door.
“Okay,” I say to Jake. “Save it, but…I don’t want to watch it.”
“Okay.” He nods. He creates a new folder and names it Evidence—Nonviewed.
“You’re in control,” he reiterates. “Anything you want to do with this, we do.”
He quarantines the drive and encrypts our copy.
After that, the work accelerates.
On day four, the dossier starts to look serious.
Jake builds a timeline that runs alongside my memory—two lines that finally match.
I point at a clip and name the man who walks in with his shoulders too square, his hair too neat.
Not a biker. Billy called him a staffer.
I point at another and tell Jake what it meant when Billy used a certain phrase.
Jake cross-references quickly, starting to see the patterns himself. To put things together.
By day five, the archive becomes a single object. Index, glossary, time-stamped clips, ledger matches, email headers, invoice metadata, and footage. So much footage.
Jake leans back in his chair and rubs a hand over his face.
“This holds,” he says.
There’s a knock on the door. “Dinner,” says Ryder.
Jake calls back, “Two minutes.”
“Needs a better name than this,” Jake says, pointing to the file name: Silas.
“Yep.” I stare at the screen, thinking. “Names matter. Names are ownership. And Silas already owned too much.”
All those clips he saved, the lists and notes Billy left lying around for me to see, the meetings he took me to, the little phrases meant to keep everything invisible.
They thought they were safe.
Billy thought he was untouchable because he had Hargrove in his pocket. Hargrove thought he was untouchable because he had Billy doing the dirty work. Silas thought he was untouchable because he had proof and records.
But they’re not safe at all. Billy and Silas are dead, and Hargrove’s power won’t protect him. We have the upper hand.
He has the hand you don’t want to be holding when someone finally walks in behind you.
I look at Jake. “How about Dead Man’s Hand?”
His face breaks into a wide smile. “Ha!” He laughs. “That’s perfect. And Wyatt will love it. He’ll be insufferable over it.”
His fingers move over the keys, and he types it in: DEAD_MANS_HAND.
“I bet you taste like fury,” Hargrove had said to me once. “You think I don’t see it? That need to be ruined? I want to be the reason you never look at yourself the same again.”
I look at the file we built, at Jake’s pride as he hits save, and I know that I helped turn Hargrove’s secrets into a blade.
So yeah, I won’t look at myself the same again, I guess, now that I know who I am.
I’m the girl you can’t ruin.