Chapter Twenty
RYDER
Nothing is happening, the house is quiet, and the waiting is making my skin itch.
An hour after Jake sent the package I heard from Keystone. Physical handoff required.
I didn’t ask why. I don’t need the explanation. People who ask for physical handoffs in this day and age either don’t trust the digital trail, or they do and they’re trying to control it. Probably both.
Jake and Damian left before dinner. They’ll do the handoff in an airport parking lot about two hours from here, at a designated location, and stash a cloned encrypted copy in a storage unit somewhere along the way.
I roll my shoulders once and feel the dull pull of the workout I did earlier—lats, traps, the kind of work that should’ve eased off this revved-up feeling. Instead it’s just a reminder that my body can’t outrun my head.
Max is upstairs taking a nap. I think her nervous system’s been cashing checks it can’t cover.
The shit she’s gone through…plus five days of reliving it all, staring at Silas’s archive.
Jake told me there was an entire drive with just her name on it and I almost burst an artery.
That fucking little creep. I’m consumed with both wanting to know what’s on it and wanting to destroy it before anyone can find out—especially her.
But it’s Max’s call. Her footage, her agency.
She didn’t get to decide what he collected about her, the little actions he took to try to own pieces of her, but she at least gets to control what happens to it now.
I take a sip of my whiskey, set the glass down, and listen to the house. The humming of the fridge, the clicking of the furnace, the couch creaking as I lean back on it. So quiet.
I pick up my phone and check it, but it’s too early to have heard anything. Jake and Damian won’t even be at the handoff point yet.
After a few minutes, the front door opens and closes, and I hear the familiar sound of Wyatt’s weight shifting, his boots dropping on the floor. He’s been out doing an unnecessary perimeter sweep, just an excuse to go for a walk, now that his ribs are feeling better.
He steps into the living room, hair windswept, a little more color in his face than he’s had for weeks.
“All clear?” I ask.
“All clear, boss,” he says, a dry joke you wouldn’t catch if you didn’t know us. I was the boss, technically, of our unit. But Wyatt is older than me, more experienced, wiser. There was always this sense of equality between us.
He crosses into the kitchen and pulls a glass from the cupboard, coming back with it in one hand. He sits in the armchair across from me and I nudge the whiskey bottle on the coffee table toward him with my foot. He pours and takes a sip, and then lets out a long breath.
“Getting easier?” I ask, jerking my chin toward his chest.
“Yeah.” He lifts a shoulder, testing it. “Still feels like someone tried to cave me in with a bat, but…yeah.”
“That’s because someone did try to cave you in with a bat.”
Wyatt’s mouth twitches. “Details.”
A comfortable silence settles between us, a kind we’ve earned by living through things together.
We’ve sat through worse waiting rooms. Cold jungle nights when you worried you wouldn’t be able to hear approaching footsteps over the insects screaming, staging tents where command argued for six hours and you just sat there with your kit on, sweating, pretending you weren’t imagining every possible way it could go wrong, hours on overwatch in the worst possible conditions where speaking at all could be a liability.
“Heard from Jake?” Wyatt asks after a bit.
“No.”
“What’s the window again?”
“Nine to nine-fifteen. Then they’ll probably message once they get to the hotel after that.”
“And the clone? They stash it yet?”
“Damned if I know.”
“You love it when they don’t tell you shit.”
I huff a laugh. I fucking hate it when they don’t tell me shit. Damian’s the worst for it.
Wyatt shifts in the chair, and I notice he adjusts without wincing.
A good sign. Another marker. For months, I was him in this same house.
Sitting in that chair, itching to get to the point where I could just fidget without my entire chest feeling like the bullet was going right through it again.
The thought brings back memories of those nights, sitting here waiting.
Waiting to get better. Waiting to hear from Wyatt.
Waiting for any sign, anywhere, that Max was okay, and hoping she didn’t turn up dead somewhere.
“She still asleep?” he asks, as if I’d said her name out loud.
“Yep.”
Wyatt’s gaze flicks toward the staircase and I catch the shimmer of concern and protectiveness in it. There’s a beat where I feel something tighten, low and private, and I try to ignore it.
Wyatt and Max.
There’s still a part of my brain that treats that like a problem to solve.
A threat to manage. And then there’s another part of my brain now, new and inconvenient, that sees Wyatt’s care for her and doesn’t flinch at it.
That thinks, of course. Because Wyatt is my brother, because I trust him more than anything, because I want him to be happy.
A part that…doesn’t mind at all when I picture them together.
I exhale a heavy breath and take another sip of my drink.
He looks at me and gives me a crooked smile. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
His eyes stay on me a few seconds longer, and I know he’s got something to say. Then:
“We never talked about last week.”
Ah.
I suck in a breath.
Hellbent Night.
He’s right. We crossed lines I never thought we’d cross, and then none of us have said a word about it since.
“You want to debrief?” I ask.
Wyatt’s mouth twitches. He takes another sip, then sets his glass down with care. “Figured it could be good to clear the air about it. We should probably all…talk about it.”
I glance up at him.
“You’re the one,” he continues, “who’s always been territorial.”
I laugh. Territorial. Like I’m a fucking dog.
I rub a hand over my mouth, then drag it down my jaw. “I didn’t know I’d be okay with it.”
Wyatt’s gaze holds mine. “How did it feel?”
My laugh is short and humorless. “Jesus.”
I’ve thought about that night over and over almost every second since it happened.
What it was like to watch Max and be with Max, the duality of it.
Max as pornographic object, serving Jake and Damian and Wyatt.
And then Max as all mine. God, I can barely keep my hand off my cock from thinking about it.
I can feel myself getting hot even now. “Uh…it felt okay. Definitely okay. It was…hot.”
Why do I feel fucking awkward, as if I’m telling Wyatt I’m attracted to him?
It’s not that, not in a direct way. It’s about how hot it was to watch Max with other men, but for those men to be ones that I trust more than any others.
Ones that feel closer to me than my own blood.
A kind of safe sharing I didn’t even know I was wired for.
“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “It was.”
“It shouldn’t,” I add, still arguing with myself about it. “I should hate it. But with you and Jake and Damian, it didn’t feel like…I don’t know…like a competition. It felt like a ceremony, almost.”
Wyatt’s eyes flash up at me, comprehension in them. “That’s a good way to put it.”
We drink, floundering under the weight of not knowing what to say for the first time.
Wyatt’s gaze flicks toward the stairs again. “You love her.”
“It scares the shit out of me,” I say with a soft laugh.
“I know.”
“And you…?” I clear my throat.
Wyatt’s smile is faint. “Yeah.”
“I didn’t know this was in me,” I mutter. “I have no idea how this works.”
Wyatt’s gaze softens. I see him taking on the role before he says anything. The wise elder. Wyatt with insight. “We don’t have to figure it out, you know? We can let things evolve organically, let Max take the lead. It’s her decision anyway. But we’ve never been, like, your average guys.”
I snort at that. Truer words and all that…
“Different circumstances have shaped us than most people,” he continues.
“We’ve been incredibly lucky to have formed such a tight unit, to be able to trust each other so much.
What we have with each other has always been different.
And now we have Max and that’s different, too.
As long as we’re respecting her, and each other, I think we can just let things be what they are. ”
I don’t know what to say to that. I lift my eyebrows, nod, wheels turning. He’s right that nothing about our evolution as a group has been normal. There’s a freedom in thinking I can just accept this new salacious interest Max has awakened in me. I can just…let it be.
I take a deep breath, and a big sip of whiskey, the tightness in my chest loosening.
Just then, there’s a soft creak of a floorboard upstairs, then another.
Wyatt looks at me, and there’s a question in his eyes that he doesn’t voice. Are we good?
I hold my glass up in a cheers motion. “Here’s to being different,” I say, and he smiles.
Max appears at the top of the stairs in an oversized t-shirt, bare legs, shoulder-length hair mussed.
I can’t take my eyes off her legs as she walks down the stairs—the smoothness of her skin, the surprising muscle for someone so small, the aching I have for the feel of those legs wrapped around me, or… one of my brothers.
That new, inconvenient part of me stirs awake.
When she reaches the bottom step she looks between us and smiles. “Why are you both looking at me like that?”
Wyatt’s mouth curves. “Can you blame us for not being able to take our eyes off a beautiful woman?”
Max’s eyes narrow. Then she huffs a soft laugh and swats him on the shoulder as she comes toward the couch, the hem of the shirt brushing mid-thigh as she perches on the end across from me.
“What time is it?” she asks.
“Eight fifteen,” Wyatt answers.
Her gaze flicks to my glass. “Oh.” Mock surprise. “Whiskey.”
I lean back. “Trying something new.”