Chapter Twenty-Two
“YOU SURE YOU’RE ready?”
Jake reaches for my hand where it’s resting on the comforter and squeezes it. His laptop is open, resting on his thighs.
It’s been three weeks of avoidance. Three weeks of settling into new routines, making a kind of unconventional home with each other, and healing.
I’m feeling steadier. Wyatt rarely shows any pain.
And I’m ready to face the one thing that’s been hanging over me since we settled into this waiting phase.
After Jake and Damian made their physical handoff of the dossier, their client’s instruction was to “go dark.” That means we stay put at Jake and Damian’s house and keep our heads down.
The O.D. isn’t the threat anymore, but Hargrove is.
Mercer was at Ryder’s house the night I was taken—proof he can reach us.
So we wait, under the radar, until Hargrove is, as Ryder puts it, “neutralized.”
Going dark feels a lot like being in the cabin, except that here we have more room, with enough beds for everyone. And unlike at the cabin, everything has changed between us.
There’s no longer a question of whether closeness is allowed.
There’s space for choice, and sometimes closeness looks different from one night to the next.
Last night, when I ended up in Jake’s bed after the two of us stayed up late watching something dumb on TV and laughing like old times, it didn’t feel like a deviation.
It just felt like part of how things work now.
I nod at him. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be to face the truth of Silas’s intrusions.
“Okay. I’ll show you where the file is and then I can leave you alone with it, if you want.”
He’s trying to respect how difficult this might be for me. I have no idea what’s on the MAX drive. It could be stuff I want no one to see. But the idea of facing it alone is harder than the idea of facing it with someone here beside me. Someone I trust.
So I squeeze his hand. “Stay?”
He lifts his green eyes to mine. His hair is a mess, his jaw shadowed, he’s sleep-rough and impossibly adorable.
“Yeah?”
We’re still cocooned in the intimacy from last night. Jake got up and put on his boxer shorts to make coffee and came right back to bed, and I’m still nestled in the warmth of his comforter and his body and his touch.
“Yeah,” I answer with certainty.
“Okay.” He picks up the laptop and moves it over to my thighs. “Let me give you control. Here.”
He directs me to the containing folder, Evidence—Unviewed, and the Max subfolder within it.
The first thing that comes up is a list of subfolders: Bathroom, Billy, Face, Public, Restraint, Sleep.
My stomach turns.
“Jesus,” Jake says under his breath.
My finger hovers over the trackpad for a second, frozen. The categories shock me. Bathroom? Sleep? But I recover quickly. It was always going to be horrible. There is no version of Silas that’s not horrible.
I open Face, which seems like the safest bet, given the options. A grid of thumbnails loads—dozens of tiny versions of me.
I open the first one and the screen fills with my face in close-up, filmed from slightly above but zoomed in. Thirty seconds of me listening, blinking, swallowing, and looking at someone off-camera.
I take a deep breath. It’s unsettling. Creepy.
When the clip ends, I close it and notice that the names of all the files in the folder are meticulously labelled with my name and the shot angle. I open the next file, MAX_0917_002_FACE_FRONT.
I’m sitting at a table near the clubhouse bar.
The background is a blur of activity, people moving back and forth, but I’m still, lost in my own world.
My face is blank, my eyes empty. I don’t even recognize this version of myself.
It’s as if someone animated a wax sculpture of me. Very close but not quite right.
“Man,” Jake says. “That doesn’t even look like you.”
It’s so strange to see myself like this, from the outside. To remember how empty I always felt in the clubhouse. Lifeless, shut down, trying to survive.
“I look dead.”
“You look a little dissociated,” he agrees.
I close the file and stare at the grid of thumbnail versions of my face. All those tiny little boxes of private moments. Silas trying to collect pieces of me because Billy wouldn’t let him have me. Everything had already been taken from me and Silas was trying to take more.
I could push through, endure the discomfort, just to…what? Know how deeply perverse his interest was?
I’m not in that place anymore. And suddenly it occurs to me that I don’t owe Silas another hour of my life. I don’t owe him my eyes. I don’t owe him the strength it would take to see everything he tried to steal from me.
I don’t have to pay for closure with my own nervous system.
I lift my chin. “I don’t want to look at any more of it.”
What else is there to look at? Bathroom? Billy? Sleep? Suddenly, righteous anger is rising up in me, clean and hot. And it’s…good. Strengthening.
I don’t need to relive any of this. For once, I can put the past behind me to serve myself.
“Okay,” says Jake. “What do you want to do?”
“Delete it.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. Permanently.”
“Okay.”
He reaches over and opens a new window and types a command.
“I’m going to let you do it,” he says. “This is your decision. You hit enter here and it will start a secure overwrite. A permanent deletion.”
I reach forward without hesitation and tap the enter key.
I learned young how to pack up my life in a box and start over. In the past, this was a survival skill. Sometimes it meant leaving things behind that I didn’t want to. But this time, I’m using that skill for something better: to choose for myself what I’m better off without.
A progress bar opens up and I watch it crawl forward slowly, the last proof of this violation dying. When the bar hits one hundred percent, the window closes, the folder disappears, and MAX is gone.
“Thank you,” I say, quietly.
“Ugh,” he replies, like the creepiness of it has gotten to him as well, and he throws an arm around my shoulder, pulling me in against him and kissing the top of my head. “Gone,” he says.
I sigh against his skin, and with his free hand, Jake closes the laptop with a soft click and sets it aside on the bedside table. Then he cups the back of my head and kisses my hair.
I’m drinking tea at the kitchen table when Jake’s phone buzzes beside me. Then Wyatt’s, who’s sitting on the kitchen counter eating a protein bar. The sound of buzzing comes from the living room, too, where Damian’s watching TV.
Jake and Wyatt exchange a quick glance and both reach for their phones.
Ryder left yesterday for Washington to meet with their client after three weeks of silence, and they’ve all been waiting for an update since.
“Okay,” says Jake, reading his phone and nodding. He puts it down and looks at Wyatt.
“What is it?” I ask, just as Damian walks into the room.
“How long before we hear something, you think?” he asks the room.
“Maybe twenty-four hours?” suggests Jake, as Wyatt turns to me.
“It’s from Ryder,” he says. “Keystone is moving today.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“It means the indictment’s being unsealed,” explains Jake. “It means they’re done building the case. They’re acting.”
“Whoa.”
It’s hard not to be unsettled the rest of the day.
The men check their phones obsessively, and take turns working out with Damian’s equipment downstairs.
I make more cups of tea but forget to drink them.
We putter around, doing household chores and watching TV and reading, but there’s an expectant energy just under the surface that makes it hard to relax.
By nighttime, I’m watching the news with my head in Wyatt’s lap, my eyes blinking closed as he lazily strokes my hair.
We’re watching and pretending we have nothing invested in it, like we might jinx something if we hope to hear any news.
We comment on the weather forecast and the local news segments like that’s why we’re really watching.
And then a new banner starts scrolling at the bottom of the screen: brEAKING NEWS.
I sit up.
A few photos of Senator Hargrove flash on the screen in quick succession and then cut to footage of the senator being led through a crowd in handcuffs.
“Hey!” Wyatt calls out. “We’re live! It’s on the news!”
He turns up the volume.
“—breaking tonight, Senator John Hargrove taken into custody earlier this evening following the unsealing of a federal indictment. Sources confirm the charges include racketeering, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and multiple counts related to money laundering…”
By the time Jake and Damian come tramping up the stairs, the arrest footage is looping again.
Two agents guiding him out toward a black SUV with their hands on his elbows, handcuffs glinting at his wrists.
People with cameras shouting questions. This time the footage runs longer and I catch another man being brought out in handcuffs behind Hargrove.
Neat but frumpy, tie slightly off, jacket a little wrong in the shoulders.
Adrian Mercer.
Jake’s phone buzzes and he lifts it quickly.
“Both are in custody,” Jake reads. “Ryder says DOJ’s folding everything together and Hargrove won’t post bail. He’s being charged federally, no deals.”
The footage cuts to a still image of Hargrove again, the word INDICTED stamped across the bottom of the screen.
The sound from the TV continues, Jake and Damian and Wyatt talking excitedly over it, but all the noise blurs and goes distant.
I watch the replay of Hargrove being marched out like that in handcuffs and all I can hear are his words that night in the hotel.
I want to be the reason you never look at yourself the same again.
Wyatt reaches for my hand, taking it in his big, warm grip, and the touch brings me back down to earth.
I look up at him, at the carved line of his profile, then over at Jake and Damian.
I think about Ryder, miles away in Washington, DC, putting the last signatures on a file that ends Hargrove.
They’d wanted me to come. Keystone wanted to meet the witness who could link the video footage and coded terms with names and faces and activities, and Ryder had refused.
You’ve done enough, he said. This is over for you.
Hargrove came for me. He thought he could have me, assumed I was his for the taking just because he wanted me, and Billy served me up on a platter.
But these men—my men—had taken the entire network out from top to bottom. Silas dead, Billy dead, Hargrove and his aide in jail. No more collar around my neck and no more impossible choices. I lean over and rest my head on Wyatt’s shoulder and sigh.
It’s over.