Chapter 17
RYKER
The room blurred in and out, Sloane’s face twisting as the edges of my vision crowded out reality.
I stood, refusing to allow her to see me coming undone.
The pain. The fucking pain followed by a blinding light sliced through me again.
Somehow, I managed to walk down the hall to the bathroom without collapsing.
The bunker absorbed sound the farther I got from her, but her words hit the inside of my skull.
Nate. The case she couldn’t walk away from was her brother. We both had the same goddamn rabbit tattoo. Which meant I wasn’t simply near it. I was in it.
I forced my shoulders to stay level. Forced my hands to stay steady. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of watching me break, not when she was strapped to a chair in the next room and my control was the only thing keeping her alive.
The bathroom door stuck as if it didn’t want to open. I shoved it, hard, and it gave with a scrape of metal on metal.
The light snapped on. Too bright. Too white. I gripped the sink as if it could make me sane. I stared at myself in the mirror, and for a second, I didn’t recognize the man looking back. Pupils blown wide. Sweat at my hairline. Jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached.
I dragged a breath in through my nose, but it didn’t feel like mine.
The fluorescent panel above me buzzed, faint but constant, and the sound threaded straight into my nerves. A tremor ran through my forearm and down into my wrist. Pain snapped sharp and my vision sparked at the edges.
I froze.
Fluorescent panels. Ceiling tiles. A monitor’s steady beep.
The room didn’t feel like the bunker anymore. It slid fucking sideways.
White swallowed the concrete.
My throat burned, and when I tried to swallow, something tugged deep inside me like a hook.
I tried to lift my hand. It didn’t move because it wasn’t free.
A padded strap circled my forearm. Another pinned my other wrist. Wide Velcro bands pressed down over my thighs. My legs were straight and held in place.
Broken legs, I told myself. Broken ribs. Brain damage. That’s why.
One wrong jerk, and I’d split myself open like a fucking zipper.
A nurse leaned into my line of sight, a mask over her face and her hair tucked under a cap. Only her eyes showed, and they were calm, practiced.
“Shh,” she murmured. “You’re okay. Don’t fight.”
Her gloved fingers checked a line at my arm with quick efficiency, smoothing tape, adjusting a clamp. The beep stayed even.
Panic hit anyway and I strained against the restraints hard enough to make my vision flash.
The nurse’s attention flicked to my wrist. Not to check my skin. To check the strap.
She tightened it a fraction as if she’d done it a hundred times.
“There you go,” she said softly, and two fingers pressed to the side of my neck. “Just breathe.”
My throat constricted. My ribs screamed. I tried to turn my head, to see the room, to understand why my pulse was pounding so fucking hard.
The white curtain beside the bed shifted. Shadows moved on the other side. A clipboard snapped shut.
A man spoke somewhere out of my line of sight, low and bored, as though he was reading off a grocery list. A number, maybe. A note.
My lungs seized.
Something in me tried to sit up, to lunge.
Pain tore through my ribs.
I caught a glimpse of the bed across from mine. A patient I couldn’t fully see, too thin, too still, and half-turned toward the wall.
His leg was in a cast.
The nurse pushed something into my IV.
Seconds later my stomach rolled so hard I tasted bile.
The patient turned his head, slow as if it hurt.
His eyes found mine. They didn’t plead. It was as if he knew me. His lips moved, but no sound reached me. The nurse’s hand on my neck wasn’t soothing anymore. It was rough. A warning disguised as comfort.
“Don’t.” The softness was gone. “You won’t remember him.”
The room tilted. Darkness crowded the edges.
And right before it swallowed me, I saw the edge of her badge swing forward as she leaned closer.
I tried to read her name, her face twisting into disturbing images.
I snapped my eyes closed; my damaged brain was just looking for monsters in safe places.
Either way, the strap bit tighter as I went limp.
I blinked—
and the bunker bathroom snapped back into place.
My knuckles were white around the sink. My breath came in hard pulls. The overhead light hummed. The mirror stared back with none of the answers.
I swallowed and my throat burned from the memory.
I turned the faucet on and shoved my wrists under the cold water. The shock grounded me for half a second. I watched it run clear like it could rinse memories off my skin, but it couldn’t.
The drip started the second I shut the tap, stubborn and steady.
I forced my breath to slow. One inhale. One exhale. A rhythm I could control.
Broken legs. Broken ribs. Brain damage. Hospital restraints. That was all. PTSD kicking my damn ass.
I dragged my fingers down the side of my neck where those gloved fingers had pressed in. Nothing was there now, only sweat and skin. Still, I felt her hands. I straightened and stared at my reflection in the mirror until the haze backed off enough for anger to take its place.
I shut the faucet handle tighter than necessary, finally stopping the drip. Then I turned and left the bathroom, my boots loud against the concrete, using the sound to drown out the echo of that beep that still lived in my head.
When I stepped back into the room, Sloane’s chair creaked. Her attention returned to me immediately, first to my hands, then my face. Like she knew the real reason I went to the bathroom.
She lifted her chin, trying to look defiant with her wrists tied and her throat still red from choking a few minutes ago. “Are you okay?” she asked, and the softness in it didn’t match the fight in her expression.
I didn’t answer. Instead, I crossed to the table, grabbed the water bottle, twisted the cap, and walked straight back to her. I tipped it to her mouth. Slowly this time. One swallow at a time. Enough to keep her talking. Not enough to make her comfortable.
When I pulled it away, she licked her lips, and the motion was small and human. It made something dark in me tighten.
I set the bottle down. “You said Nate was twenty-nine.”
Sloane’s throat bobbed. “Yeah.”
I couldn’t ignore the pain in her expression as she talked about him. My heart stuttered, thinking about how I’d felt when … but I wasn’t the issue here. She was. Nate was.
“And you said the rabbit is tied to him.” My voice stayed level, but every word had teeth. “Tell me exactly how.”
Her brows drew together. “I—Ryker, I already started—”
“No.” I wasn’t giving her an option. “Start over.”
Her nostrils flared. “Why?”
Because a memory had bitten me, and I needed to know where it was coming from. What had triggered it after she mentioned her case. My body reacted to Nate’s name as if it had been trained to. Plus, if she was lying, I needed to catch it before it got me killed. I didn’t give her any of that.
I stepped closer. “If you leave out one detail, I’ll know.” I leaned down, mouth near her ear, and kept my voice low enough to feel like a threat against her skin. “And then you’ll find out what dying actually feels like.”
Sloane went still, and her breath hitched.
“I want the truth. Not what you think will save you. Not what you think I want to hear.”
Her eyes locked on mine as if she was choosing whether to hand me a knife or aim it at herself.
“Nate went missing nearly three years ago. No body. No note. No witness. Just … gone.”
Almost three years. A gap big enough to fucking hide anything. “Last confirmed sighting?”
Her shoulders slumped. “The last time I saw him in person was at my house. The last confirmed sighting was a gas station. It was late at night. He bought water and jerky and—” She looked away.
“He bought a cheap stuffed rabbit for a little kid who was crying in the aisle. The cashier remembered because it was sweet.”
My jaw tightened. A rabbit again. Not the mark, but a toy. A coincidence that didn’t feel like one. “And the tattoo?” I asked. “Where did you see it?”
Sloane’s gaze dropped to my forearm as if she couldn’t stop herself. As if the ink was calling to her even covered by my sleeve. “I saw it on Nate first. I have a picture of us together.”
She paused.
I took one step closer, and the hesitation died.
“Then an evidence photo of another missing guy. He was eighteen. The case file shouldn’t have been anywhere near mine. It was misfiled, like someone wanted me to find it.”
My pulse ticked once, hard. Misfiled. A breadcrumb. “Describe it.”
“It was a wrist. Male. Bandaged. Hospital lighting. And right at the edge of the gauze, you could see it. A rabbit. Same style as yours. Same line work.”
A memory at the edge of my mind taunted me as it remained out of reach.
I kept my expression blank, making sure that I didn’t give her a reaction. My fingers flexed anyway, betraying me.
Sloane caught it. Of course she did. She was trained to identify tells. “You know something.”
“I know you’re not lying about what you saw,” I said, cutting her off. “Now tell me where the photo came from. Who had access.”
“I don’t know. It was in an internal system. Old scan. No metadata. Maybe someone scrubbed it.”
I turned away before she could see what her words did to me. I crossed to the laptop and flipped the screen open, my hands already moving. Search. Cross-reference. Dig.
Behind me, Sloane shifted in the chair, the restraints squeaking under her weight. “Untie me.”
I let out a short, humorless laugh. “You don’t get to negotiate.”
“I already am,” she snapped. “You haven’t killed me yet.”
I stopped typing. Slowly, I turned my head and looked at her over my shoulder.
Sloane’s hair was a mess and her wrists were raw. Too stubborn. Yet, somehow still fighting.
I walked back to her, crouched in front of the chair, and tipped her chin up with two fingers.
“You want to live,” I said quietly.
“Yeah.”
“You want Nate. Alive, dead. Whatever truth exists.”
She gulped. “Yes.”
“And you want answers about me.” I watched the flare in her pupils like she hated herself for it.
Sloane didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. Her pulse did it for her.
I leaned in until my mouth was a breath from hers. “Then here’s your deal. You tell me everything, and I don’t kill you tonight.”
Her eyes flashed. “That’s not a deal. That’s you—”
“That’s all you get. Because you’re in my hands, Sloane. And the rabbit didn’t bring you to me to bargain.”
I straightened, and in the same motion, I reached behind the chair and yanked the zip tie a fraction tighter at her wrists to remind both of us where the line was.
Sloane hissed, her hands twisting against the bite of plastic. She lifted her chin again, pinning me with her gaze. “You’re scared.”
I stepped closer, letting my shadow swallow her. “I don’t get scared.”
Her smile was small and sharp. “Then what was that in the bathroom?”
My hand came down on the chair back beside her head with a dull thud. A warning.
Sloane flinched but forced her attention to stay on me.
I breathed once, slow, and leaned down until my lips grazed the shell of her ear.
“It was a memory trying to come back,” I growled. “And if you keep pushing, you’re going to find out what I do to people who make me remember.”
Sloane gulped, and I saw a tremor in her right leg.
“Tell me about the messages.” I straightened. “Every number. Every instruction. Start with the first ‘Find Ryker.’”
Her voice shook when she answered, but it didn’t break. “The first one came the day Nate’s file was pulled without authorization. Burner number. No caller ID. Just a text.”
“What did it say?”
She inhaled like she was stepping onto shards of glass.
“Find Ryker. And underneath it … a rabbit.”
My blood went cold. I held still for a beat too long, the bunker suddenly tightening around us.
I returned to the laptop, hands moving again; vicious and precise because whatever was tied to that rabbit hadn’t finished with me.
And now it had Sloane in its snare too.