Chapter 18
SLOANE
Day three in the bunker and I’d learned the difference between being captured and being kept. Captured meant panic, noise, improvisation—an animal in a snare thrashing until the wire cut to bone.
Kept meant routine. Kept meant the same plate slid across the same scarred table at the same hour.
The same water bottle, measured like medicine.
Trips to the bathroom the same times each day.
It meant he didn’t need theatrics to remind me he had control because the bunker did it for him.
Concrete walls. One way out. No windows.
No clocks. Only the low hum of electricity and the drip-drip-drip of a faucet that refused to let silence win.
And Ryker … Ryker moved through the days without really sleeping, only powering down in short bursts.
Twenty minutes in a chair with his head tipped back.
An hour on the floor in the hall where he could still see me if I tried something stupid.
Then he’d wake instantly, clear-eyed and ready with his emotions locked behind a steel door.
He didn’t apologize for the water. He didn’t explain the bathroom.
At least he’d stopped playing with the waterboarding threat after that first night.
Not because he’d softened, but because he’d changed tactics.
Now, he controlled me the way someone controlled a weapon they planned to use.
Kept it clean, fed, and functional. I wanted to believe his control could be a shelter.
That was the most dangerous thought I’d had in years.
On day two, he’d cut the zip ties off my wrists and replaced them with something worse: permission.
I could stretch. I could eat without my hands cramping from being pinned in front of me or behind my back.
I could stand and pace, but I wasn’t sure what boundaries he’d decided were okay.
He’d even brought me a hoodie. It was big, black, smelling faintly of detergent and him.
He’d tossed it at my chest, a scrap of mercy.
“If you freeze to death, you can’t talk.”
A command disguised as consideration. I’d put it on anyway. I’d learned quickly that in a place like this, I took warmth where I could get it, and I saved my pride for later.
The only restraint he kept was a single cuff around my ankle that anchored me to a heavy steel ring in the floor with a short length of chain. It was long enough to reach the table but not enough to reach the hall. At least I had more mobility than when I was tied to the chair.
I’d expected terror to hollow me out after the first night.
Expected my body to collapse into that old, familiar survival mode where you become small and invisible and quiet.
Instead, something else happened. I started watching him.
Not like a victim watches a captor. Like an investigator watches a pattern.
Ryker had patterns. He always checked the same corners of the room before he sat.
Always kept his back to a wall. Always sat where he could see the hall, the door, and me in the same line of sight.
Always ate fast, as if food was fuel and nothing more.
And every few hours, every time I said the wrong word, or the laptop screen showed the wrong image, or the bunker light flickered a little too bright, his eyes would go distant for a few seconds.
As if something yanked a chain inside his head.
He covered it with anger or silence, but I saw it. I’d spent my life studying monsters.
That morning, the bunker smelled of reheated meat and burned coffee. He’d scrounged a small camping stove from somewhere and brewed it strong enough to peel paint. He didn’t offer me sugar or cream. Just poured black liquid into a chipped mug and shoved it across the table.
“Drink.”
“I hate you,” I said automatically.
“You’ll hate me more with a headache if you don’t get some caffeine in you.” He didn’t even bother looking up. “Good.” His mouth tightened like he hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
I took the mug with both hands because my fingers were still stiff from sleeping wrong on the concrete floor. The heat sank into my palms. The first sip was bitter and scalding. I coughed and glared.
Ryker’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. Not quite.
Then it vanished as if it had never been there.
He stared at the laptop, his fingers moving.
The screen reflected off his irises, turning them colder.
He’d been in the same loop for hours: searches, cross-references, phone numbers, burner patterns, message timestamps.
I didn’t know what he was looking at most of the time, but I listened. You could learn a lot from the words people muttered when they thought no one mattered enough to hear.
“Pulled without authorization.” His fingers stuttered on the trackpad, one tiny misfire, then he crushed the movement into a fist like he could strangle the glitch before it spread.
I tightened my grip on the mug. “I already told you. My system flagged it.”
“I know.” He clicked something hard enough the touchpad made an angry tap. “I’m not arguing that.”
I blinked. That alone was progress. Yesterday, he’d spent an hour trying to prove I’d forged the internal access logs. Trying to back me into a confession I couldn’t give because it wasn’t true. When he finally realized I wasn’t lying, he hadn’t apologized.
He’d just gotten quieter. More dangerous.
My ankle chain scraped softly as I shifted closer to the table. The sound made his gaze snap down, a reflex.
He looked at me. “Are you awake enough to talk?”
“I’ve been awake.”
He cracked his knuckles. “Good. Tell me the exact wording. The first text.”
I didn’t move fast. Moving fast around him was similar to bleeding in front of a shark.
“It said, ‘Find Ryker’ No punctuation. No signature.”
“And the rabbit.”
“Yeah.”
He held my gaze as if he could see the message behind my eyes. “What time?”
“1:13 a.m.”
His fingers paused. His expression didn’t change, but something in his posture did. It coiled tighter, as if he’d found something he didn’t like. “Why do you remember that?”
Because it had been the first real sign that Nate’s disappearance wasn’t random due to that goddamn rabbit. It had been the first time in a long fucking time that I’d felt like I wasn’t screaming into the void.
I pushed my answer down and kept it simple. “I took screenshots. I’ve been chasing this for years, and I’m not sloppy.”
Ryker’s gaze dropped briefly to my ankle cuff, the chain, the ring in the floor. Then back to me. “Don’t confuse not sloppy with in control.”
The words should have scared me. They did. They also did something else, lit a fuse in my spine. “You’re the one having blackouts.” The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop myself.
Silence slammed down so hard my teeth rattled.
Ryker didn’t blink.
The room turned colder. My pulse kicked, but I held his stare anyway. I’d learned something over the last three days: he respected resistance more than fear.
His voice dropped. “Say that again.”
I set the mug down slowly, so my hands didn’t shake. “You disappear for a few seconds.” I let that soak in before I continued. “Your eyes go somewhere else, and your body tenses. Your fingers twitch like you’re fighting something you can’t see.”
His expression stayed blank, but his breathing changed. It was a little deeper, and a fraction slower. The predator recalibrated.
“I don’t disappear.”
I almost laughed. “Okay.” I pretended to think. “Then you go offline.”
A muscle jumped at the corner of his eye.
There it was again, that crack.
I pressed because I couldn’t afford to tiptoe. Not if Nate was out there dead or alive and Ryker was the only door the rabbit had given me. “You asked me to tell you everything.” My tone was softer now. “That includes what I’m seeing.”
Ryker stared at me for a long moment. Then he looked back at the laptop because it was safer than my face. “You don’t know what you’re seeing.”
“I know trauma,” I replied. “I know conditioning. I know what it looks like when someone’s body reacts before their brain catches up.”
His fingers stopped moving, and the bunker hum filled the silence again.
Without looking at me, he said, “You’re not a psychiatrist.”
“No.” He wasn’t wrong. “But I’ve hunted enough monsters to recognize when one has a handler.”
That got his attention.
His head lifted slowly. His gaze pinned me. “Careful.”
“I am being careful.” My chin jutted up. “That’s why I’m still alive.”
His mouth flattened. “You’re still breathing because I’ve let you.”
“And you’re still listening,” I shot back, “because you need me.”
His gaze narrowed. For a second, I thought he might stand and make me regret the words. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and stared at me as if I’d become a problem he didn’t know whether to solve or keep.
“Tell me about the photo again. The bandaged wrist. The rabbit.”
My stomach knotted. “It was in the system. No metadata. Like it was scrubbed.”
“Describe what you saw.”
“Hospital lighting,” I recalled. “White. Clean. A wrist wrapped in gauze. And right at the edge, like whoever took the photo, didn’t notice or didn’t care that there was the rabbit. It was the same line work as yours.”
His fingers tightened on the edge of the table. The only tell. “Tell me again. Every little detail matters. Where did you get that image?”
“It was in an internal folder that shouldn’t have been accessible,” I said. “It was almost as if it was dropped in my path.”
“Dropped?”
“Yes. Like bait.”
His gaze flicked toward the hall, then back to the laptop.
His jaw clenched harder right before he did something that made my stomach drop.
He opened a program I recognized. Not by name, but by behavior.
A black window. A cascading series of prompts.
A connection handshake that didn’t look legitimate.
Not normal browsing on Google. It was layered, black, and intentional. My heartbeat spiked.
“What are you doing?” I asked.