Chapter 21
RYKER
Sloane froze.
Mom shot him a look. “Don’t interrogate her.”
“I’m not,” Dad said. “I’m asking because this is our house, and because Ryker doesn’t bring people here unless it matters.”
Silence thickened between us. I could feel Sloane’s pulse in the air. I could feel mine too.
This was the part where I was supposed to keep it clean. Keep it simple. But the questions that had been choking me since Sloane told me I’d gone missing as a kid climbed up my throat anyway.
My mom watched me. Concern turned to something else, hesitation.
Did she know what I was about to ask? A slow, cold awareness lit in my chest. Not rage. Not yet. “Dad.” My voice sounded even. “When I was eleven … did I disappear?”
My mother’s hand jerked on the countertop, and a spoon clattered to the wood floor.
Sloane’s eyes snapped to me so fast it was almost a flinch.
Dad went still. He stared at me for a long beat, then glanced at my mom for permission.
My mom’s cheeks drained of color. “Ryker …” Her voice carried a warning, a pleading.
I held her gaze. It took everything I had to keep my voice steady. “Did I disappear or did something else happen to me that you never told me about?”
The fire popped in the other room. A car passed outside, tires hissing on wet pavement.
Normal life kept moving while my whole past cracked open at the goddamn kitchen table.
My dad exhaled through his nose, slowly. “You don’t remember?”
“No. I remember before. I remember after. I remember meeting Sebastian and Kip. I remember —” I cut myself off before I said too much in front of Sloane. Before I handed her more ammunition than she already had. “Bits and pieces before that. I thought everyone did that.”
Sloane’s hand tightened around her mug. Her gaze stayed on my parents, not me.
She was attentive and filing away the pieces of truth around me.
My mother’s voice shook. “We all have gaps in our memories.” She fidgeted before she continued. “We thought we were doing the right thing.”
That sentence hit like a slap. People said that when they’d already made their choice and wanted forgiveness anyway.
My dad leaned forward, elbows on the table. “You were gone for four days, son.”
Sloane sucked in a quiet breath.
My stomach dropped like I’d stepped off a fucking ledge.
Four fucking days.
Not a blur. Not a bad weekend. Not a teenage bender. Four days of missing time.
My mother’s eyes were wet now. “We called everyone. We called the police. We searched. We—”
“Then I came back.” My body remembered. My mind just refused to show me the picture.
Dad’s shoulders tightened. “Yes.”
I flexed my fingers, trying to control the anger bubbling beneath the surface. “You never told me anything.”
Mom shook her head fast. “You were—Ryker, you weren’t the same when you came back.
You had nightmares. You wet the bed. You screamed if anyone touched you.
” My mom glanced away, then back at me. “You had bruises on your arms, wrists … We tried to report it.” The words came out like they hurt.
“Someone called. They knew things they shouldn’t have known.
They told us if we kept asking questions, you would disappear for good. ”
Cold slid under my ribs.
My father went rigid. “So, we watched you. We documented what we could. And we waited. We didn’t know who to trust, and we couldn’t risk losing you again.”
Watched you. Waited.
I stared at the table because if I looked up, I’d show too much. My hands were still, but my pulse wasn’t. Rage kept trying to climb my throat, kept trying to turn into violence.
Sloane’s gaze flicked to my hands on the table. She saw it anyway. The crack in me.
I hated that she’d learned something true about me.
My dad’s voice dropped, smaller now. “The therapist told us not to push it. She explained your brain would bring it back if it needed to, and that forcing the memories could make it worse.”
A humorless laugh tried to come out and died halfway. “So you listened.”
He glanced away. “We were terrified.”
“And did you believe that?” I asked.
My mom’s lips parted and then closed. Believe wasn’t the right word. Hope was.
Hope the ugly fucking past would stay buried.
Hope it wouldn’t define me.
Hope I’d never become what I became anyway.
Dad shifted in his chair. “There was … someone.”
My pulse jumped.
My mother flinched like he’d said a name he wasn’t supposed to.
“A man,” Dad continued. “He brought you home. He told us you’d wandered off and gotten hurt. Said you were confused, but he’d managed to get a street address and last name from you.”
My mouth went dry.
Sloane’s brow rose ever so slightly. “Did he give you his name?” she asked before she could stop herself.
Every head in the kitchen turned to her. She froze. Then she lifted her chin like she refused to shrink.
My mom blinked, then softened.
I watched Sloane for a second. She’d just broken my rule. And yet my first instinct wasn’t punishment. It was relief. She’d asked the exact question that I couldn’t get out without my voice betraying me.
Dad nodded slowly. “He did. But … it’s been a long time.”
My mother’s fingers twisted in her cardigan. “We don’t talk about him.”
They knew. I could see it in the way my mother’s fingers twisted, the way my dad’s jaw set. The name was right there, sitting on their tongues like something they’d agreed never to swallow and never to spit out either.
My stomach turned. “Why not?”
My mom met my gaze. For the first time since I walked in, she looked afraid of the memory.
“We thought he was helping.”
My dad’s expression went hard. “After you were home, we began to question who he really was. If he really found you, or if he’d been involved somehow. We never found out for sure.”
Sloane’s voice came quieter, almost gentle. “Do you remember what he looked like?”
Dad swallowed. “Tall. Always dressed too nice for where we lived back then.” His eyes drifted, unfocused. “He had a ring. Gold. Big.”
Something in me cracked. Not open, nothing that clean. A hairline fracture through the version of my childhood I’d been living in, which wasn’t real.
Four goddamn days.
Four days I’d been gone, and no one had ever said a word. Not once. Not when I woke up sweating. Not when I flinched from hands touching me. Not when I started building myself into a weapon because I didn’t understand why my body only felt safe when it was ready to hurt someone.
My parents had let me grow around it. They’d watched me become this and still kept their mouths shut.
I locked my stare on my mother. Her expression pleading like that would soften the truth.
“You let me believe I was fine.” My voice was so controlled it didn’t sound like mine. “You let me believe that was normal.”
Mom shook her head fast. “Ryker, you were a child.”
I laughed once, sharp. “Yeah. And somebody had me for four goddamn days.”
Silence slammed down hard. My dad’s shoulders tensed. My mom’s breath hitched like I’d punched her.
My pulse didn’t race, it thudded, slow and violent, as if my body wanted to stand up and put my fist through the first wall it found.
A ring. Gold. Big. My mind stayed blank, but my gut recognized the shape of it like a scar under skin. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, quieter now, because loud would mean I’d lose control. “Was it shame? Was it fear? Or did you decide I didn’t deserve the truth about my own damn life?”
My father’s jaw worked. “We did what the therapist told us. We thought—”
“You thought you could bury it,” I cut in. “You thought if you pretended it never happened, it would simply go away.”
My gaze dropped to my hands on the table. They were steady. Too steady. The kind of steady that meant the damage was going somewhere else later.
Then I felt it. Sloane next to me with cuffs under her sleeves. She was quiet, listening and watching the cracks spread.
That did something worse than the anger. Because if I let this split all the way open in front of them, my parents would see the monster inside me now. They’d hear it in my voice. They’d realize they didn’t raise a son. They raised a man who learned to live without mercy.
And Sloane … Sloane was the only person at this table who’d already seen that part of me and didn’t look away. I should have wanted her gone. Instead, when her knee brushed mine under the table, it grounded me, dragged my focus back to the only thing I could control in this moment.
Her.
I pushed air into my lungs, swallowed the rage, and turned it into a blade.
“Finish your coffee,” I told her, voice flat. “We’re leaving soon.”
Sloane didn’t move right away. She studied my mother, my father, the warmth in this kitchen as if she was trying to understand how a man like me could come from them.
Her gaze lifted to mine, and for the first time since I took her, she looked conflicted.
Maybe less certain that I was only a monster.
She wasn’t the only one conflicted. I wanted her to look at me like I was the answer, not the threat.
My mother wiped at her eyes and straightened, forcing herself back to normal like she’d practiced.
“Ryker.” Her voice steadied, but her hands didn’t.
“Everything we did was to protect you. The threat of someone taking you again was real, and we lived with that fear for years.” She looked away briefly.
“I know you’re angry. You have every right.
But put yourself where we were. What would you have done if it was your son, and you were being warned you’d lose him for good? ”
The question hit like a fist to the sternum.
My first instinct was to tear the room apart.
To punish them for the years they let me rot around the missing pieces.
The other part of me answered her question.
If I had been in their shoes? I would’ve done anything to keep my kid breathing.
My rage didn’t go away. Instead, it shifted and found a new place to live.
“I can’t forgive you yet.” The words tasted like blood. “But I hear you.”
“You’re staying for breakfast,” my mom said, firm. “You can’t leave like this.”
I opened my mouth to refuse, but then I saw it. Sloane’s fingers white-knuckled around her mug, her shoulders tight as if she was waiting for the hit that never came.
My mother watched her the way she used to watch me when I came home wrong.
Like she recognized the look of someone carrying something too heavy to name.
My chest twisted hard enough to piss me off.
Not fucking now. Not here. Not in front of them.
I could burn my parents’ choices down later.
Right now, I needed control back in my hands, and I needed Sloane steady, quiet, and fed.
So, I swallowed the refusal like it was glass. “Fine.”
It was just one hour. A little warmth. A little normal. Afterward, I’d take her back to the bunker, or I’d let her go, or I’d do whatever the hell the situation demanded.
I could still protect Death and Kip and control the situation. I could still keep my heart out of it.
I didn’t only want her safe. I wanted her mine and alive and that was worse.
Because the moment I started wanting her safe for reasons that had nothing to do with witnesses or protection meant—
I’d already lost.