Chapter Twenty Five
Something woke me. Not a noise. Not properly. More a feeling.
Heat.
Too much of it. Pressed into my back, wrapped around me, heavy and unfamiliar in a way that dragged me up from sleep before I could settle back into it. For a moment I lay still, caught between now and something older. A memory scratching at the edges.
Sneaking him in. The weight of him in my bed when we were too young to understand what it meant, or that what we had then wouldn’t last. The panic that came with it. Listening for my dad’s car on the drive. Shaking him awake before dawn, whispering harsh and urgent for him to go.
My eyes opened slowly. Darkness. But this wasn’t that.
There was no quiet breathing beside me. No soft, steady rhythm.
Ryan moved. Not gently. A twitch at first. Then a shift.
His arm tightening around me, fingers flexing like he was holding onto something that wasn’t there.
A low sound followed. Rough. Broken. My chest tightened.
“Ry?” I whispered, turning slightly, trying to see him in the dark.
He didn’t wake. His head moved against the pillow, jaw clenched, breath uneven.
“You reap what you sow…”
The words were low. Repeated. Over and over again. Not said. Dragged out of him. His grip tightened suddenly, fingers digging into my hip hard enough to hurt.
I sucked in a breath, my eyes struggling in the darkness. Behind me his chest rose and fell, uneven. Ragged. Too fast. Too sharp. As if he was running from something he couldn’t outrun.
“Ryan,” I said again, louder this time, my voice unsteady despite the effort to keep it calm.
He didn’t hear me. His head jerked again, his knees hitting me in the back of the thighs, the words still spilling from him, quieter now but constant.
“You reap what you sow… you reap what you sow…”
“Ryan, wake up.” I couldn’t ignore the panic I could hear in my own voice.
Wriggling free of the heavy arms that held me there, I turned, pushing into his chest, shaking him once, twice. His skin was hot under my fingers, damp. Whatever had hold of him wasn’t letting go easily.
For a second nothing happened.
Then his body jolted, sharp and sudden, something snapping.
That hold breaking. His eyes opened. And for a moment he didn’t see me.
The room descended into silence. The air charged with tension.
Ryan breathed heavily, but with each breath, the tension in his body eased.
Arms that had been rock a moment ago relaxed.
“I’m sorry, Soph.” His voice was hoarse and rough, like he’d been shouting. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What was happening, Ry?”
“Nightmare.”
“That was more than a nightmare.”
I’d seen nightmares. That was bigger. Deeper. Something so rooted, I knew there was so much more. Thirteen years. So much had happened in that time. So much life had passed. And in that time, something had happened to him. The laugh-a-minute, happy-go-lucky boy I knew.
Ryan said nothing as he climbed out of bed, the space he left behind instantly inviting the cold air of the terraced cottage. He didn’t turn the light on, only scrambled around in the dark in the wardrobe beside the bed.
“What are you doing, Ryan?” I asked as he slid jeans over those thick tattooed legs.
“I need to clear my head.”
“Now? What time is it?”
“Early. Sun not up yet.” He turned then, gazing at me through the darkness. “You’d better come, Soph. Can’t leave you here. But I need to get on that bike right now.”
I didn’t understand. Not one bit. But I nodded anyway.
Night air clung to my legs, my thin jeans doing little to ward off the cold.
. The bike roared beneath us. A different tone.
Angry and urgent. But then it changed. Dropped.
Deeper. Heavier. Not the sharp snap of before.
Not the push to get somewhere. This was something else.
It settled low and stayed there, rolling through the frame and up into my bones.
Ryan leaned forward, his body folding over the tank.
He wasn’t riding anymore. He was driving it.
Forcing it to answer him. The engine didn’t protest. It responded.
A long, relentless pull. Like it was trying to drag something out of him.
My arms tightened around his waist as the speed climbed, the road blurring beneath us, the world thinning out at the edges to nothing more than streaks of light in a marbled darkness.
The sound filled everything. No space left for thought. No room for anything else to exist.
And that was it. That was what he needed. Not escape. Drowning in the roar of an engine and the rush of the wind.
As first light pulled in over the north east coast, Ryan slowed the huge motorbike underneath us.
I don’t know how long we’d ridden into the night for, chasing the golden streaks of dawn as it filtered inland over the North Sea.
But now I was numb, my finger ends tingling hot and sore and my toes feeling like the wind had worn them down to lifeless nubs.
I shivered suddenly tightening my arms around Ry.
The deep roar uncoiled into something steadier, the vibration softening where it pressed into my legs.
The road came back into focus, the world filling in around us again where it had blurred and stretched.
Whatever was happening in Ryan’s head, I could feel it through the bike.
The aggression. The speed. And then the breath.
Like life had been reset. And now he could breathe again.
He shifted slightly in front of me, his body loosening, the tension bleeding out of him in slow increments.
Then his hand moved. Reaching back, finding my leg without looking, his palm warm where it wrapped around me.
Simple. But it grounded something. Anchored me to him in a way I couldn’t describe. And now we could both breathe.
For a while, we cruised the deserted roads.
The winding tarmac at the back of Gateshead smoothing into the straightness of the A1 motorway.
And then to my left, crowned by the gold of dawn, she reared up before us.
The light caught along her wings, stretching wide against the waking sky, red-brown weathered steel softened into something almost alive.
She stood there, unmoving, watching over it all and judging none of it.
Ryan pulled off to the left, leaving the motorway at the feet of the Angel of the North and winding upwards, the road leading up past the structure.
The car park at her feet was as deserted as the roads.
Too early and too cold for most. Spring air still nipping at anyone brave enough to be out in it at this hour.
When the engine switched off, I still felt the vibrations deep in my muscles, counterbalancing the shivers that wracked my body in a different rhythm.
“Come with me, Soph,” Ryan rumbled, filling the void where the noise of the engine ceased.
He helped me from the bike, my legs wobbling as I straightened up and then wrapped cold hands in mine. We walked into the dawn, long steps winding up to where she stood, protectively watching out over the north east.
For a while we stood there, our backs against her feet, Ryan’s arms wrapped around me. It wasn’t enough to still the ever creeping cold, but firm enough to stop the shivers.
“Ry?” I asked eventually, breaking the silence between us and the gentle roar of traffic starting to build on the A1 below us. “Tell me what happened.”
He didn’t answer straight away. But I could feel the tension start building in him like I’d pressed a trigger and allowed it to flow again.
“Sometimes I’m like that,” he started after a long, slow breath. “In the night, I mean. I don’t know what they are. Nightmares. Night terrors.”
“It’s a form of PTSD, Ry, when they present like that. What happened to you?”
I glanced up at him watching out over the world, and his eyes even further away.
“The first time I was inside,” he paused, and then continued differently. “It’s why my brothers call me Reap. Took the piss out of a phrase I use too often.”
“You reap what you sow?”
He glanced down at me, the hint of surprise in his eyes fading quickly.
“Yeah, that.”
“That’s what you were saying in the night.”
“I know. The first time I wasn’t prepared for what prison would do to me,” his voice lowered, a flatness creeping into it. I recognised that tone. The control over his emotions. “The beatings. The cruelty. Because they could.”
“The other inmates.”
“Some. Mostly the guards. Delivering punishments for misdemeanours that hadn’t happened.”
“Did you report it?”
“Darlin’’, that would have only made things worse.
Besides, that ‘don’t talk to cops’? That applies inside, too.
No talking. No complaining. In the end, it didn’t hurt anymore.
The bruises. The broken bones. None of it.
And that made it worse. One of them made it his challenge to break me.
He’d chant those words as he did. The first time I dealt with business for the club.
I said those same words. Like he’d forced them deep into the very back of my brain. ”
“And that’s why they call you Reap,” I repeated. “Do they know about this?”
“No. I’ve never told them. Any of them. If Indie knows, it’s just a suspicion.”
“You never told anyone else?” I didn’t know why I needed to know. But I did.
Ry shook his head. “No, Grey.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
He folded his arms around me, pulling me back into the comfort of his chest and his huge frame.
“After a while I didn’t feel anything. Couldn’t feel anything. Couldn’t now. Not until that day I saw you again.”
“The tattoos and the piercings. When you told me you did them to feel again. That was because of prison?”
“Yeah. The tattoos hide the scars, too. There were many. I wouldn’t wear his injuries on my body, so I covered them.
Owned them. Prison tattoos while I was inside.
Better ones when I was out. But yes. With each tattoo.
With each piercing, for a moment I can feel. On my terms. Not on someone else’s.”
Ryan’s voice trailed off, but his arms never slackened. We stood there listening, watching the morning creep over the top of us.
“I like it out here, Grey. When I got out and the nightmares wouldn’t leave me alone, I’d ride up here in the night. It’s like she keeps those thoughts away, at least while I’m here, under her watch.”
I shivered then. Half from cold, half from what he’d just handed me.
“Let’s get you home, Grey,” Reap’s voice brushed the top of my head. “You’re freezing.”