CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHEN THE STORM passes, I’m still standing.
And Wyatt is still there too.
It starts with realizing I slept through the night. Then with eating some dry toast and keeping my food down.
Wyatt watches me carefully. We’re both battle-worn and weary.
I take a shower on my own and I’m startled by my reflection in the bathroom mirror.
My cheeks are hollowed out, dark circles under my eyes like bruises.
The past few weeks feel like a strange dream—Rox, Maze, Wyatt.
The twisting sickness. The camera blinking silently in the bedroom. The dreams of Ryder.
I feel scraped out and empty, raw around the edges.
Wyatt suggests we go for a walk.
“Outside?” It feels like I haven’t been outside in years.
“Yeah.” He gives me a funny smile. “C’mon, kid.”
Three guys working on their bikes out front track me with their eyes as we step past, but no one says anything. The sun is bright, the air fresh in a way I forgot existed, smelling like dirt and sunshine.
We circle the hangar in relative silence. He points out a hawk, I pick a bunch of dandelions and link them into a crown, dropping it on my head.
When we come back around to the front, Wyatt jerks his chin toward the storehouse. We cross the yard and walk around to the far side, where it runs parallel to the bushes that line the front of the property.
It’s just a shitty little strip of grass with no view and no sunshine, but Wyatt drops to the ground and pats the ground beside him.
It’s where he wanted me to meet him when he put that note in the cigarette pack.
“Surveillance blindspot here,” he explains in a low voice. “We can talk.”
It’s hard to know where to begin.
I’ve been captive for weeks, ripped away from the place I thought was home, left with the image of Ryder bleeding out on the gravel.
When Silas dropped me at Billy’s feet, I was hysterical.
Inconsolable. But Billy set himself to breaking me, with rope and humiliation and fear. With a collar and an audience.
He taught me hope was poison. That feeling anything would shred me apart. So I stopped feeling, and shut myself off to everything.
Then Rox came along and offered me a faster way to lose myself, and I chased that as far as I could until it was wrenched away from me.
Now I’m sitting in the grass with the man who keeps saving me. The one who cared for me. The one who just carried me through hell. And I don’t know how to speak about what I’ve been through. How to reach whatever’s left inside me. Or who he really is anymore.
I’ve been shattered every way that a person can be, and what’s left of me is just pieces loosely linked together. I don’t have words for that. But luckily, he starts.
“You know we were military,” he says quietly, casting a glance past my shoulder.
I nod.
“The four of us made up a highly specialized unit, but it got disbanded. Political shifts. Ryder bought the land and I opened the shop. Jake started working. But Ryder stayed connected. He had contacts looking to hire for private work, off-the-record stuff no one wants to touch, that sort of thing. So we started taking on contracts, you know, that require skilled work.”
He watches me carefully.
I knew they did some kind of work they wouldn’t tell me about, but it never fazed me. Now the way he’s looking at me, careful and assessing, I wonder if I was supposed to take it more seriously.
I’d been living in a motorcycle club for years by the time I met them, though. Off-the-books work has never seemed unusual to me.
He drops his voice even lower. “We got a big contract on a corruption case with ties to the government. The O.D. is running a massive money laundering scheme that’s funding an umbrella of illegal activities.
My background is in intelligence, plus I have a bike.
So Ryder sent me in undercover. Hence, Ryan. ”
I know a bit about that side of the O.D.’s operations, even though I’m not supposed to. But Billy didn’t go to any lengths to hide anything from me—hell, he tried to give me to the senator as a gift. So none of this surprises me. Except maybe the idea of Wyatt as an undercover agent.
“Silas found a flash drive,” he continues.
“Hidden inside a bike that went into town for service. Just pictures. The clubhouse, the hangar, the grounds. No faces. But not long after that, the surveillance started going in.” He lifts his eyes to me.
“Billy doesn’t suspect me, which is the only reason I’m still breathing.
But he knows someone’s feeding information out, and he’s watching everyone.
I can’t risk using any of my old channels. ”
He picks at a blade of grass and looks away.
“What I’m telling you right now, Max…it could get me killed.”
My throat tightens.
“I went on the job to El Salvador, and when I got back…you were just here. And I don’t fucking know what you’re doing here, but you don’t belong in this place.”
He turns to look at me fully now. “I need to understand what you’re doing here. And how to get you out.”
I look down at my hands, at the dirt under my nails and the faint bruise on the back of one hand.
“I’m here because they took me,” I say quietly. “Because I used to belong to them. To Billy. He’s the one I ran from. My ex.”
Wyatt’s whole body stiffens.
“Billy is your ex?” He stares, disbelieving. “Billy is the one you were running from? You’re O.D.?”
I sigh. I hate hearing it put that way. Like this is my identity. Like this club is part of who I am. But then I press my lips together and nod. Because like it or not, it is.
Wyatt leans back against the storehouse wall, scrubbing both hands over his face.
“Jesus Christ, Max,” he says, his voice hollow. He blows out a long breath. “How is that possible? Is this where you ran from?”
I nod again, barely breathing.
“Max…we’re six, maybe eight miles from Ryder’s place. On foot. Drugged. Jesus. I never would’ve suspected. You never said a word.”
I pick at the dirt under my nails, feeling the weight of everything I've tried to outrun.
“I didn’t know how to say it,” I murmur. “It seemed like a lot to explain. And I started thinking I could just leave it behind. Start a new life.”
“You should’ve told me. You should’ve trusted me.” Then, almost an afterthought: “How could they take you? We had the perimeter locked up. Were you at home?”
Ice cracks down the center of my chest, opening a fissure wide enough to swallow me whole.
He doesn’t know.
The realization hits like a wrecking ball, shattering the fragile, frozen thing I’ve been hiding inside. Something sharp and terrible starts to rise in me. A dark tide, rushing fast, ripping loose everything I’ve buried.
“I don’t know,” I say breathlessly, my lungs tight. “I stepped outside and Silas—”
The tide swells. Crests.
Bursts.
And suddenly I’m crying.
A full-body sob that rips out of me like my body’s trying to purge something it can’t hold anymore.
I haven’t cried since I got here. Billy didn’t give me time. One horror to the next, no room to feel, no room to fall apart.
But now it finds me, and everything hits me all at once.
“Ryder—” I choke out, but the word breaks apart in my throat, swallowed by the flood.
I double over, arms locked around my knees, collapsing into myself and rocking.
It hits all at once—the grief, the loss, the devastating reality I’ve been living with.
Losing Ryder shattered me so thoroughly that, in a way, it made being here easier.
No hope meant nothing to live for. No future meant nothing to fight for.
It let me stop trying to be anything but gone.
But Wyatt being here rips that hopelessness away from me—and that makes it worse. He pulls me back into a world where I might still live.
And Ryder’s not in it.
A wail escapes me, and then Wyatt’s arms are wrapping around me, pulling me in against him as if he could shield me from everything I’m feeling. Just hold me together through sheer determination and muscle.
“You kept saying his name when you were sick,” he murmurs.
“He’s gone,” I sob. The words tear out of me.
I feel him flinch against me.
“No,” he whispers. Like he’s saying it to himself.
“Silas shot him,” I babble, voice breaking, my words wet with my tears. “He shot him. Ryder is gone.”
And then I break completely.
The dam inside me ruptures. Every wall, every barrier, every lie I’ve told myself collapses. I cry like I’ve never cried before.
I cry until my body gives out. Until the exhaustion that overtakes me is a kind of peace. I cry and let myself be held, and Wyatt doesn’t say a thing. By the time my eyes are dry and he’s lifting me to my feet, the sky has turned soft with dusk.
Time is a strange, slippery thing. I get better in increments, although it takes an enormous amount of concentration to push away the relentless hankering for pills.
Wyatt gets worse.
Something in him hardens. Crystallizes. I wake up at night to find him sitting in a chair, staring at the wall. He smiles less. Withdraws more. Even the other guys notice.
“Must’ve been all that cum in his balls keeping him happy,” someone jokes. “Now that Max is sucking it out, he’s a miserable bastard.”
Wyatt doesn’t respond. He just walks away without smiling.
He becomes obsessed with getting us out as fast as possible—whispering ideas to me under the covers at night, pressing me for anything I might have noticed.
Security patterns. Door locks. How often the guards rotate.
He’s building a plan inside his head, looking for the cracks and the weaknesses.
But most of the surveillance is new. It wasn’t like this before.
I start noticing it too. Tiny cameras tucked into corners. Bulky ones bolted in plain sight. Mic pickups hiding inside smoke detectors, ceiling vents.
Wyatt points out the rest—RFID tags stitched into the vests, club-issued phones that are tracked, maybe even listened to. Half of it goes over my head, but I listen anyway because knowledge feels like power.