CHAPTER TWENTY
NOTHINGNESS IS SOFT, like velvet inside my skull, and I want to stay wrapped in it. But the velvet slips, and a tiny stone of awareness rolls loose inside my head.
I drift up through black water. Somewhere above, metal groans. A tire squeals. A man curses under his breath. Something brushes my cheek. Another touch at my throat. Voices bleed through the cotton buffering my awareness.
“Resp’s six a minute. She dives again, I’m pushing it.”
“Do it now.”
Something white-hot and sharp slams into my thigh. Light explodes behind my eyelids, and fire races up my bones, through my ribcage, and spears my heart. Air detonates in my lungs. I arch, cough bile, and every buried nerve riots back to life.
I try to scream but it’s only a rasp. My own heartbeat drowns me.
“Stay with me, Max.” The voice slices through the roar—sharp, bossy, impossible. Damian.
How?
Plastic crinkles; fabric tears. “Pulse coming up,” he says.
The floor shudders; a motor growls inches from my spine. I blink, force the blur into shapes. Van. I’m on the floor of what looks like an ambulance, sitting upright against a bench seat. A foil blanket crinkles around me.
In front of me, strapped to a backboard, is Wyatt. From here I can see his swollen-shut eye, his shirt glued to him with blood.
The world tilts again. Tires bump gravel. I flinch. A siren blurts once, like a throat-clearing cough, then cuts.
“Unit Six, burn victim, Code Three,” another voice barks. The scent of October air rolls through the open driver’s window.
A shout outside, muffled, and then we lurch forward; the faint clang of a gate rattling behind us.
“Clear,” says the passenger. Jake? The driver downshifts, steady hands on the wheel. I glimpse paramedic green on his shoulders.
My stomach flips; sweat chills on my back.
Damian’s face hovers again, pen-light stabbing my pupils. His eyes are red around the edges, brimming with fear.
“Max, focus on me,” he orders. “Tell me where you are.”
The question scrambles inside my skull. Cage. Stage. Coffin. My mouth works but no words land.
“Her brain’s still swimming,” he tells the cab. “Narcan yanked the curtain back, but she was deep.”
Someone up front swears quietly. The dash radio sputters: “All units responding to multiple ten-seventy-ones at the old Fremont Airstrip—” Jake kills the volume with a snap.
I swallow, try again. “Billy?” The name rasps out, tastes like ash.
No one says anything. My foil blanket crackles with my movement.
“Small sips,” Damian murmurs, tipping a bottle to my lips. Water tastes alien, like I’ve never met it before.
The van hits smooth asphalt and the vibration eases. Wind whistles through a cracked window up front. I gag and shove the bottle away.
My gaze skitters to the driver’s mirror. Eyes meet mine there—coffee-dark, familiar, agonizingly alive.
Ryder.
I blink and the eyes are still there.
Sanity frays. I rasp, “You’re dead.”
“Yeah?” All I can see are his eyes, but they crease with a smile. “Guess I missed the memo.”
I lurch forward and the foil blanket crackles like static off broken speakers. Every cell in my body tries to decide between sobbing and screaming. The van doubles, then triples, edges warping as if the glass itself can’t process what I’m seeing.
“You’re alive.” It’s almost a whisper, like it’s too unbelievable to say out loud.
My brain rifles through impossible explanations—angel, ghost, morphine mirage—before landing on the simplest, most devastating truth: I was wrong.
I could stare at those eyes in the rearview mirror forever. I’m starved for them.
“Still kicking, baby.”
The term of endearment makes me choke with emotion.
“How?” The word cracks on my lips. “I saw the bullet go through you.”
Jake twists in his seat. “I found him that night, after you were taken. Storm fried a perimeter sensor,” he explains.
“Except it wasn’t the storm, it was cut.
I couldn’t sleep and saw the alert. Drove out to check the node and found Ryder in the driveway.
Clean through-and-through, high left chest. Missed the engine room by an inch. ”
“He called me,” Damian says, tightening the BP cuff on my arm. “We packed the hole, ran him to a field doc in Redwater. Cost two grand and a bottle of Booker’s.”
Ryder huffs a laugh, eyes still on the road. “Worth every penny. Doc stitched me, then taped my mouth shut ‘cause I wouldn’t stop trying to say your name.”
My pulse thrashes so hard it kicks the monitor into a double-beep. “You were alive all this time.” Grief, relief, and guilt all try to occupy the same space in my chest. The collision makes it hard to breathe.
Ryder’s gaze flashes to the mirror again, soft heat flickering behind the exhaustion. “Never stopped looking for you, Maxwell.”
The van falls quiet except for the low thrum of tires and the whisper of prairie wind leaking through the cracked pane. For a heartbeat I’m suspended between two timelines—the night he died and this impossible now.
Damian presses a clip to my finger, looks up at a monitor displaying my pulse. Heat rolls through me, then flips to ice. I shiver under the foil blanket.
“One-ten over seventy,” says Damian, checking a monitor. “Not awful, considering.”
The scanner hisses with open static, then a female dispatcher breaks in: “…confirm ATF en-route, ETA eight minutes. Report of one DOA at scene —” Jake hits the scanner, and silences it again.
Wind buffets the side panel. The floor’s vibration settles into a weird, painful peace.
We’re together again. Wyatt’s alive. Ryder’s alive.
I’m alive. It’s overwhelming. Too much to process.
Especially with Damian’s administrations making my bones vibrate.
Everything is hyper real and surreal at the same time.
Damian digs in the med kit. “Ah, perfect. Promethazine. For the pukes coming your way.”
“How do you know all this?” I manage to ask.
“Used to be on the other end of the Narcan,” is all he says. He holds out the tablet and a bottle of water, and I take it.
My stomach heaves at the mere thought, but I swallow the pill, water sluicing like acid down an esophagus raw from bile. My joints ache, my skin itches from the inside, and my thoughts tumble out of order.
I force a slow breath. I think of Ryder’s house, Leathernecks, Jake and Damian’s house. All the places I’ve missed so much.
“Are we going home?” I ask weakly.
“Not yet,” answers Damian. “Wyatt needs the medic, and then we’ll hole up somewhere safe while we wait to see what the fallout is.”
Jake clears his throat. “But first, we’re rendezvousing with Damian’s truck at an old grain elevator. Swapping vehicles, going dark. Ryder and I’ll torch this ambulance after we wipe the prints.”
“Burn it?” I ask. “Why?”
Ryder glances at me in the mirror. “Because we stole it from county EMS,” he says. “And the decals are magnetic.”
Wyatt’s laugh cracks the hush—warm, incredulous, instantly regretful. He clamps a hand to his bandaged side. “Son of a bitch, that’s…that’s funny.”
Damian tightens Wyatt’s chest strap. “Try not to breathe too deep.”
The van drones. Outside is nothing but blacktop and the raw Wyoming dark. My eyelids flutter, heavy with the riot starting in my veins.
I anchor myself to the only constants I have left. Four men. Four compass points in the wreckage of my world.
I lean my head back on the bench and let a single, aching truth settle in my bones: Love didn’t save me tonight. Love carried me, bleeding and half-dead, out of hell. And for as long as we’re breathing the same air, I will crawl, run, or burn to keep them alive in return.
Somewhere ahead, where the highway bends into star-clotted black, waits a future where no one owns my body, and the only currency is the promise we just made in silence: we leave no one behind.
The van keeps humming, half lullaby, half war drum, and I close my eyes against the blur of tears and headlights.
I have been caged, collared, drugged, paraded, violated.
But tonight I ride toward dawn with four ghosts made flesh, and the horizon, though jagged, finally feels wide enough for the life I intend to live.