Chapter 15 A Dead Boy’s Files
Mara
For one full second, neither of us moves.
Rain ticks against the van roof in a soft, steady pattern. Tires hiss overhead on the highway. Somewhere water drips off the concrete lip of the overpass and lands with a hollow metallic plink that sounds too rhythmic, too patient, too much like a countdown.
Ronan is half over me, one hand braced against the seat, his breath still rough from kissing me, from the chase, from the rooftop, from everything tonight keeps throwing at us.
I’m still pinned in the heat of him, my heart trying to decide whether it’s racing from want or fear or the simple impossible fact that Eli Mercer’s laptop bag is sitting in the backseat of a stolen van neither of us noticed in the chaos.
His eyes are fixed on the backseat now, the hunger from a second ago burned off and replaced by something much colder. He shifts off me in one controlled movement, every muscle in him gone hard with alertness. The loss of his weight is immediate and awful, like stepping from a furnace into winter.
“Did you see it when we got in?” he asks.
“No.”
“You sure?”
I turn to him so fast my shoulder hits the passenger door. “You think I forgot there was a dead boy’s bag in the backseat while we were—”
I cut myself off.
His gaze flicks to my mouth once, then away again. Not because he doesn’t know how to finish that sentence. Because he does, and there are too many other things bleeding into the moment now.
“That’s not what I asked,” he says.
I stare at him, furious that he can go that flat that fast. “No, Ronan. I did not see Eli’s laptop bag sitting in the backseat before now.”
He nods once. Accepts it instantly. Files it away. Moves on.
That should not be a relief.
It is.
He reaches behind the seat and pulls the bag toward him slowly, like he expects it to explode or bite.
The leather is soaked and scuffed, one strap half torn through just like I remember from the warehouse photos and every passing glimpse of Eli I’ve seen in club footage.
A dull silver corner tag catches the low light from the dashboard and turns cold in the dark.
I pull my knees up under me and watch him.
“You think Eli hid it there?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re still opening it?”
His mouth tightens. “Yes.”
He sets the bag between us instead of the backseat, keeping it close enough to control and far enough that if something ugly happens, it happens to the leather and not his face.
His fingers move over the zipper, the seams, the pockets.
Quick, efficient, careful. The hands of a man who has found too many surprises in places they weren’t supposed to be.
“Anything wired?” I ask.
“Not seeing it.”
“That isn’t reassuring.”
“No.”
He opens the main zipper.
Inside is a laptop wrapped in a hoodie, two cheap burner phones, a folded manila envelope swollen with papers, and a small spiral notebook with the elastic band snapped loose. One glance and my whole body goes cold.
This is real.
Not a planted decoy filled with junk. Not a random bag that happens to look right. Eli’s life is in there in pieces.
Ronan reaches for the burners first. Smart. He pops the backs off, checks the batteries, checks under them, tosses one onto the dashboard and the other on the floorboard. Then he opens the notebook.
Eli’s handwriting slopes sharp and cramped across the pages, the kind of writing people use when they think faster than they can sort. Dates. Figures. Names reduced to initials. Arrows. Boxes. Question marks stabbed into paper hard enough to nearly tear it.
My pulse kicks harder.
“What do you see?” I ask.
Ronan scans the first two pages, then the third. “Accounts.”
“Club?”
“Looks like it.”
He hands the notebook over.
The paper smells faintly damp and metallic. The first pages are numbers I can’t yet make sense of—deposits, missing amounts, shipment notations, references to side inventory. Then one line jumps out hard enough to stop me.
S.K. moving product outside agreed channels. Not reporting full take.
I look up. “S.K.”
“Silas Kane.”
The certainty in Ronan’s voice makes me swallow.
I flip farther. More initials. More amounts.
A page with three burner numbers listed under the heading used after meets / don’t call direct.
Another page with handwritten plate numbers and dates.
Another with a rough family tree of the club structure—Jax at the top, names branching below, Silas circled twice in black ink.
“He was building something,” I say.
Ronan doesn’t answer because he’s already opening the envelope.
Photographs slide out. Printouts. Grainy copies of ledger pages, photographs of what looks like a laptop screen showing transfers between shell companies, cellphone pictures of handwritten account books. One is a shot through a clubhouse office window of two men standing over papers.
Jax.
And Silas.
Even blurry, I know them.
Ronan sees the same thing and goes very still.
“He took photos of the books,” I say.
“He took photos of what they didn’t want photographed.”
I sort through the stack with my good hand. Club accounts. Payment notations. Product tallies that don’t match the deposits Eli wrote in the notebook. A shot of an old warehouse file box with half a shipping label visible. Another of what looks like a burned ledger page sealed in a plastic sleeve.
“What am I looking at?” I ask.
“Silas skimming.”
“From the club?”
“From everybody.”
The answer comes out flat enough to suggest old anger rather than surprise. I look at him. “You knew.”
“I knew money was disappearing.” He pulls the laptop free of the hoodie and sets it on the center console. “Didn’t know how deep until Eli started looking.”
“You said he was asking questions.”
“Yeah.”
“This is more than questions.”
“This is what got him killed.”
The sentence lands hard and ugly in the tight dark of the van.
For a second neither of us moves. Then Ronan flips open the laptop.
The battery is low but not dead. The screen glows blue-white in the van’s shadows, turning both our faces ghost-pale. A password prompt appears.
Ronan swears softly.
I look at the notebook in my lap, at the way Eli’s pages loop back on themselves in circles and arrows. One page near the middle has a boxed line under a list of dates.
A.M. 0417
I point. “Try that.”
Ronan looks at me. “Why?”
“Because it’s boxed. Because it’s repeated twice. Because maybe he thought he’d remember and then didn’t.”
He types it in.
The password clears.
A thrill of fear and triumph hits so fast it makes me dizzy.
The desktop is chaos. Folders. Audio files. Scans. Spreadsheets. Two external drives listed in the corner, one disconnected. A background photo of Eli with his father at some charity ride, both of them smiling in a way that now feels like black humor.
Ronan’s jaw flexes once.
“Start with files,” I say.
He opens the main directory. More folders. Accounts. Shipments. Burners. Warehouse South. FIRE.
That last one changes the air.
Not because of the name alone.
Because Ronan sees it.
I watch the blood drain from his face in real time.
He was already pale from blood loss, but whatever color remained goes flatter, colder.
His whole body locks as if the laptop screen has reached inside him and grabbed bone.
I look from the folder to him. “Ronan.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Fire,” I say more quietly.
Still nothing.
Then his voice, when it comes, is low enough to scrape. “Open it.”
He doesn’t touch the trackpad.
I do.
Inside are three subfolders and one audio file sitting loose beneath them.
FIRE—DON’T TRUST JAX
The words hit me like a fist.
I forget to breathe.
Ronan doesn’t move at all.
The name on the file stares up at us in Eli’s careful digital lettering, and for the first time since I met Ronan, I understand that whatever happened years ago did not stay years ago. It lived. It spread. It came forward under different names and new blood and finally reached back for Eli.
“This is it,” I whisper.
Ronan’s eyes stay on the screen. “Play it.”
My hand shakes when I click.
Static. Rustle. Then a breath.
And Eli Mercer’s voice fills the van.
Young. Tense. Too fast. Like he recorded it between looking over his shoulder and trying not to admit he was scared.
“If this is playing, something already went bad.”
The voice cracks once at the edges and steadies.
“I don’t know who gets this. Maybe nobody. Maybe Ronan. Maybe whoever’s left when they finally stop calling this loyalty and start calling it what it is.”
I look at Ronan.
He looks like he’s forgotten how to blink.
On the recording, Eli exhales sharply. Papers rustle.
“Silas is skimming. I have proof. Cash. Product. Side shipments moving off books through channels Jax never approved—or maybe he did, and that’s worse.
He’s been peeling money out of club accounts in pieces small enough not to flag until you map the whole run.
He’s moving product through shell buyers and falsifying clubhouse numbers to cover it. ”
I clamp my free hand over my mouth.
The van feels too small for the dead speaking.
Eli keeps going.
“I thought it was just theft. It isn’t just theft.”
Another breath. Shaky this time.
“It ties back to Warehouse South. The fire file. The one they buried. The fire wasn’t an accident.”
Ronan closes his eyes.
Only for one second.
It is enough.
When he opens them again, they have gone dark in a way I have never seen on any human face that wasn’t about to either kill or collapse.
Eli’s voice lowers.
“Ana Morales was in that building because she had records. Real records. Jax knew. Silas knew. I don’t know who else. Somebody moved before she could talk. They covered it. Then they covered the cover-up.”
My throat goes tight around her name.
Ana Morales.
Not theory now. Not whispered half-history. A dead woman with records and a fire and men who knew.
On the audio, Eli swallows hard enough for the mic to catch it.
“I’m keeping copies separate. If anything happens to me, do not trust Jax. Do not let Silas near the files. And if Ronan hears this—”
The van goes silent except for the rain and Eli’s next inhale.
“—you were right. I should’ve come to you sooner.”
Ronan’s fingers tighten around the edge of the seat until his knuckles pale.
Eli’s voice drops almost to a whisper.
“I think they know I’m digging. If I disappear, it wasn’t random. The fire wasn’t random either. It’s all the same blood. Same rot. I just finally found the trail.”
The recording clicks off.
Silence crashes into the van so hard my ears ring.
I stare at the screen, at the still file name, at the reflected ghost of my own face in the black band at the bottom.
“This isn’t just corruption,” I say, because the words are too small and still the only ones I have. “This is old blood.”
Ronan doesn’t answer.
He looks sick.
Not nauseous. Not weak. Sick in the sense that something toxic has finally surfaced after living in the body too long, and now there is no pretending it wasn’t there all along.
“You knew more than you told me,” I say.
His laugh is a dead thing. “Yeah.”
“How much more?”
He doesn’t look at me. “Enough.”
“That is not an answer.”
“No.”
I watch him in the blue-white laptop glow, the way he stares not at the screen anymore but through it, back into some place years old and still burning.
“Did you know Ana Morales?”
His mouth flattens.
That’s answer enough.
The truth starts arranging itself into shapes I don’t want. Ronan at the warehouse. Ronan unable to say what happened after he found Eli. Ronan going pale at the word fire like the dead reached through the computer and put a hand around his throat.
Whatever role he played back then, it was close enough to scar.
I open my mouth.
The laptop pings.
The sound is small.
Sweet, almost.
Wrong enough that every nerve in my body lights up instantly.
Ronan’s head snaps down toward the screen.
A notification has appeared in the lower corner.
Location Services Active — Share Request Accepted
For one second I do not understand it.
Then the map icon opens by itself.
A pulsing blue dot blooms on the screen.
Our location.
Broadcasting.
My whole body goes cold. “Ronan.”
He is already grabbing the laptop, fingers flying over keys, but the screen flashes again—
Location shared
The words sit there, bright and cheerful and utterly catastrophic.
“Someone just accessed it,” I whisper.
“No,” Ronan says, voice gone to stone. “Someone used it.”
Rain hammers the roof of the van.
Above us, traffic roars over the overpass.
And on the laptop screen, the blue dot keeps pulsing exactly where we are.