Chapter 2 #6
Tris looked up at Edge, tears slipping down her face.
“She didn’t go there because she wanted to be bad.
She went because they made her feel like she already was.
Then somebody gave her something. A blunt, but it wasn’t just weed.
I don’t know what was in it. She started talking like she was cursed.
Like Destiny meant she had to finish what her mother started. Like Mandy was inside her.”
I remembered her in the brush.
Mandy?
I’m not her.
I’m not her.
My hand curled into a fist.
Jake’s voice roughened. “We tried to get her out. We did. But she was gone. Not normal gone. Whatever she smoked hit her fast. She was drunk too, but this was different. She looked right through us.”
Nyla nodded. “They were filming her. Laughing. Even after she was messed up.”
Regan’s head snapped up.
“What?”
Nyla held out her phone with shaking hands. “I took some videos too. Not to hurt her. To show what happened. To show she was drugged. To show them laughing before everything went bad.”
Hacker moved instantly, but Edge lifted one hand.
Everyone stopped.
Edge walked to Nyla.
She looked like she might pass out, but she didn’t lower the phone.
He took it carefully.
Not gently, exactly.
Carefully.
Like he knew this girl was handing him one of the only things standing between his daughter and a noose.
“Thank you,” he said.
Nyla started crying again.
Edge looked at Hacker. “Copy everything. Every phone they have. Now. Then wipe their location from here.”
Hacker nodded and moved.
I watched Edge’s face as the first video began playing without sound.
I couldn’t see the screen from where I stood, but I saw his reaction.
Nothing.
Again, nothing.
A terrifying, dead nothing.
Regan rose and stepped beside him. Her bloodstained hand found his forearm.
He didn’t look at her, but his fingers opened, and she slid hers into them.
Together, they watched their daughter break on a screen.
No parent should have to do that.
No child should have to be strong enough to hide the reason.
Tarak came forward slowly.
“Edge,” he said.
Edge didn’t answer.
Tarak’s voice cracked. “I didn’t know.”
Edge looked at him then.
For one second, old history stood between them. Mandy. The engagement. The betrayal. The car wreck. The secret daughter. Every wound that had been stitched badly and called healed.
Then Edge said, “Neither did I.”
That was worse than blame.
Regan’s face crumpled.
“She was protecting us,” she whispered.
Nobody contradicted her.
Because it was true.
Destiny Rourke, seventeen years old, almost eighteen, bullied bloody by rich kids and haunted by a dead mother she never chose, had swallowed years of torture because she thought the people who loved her had already suffered enough.
Then tonight, the weight had gotten too heavy.
And she had dropped it on the whole damn desert.
Tris wiped her face and gave a shaky, awful laugh. “She really blew shit up tonight.”
Jake looked at her like now was not the time.
Tris laughed harder, crying through it. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I just—she said they wanted a desert fire. So she gave them an inferno.”
Regan let out a broken sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t hurt so much.
Edge did not laugh.
He handed the phone to Hacker.
Then he looked around the room, and every man there straightened.
“My daughter is upstairs hurt,” he said. “She is drugged, burned, bleeding, and scared because she thought she had to carry this alone. That ends tonight.”
Nobody breathed.
“If any kid from that party says her name, I want their family history. If any parent calls a lawyer, I want to know who pays that lawyer. If any video goes online, I want it found before it spreads. If any cop asks questions, they go through our attorney. Nobody talks without me. Nobody threatens those kids without my say.”
That surprised me.
Not the control.
The restraint.
Edge’s eyes moved to Tris, Jake, and Nyla.
“You three stay here.”
Jake stiffened. “We need to tell our families?—”
“You will,” Regan said, voice raw but steadier now. “But not yet. Not until we know who’s looking for you and what story they’re telling.”
Tris nodded immediately. “We’ll stay.”
Jake looked at her like she had lost her mind.
She glared back. “Destiny would stay for us.”
That shut him up.
Doc appeared at the top of the stairs then.
Every head turned.
Edge moved first. Regan was half a step behind him. Tarak came up from the side. I stayed where I was, but every nerve in me stretched toward that staircase.
Doc’s face was serious, but not grim.
That was the only reason I kept breathing.
“She’s banged up,” he said. “Head wound looks worse than it is, but I’m watching for concussion.
Burn on her hand needs cleaning and wrapping.
Ribs are bruised, maybe cracked. Shoulder’s strained.
She’s got plenty of cuts, no major bleeding now.
The bigger problem is whatever she took.
Pupils are ugly, pulse is high, she’s dehydrated and coming in and out hard. ”
“Hospital?” Edge asked.
Doc hesitated.
The whole room tensed.
“If she worsens, yes,” Doc said. “No argument. But for this minute, she’s stable enough for me to monitor her here. She needs quiet, fluids, and somebody she trusts when the panic hits.”
Regan was already moving up the stairs.
Edge followed.
Then stopped.
He looked back.
At me.
I knew that look.
It was not trust.
Not yet.
Trust took more than one night and a rescued daughter.
But it was not suspicion either.
It was acknowledgment.
Respect, maybe, carved out of terror and blood.
“You found her,” he said.
I nodded once.
“You brought her home.”
“Yeah.”
His jaw worked.
Then he gave me one short nod.
For Edge Rourke, it felt like a whole speech.
“I owe you,” he said.
The room went quiet again, but this silence was different.
I didn’t know what to do with it.
So I said the only thing that mattered.
“She asked me to tell Regan she was breathing.”
Regan made a soft, broken sound from the stairs.
Edge’s face twisted for half a second before he locked it down.
Then he turned and went upstairs after his daughter.
I should have felt relieved.
I didn’t.
Because upstairs, Destiny Rourke was bleeding through the worst night of her life.
Downstairs, three kids had just cracked open years of secrets.
Outside, men were cleaning a crime scene before the law could put a name on it.
And me?
I stood in the middle of Santa Fe’s clubhouse with her blood drying on my hands, her voice still in my ears, and the memory of her fingers clinging to my cut like she had known me in the dark.
Forbidden fruit.
That was what men called girls they wanted and should not touch.
But Destiny wasn’t fruit.
She wasn’t temptation dressed up pretty for some outlaw’s downfall.
She was fire.
Wounded, reckless, half-wild fire.
JD Northport arrived twenty minutes after the first video played.
He did not come in like an outlaw.
That was the first thing I noticed.
Every man in the clubhouse was running hot by then.
Edge was upstairs with Destiny. Regan was with him.
Tarak had left with two Santa Fe brothers and two of ours to recover the bike before cops or fire crews widened the search area.
Hacker had three phones plugged into his laptop and a face pale enough to tell me the footage was worse than anyone wanted to say out loud.
The kids—Tris, Jake, and Nyla—sat at one of the back tables with untouched water bottles in front of them, wrapped in borrowed hoodies, looking like they had aged five years in one night.
Tris kept wiping at her face like tears were an inconvenience she didn’t have time for.
Jake watched every door. Nyla stared at the phone Hacker had taken from her like she had handed over a live grenade and was waiting to see who it killed.
The room smelled like coffee, smoke, leather, blood, and panic.
Then JD walked in.
Clean jeans. Dark button-down. Boots polished but not pretty.
Cut over his shoulders like he had earned it and still remembered what life looked like without it.
He had businessman written into the set of his jaw and Royal Bastard in his eyes, which made him more dangerous than half the men in the room who wore their violence on the outside.
Some men entered a crisis looking for someone to hit.
JD entered looking for the weak point in the legal structure.
That was worse.
His gaze swept the room once. Kids. Phones. Hacker. Callum. Me. Blood on my shirt. Blood on my hands. Then the stairs.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Upstairs,” Callum said. “Doc says stable for now.”
“For now,” JD repeated, like he hated the words.
He turned toward Hacker. “What do we have?”
Hacker pushed back from the table, rubbing both hands over his face. “Too much. Not enough. Depends how screwed you want to feel.”
“Start with the worst.”
“Videos,” Hacker said. “A lot of them. Most shaky. Most useless. Some show Destiny at the party. Some show her visibly intoxicated. Some show kids laughing at her. One shows someone handing her the blunt, but the angle’s bad.
Nyla’s got the best evidence that something was wrong with her before the fire started. ”
JD’s eyes cut to Nyla.
She shrank a little, but she didn’t look away.
“I wasn’t trying to record her to hurt her,” she said quickly. “I swear. I just—she was acting wrong. I thought maybe if we could show her later, she’d understand why we were scared.”
JD’s expression softened by half an inch. “You may have saved her.”
Nyla’s mouth trembled.
Jake leaned forward. “Can you get her out of this?”
JD looked at him then.
Not kindly.
Not cruelly either.
Honestly.
“No.”
The word landed hard.
Tris went still.
Jake’s face tightened.
JD continued, “I can help keep her from being buried under the worst version of the story. That’s different.”
Callum leaned against the bar with his arms folded. “We’re building Cabo.”
JD’s gaze sharpened.