Chapter 2
DOPE
I pulled into the driveway that led to my house. My fucking house. It didn’t feel like coming home. It felt like returning to a crime scene.
The house sat tucked into the trees, hiding behind dark cedar siding, black stone, and too much glass for a man who didn’t trust anyone.
Warm light spilled from the bay windows, but the place still looked like a fortress pretending to be a home.
Three hundred and sixty-five days since I’d last seen it.
A year gone, and I could still taste blood when I breathed too deeply.
Coming back wasn’t the miracle. Living with what had happened was my life sentence.
Eminem’s “Superman” rattled my windows as I turned off the engine, my knuckles bone-white against the dark of the wheel. The doctors with their starched coats and practiced sympathy said I would never drive again. Never walk. They were wrong.
My hands still remembered the violent tremor. My lungs still remembered the sandpaper scrape of the ventilator tube, the taste of medical-grade plastic and antiseptic.
Some nights I still woke up choking, clawing at phantom tubes while sweat-soaked sheets twisted around my legs. I could still feel the cold bite of nylon straps against my wrists. The indentations they left in my skin.
The helplessness of lying there. A prisoner in my broken body.
When the doctors delivered that sentence under harsh fluorescent lights, I’d clawed my way upright in the hospital bed. Warm blood seeped through my paper-thin gown, dark as spilled wine. I promised them I would dance on their goddamn graves.
My heart hadn’t just stopped. It had been ripped out of me, violent and final, leaving a cavern I filled with rage.
My brain suffocated in darkness thick as tar while I was trapped, pounding on invisible walls. When I finally tore back into consciousness, every cell in my body screamed as if I’d been flayed alive with a dull blade.
I made a blood oath right there in that sterile room. I would hunt down the bastard who murdered me. I would tear him apart with my bare hands.
Revenge became my religion. Without it, I didn’t have a name.
I parked my midnight-blue Audi next to the gleaming white car, my palm lingering on the leather-wrapped steering wheel, tracing the stitching.
Silhouettes shifted behind gauzy curtains in the living room.
A row of cars—Sebastian’s BMW, or as we called him Bass, Kip’s red Jeep, Ryan’s silver Mercedes—crowded the concrete driveway.
I’d sent a group text, letting them know I would be home today.
My best friends. The closest thing I had to family.
And I hadn’t earned any of them. They wrote.
They called. I let silence answer. My stomach knotted into a fist-sized ball of dread.
I climbed out, my legs grateful to be standing instead of inside the car.
The towering oaks and maples and rolling emerald hills were almost painfully vivid after months of institutional beige walls and fluorescent lighting.
I was allowed outside the more I healed, but the landscape of the facility was almost as drab as the inside.
I grabbed my phone and worn leather jacket, counting breaths.
The screensaver stopped me cold. I’d changed it after the first few months in rehab.
The smile and wide brown eyes gave me a reason to push forward, something that grounded me even though I would never be able to have it again. Still. It worked.
In for four, hold for seven, out for eight, as I approached the weathered oak door. The brass knob wouldn’t budge. My hand slipped, useless and unsteady.
“Good,” I muttered, grateful they hadn’t let their guard down and kept the doors locked. I fumbled with my keys, nearly dropping them. Occasionally my hands still shook, but the stronger I got, the less it happened.
When I finally pushed inside, the faint, stale residue smell of weed wrapped around me like an old friend’s embrace, familiar, tempting, and suffocating all at once. A year sober and my body still begged for it. I needed to fling open every window immediately, let the crisp air cleanse the place.
The entry opened into a long hallway with hardwood floors and white walls, my old scuffs still marking the way. An open concept. Too much space for too many memories.
The living room was straight ahead, kitchen off to the right, stairs tucked behind the TV wall.
The bay windows faced the trees, and the couch sat with its back to the glass.
The TV was mounted on the opposite wall as if it was built for nights that we pretended were normal.
It was a house designed to look casual while it kept secrets.
“Hello.”
My voice ricocheted down the hallway, deeper and rougher than I remembered, thundering in my ears like a stranger’s. Even my voice didn’t recognize the man who’d come back.
I stepped into the living room and leaned against the doorway; my shoulder pressed into the frame.
For a second, no one looked up. Only the sounds echoing in the space—TV noise, the clink of Kip’s spoon against a bowl, Ella’s soft laugh, Holland murmuring something under her breath, Ryan chatting quietly with Sebastian.
From what I’d been told, my friends were with me at the hospital day and night for the first few days, until I woke up from the induced coma.
I told them to leave and not come back. I have no idea if they did, or if I was too drugged up to notice.
What I did know is that they probably ignored me, hacked into my records to check on my recovery and get updates.
Or, they might have paid someone off. At least they cared enough about me even when I wasn’t capable of reaching out to them.
“Miss me?” I asked.
Ella’s gaze lifted. She didn’t look at me like a stranger. She looked at me like someone worth missing, and I didn’t deserve that kind of grace.
Her green eyes skimmed over me. Color bled out of her cheeks as she shoved upright, the blanket on her lap spilling to the floor. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Dope?”
Hearing it out loud felt like a bruise getting pressed. For a second, I almost reached for the man she was calling. That name didn’t fit anymore, but it still cut.
Sebastian’s girl. The one who’d helped drag him out of the dark.
Kip’s spoon froze halfway to his mouth. A blob of ice cream slipped off and splattered back into the bowl, but he didn’t even blink. His stare dragged over me, my broad shoulders, my chest, the way my shirt clung to my muscles instead of hanging loose. “What the fuck happened to you?”
Kip, one of my best friends since we were kids, along with Sebastian, looked at me as if I was a stranger wearing my face.
Sebastian didn’t bother to hide it. He just gaped. “When the hell did your hair turn brown?” he blurted. “And why do you look like you can bench-press my car?”
Ryan stood speechless. Cami’s ex. The only cop I ever trusted.
Next to Ella, Holland was there too. Kip’s redheaded shrink girlfriend with those too-quiet, haunted eyes. She held my gaze without flinching, but her grip tightened on her mug, like she was watching a man stitched together with rage and willpower.
Their reaction hadn’t surprised me. I wasn’t the same man they’d known a year ago. Not even fucking close.
I huffed out something that used to be a laugh and wasn’t anymore. “Long story.”
“Dope?” Ella’s voice shook. “Is it really you?”
I made myself hold her gaze. “I’m not Dope,” I said quietly. “He died that night.”
Silence dropped like a fucking brick.
Kip flinched. Sebastian’s jaw went hard, hands fisting against his knees. Ella’s eyes glossed, but she didn’t blink.
I rolled my shoulders, feeling the new lines, the new name already sitting there under my skin. “I go by Ryker now.”
Dope died in that parking lot. Ryker is who clawed his way out of hell.
Names are dangerous. Names make you real. Names make you someone people can lose.
Sebastian’s brows slammed together. “Ryker?” he echoed. “Since when do you have a whole other name that we don’t know about?”
Kip’s head snapped toward him. “It’s his middle name. You knew that. Or I thought I told you.”
Sebastian shot him a look. “You never told me his middle name was fucking Ryker.”
“Because he hated it,” Kip muttered, his attention still locked on me. “Always said it sounded like some try-hard antihero in a comic book.”
He wasn’t wrong. No way in hell was I going to use Hal or Dope, though. Those names no longer represented the man who woke up after flatlining.
I shrugged one shoulder. “Shit changes.”
Ella swallowed. “So … Dope is gone, and now you’re Ryker?” The way she said it, it wasn’t sarcasm. It was grief trying to figure out where to put itself.
“Dope was the guy who got high and fucked everything up. He didn’t make it out. I did.” I let the words sit between us, heavy and true. “If I answer now, it’s to Ryker.”
Sebastian repeated it under his breath, testing the weight. “Ryker.”
Holland was the only one who hadn’t jolted or spoken yet. She just watched. Her gaze took a slow trip over all my new edges—hair, muscle, the harder way I held myself—before a warm, steady smile finally eased across her pretty face. She slid her hand across Kip’s back.
“Ryker,” she said softly, like she was agreeing with me, not questioning it. “Welcome home.”
I dropped my duffel bag on the floor next to the television, fully aware my friends were watching my every move.
“It’s good to be back.” I leaned against the wall and folded my arms across my chest. “How’s the Horizon Society, and when can I get back in?”
Sebastian’s eyebrow shot up. “Mate, you sure you’re good to go? You were in rehab for a year learning to walk again.”