18. Jade
Jade
The bike beneath me feels like a living thing.
Razor’s body is a wall of heat at my front, my arms locked around his stomach as we lean hard into the first turn out of the alley.
The wind cuts cold against my face. My lip is still bleeding where Tyler’s fist connected, and every time I swallow, I taste copper.
We got the flash drive. That’s what I keep telling myself as the city blurs past on either side, streetlights smearing into orange ribbons.
We got it. We got out. It’s done.
Except it’s not done, because Tyler’s voice is still living in my skull—this isn’t fucking over, I’ll find Mason—and the look on his face when he saw Hawk standing in that alley is the kind of look that doesn’t lead anywhere good.
That’s the look of a man with nothing left to lose, deciding to burn everything down around him.
“Heads up,” Razor says in front of me, and I feel his body shift before I understand why.
Three motorcycles roll out of the side street forty yards ahead, blocking the road in a loose line. They have leather cuts on with Ruthless Saints patches. Engines running, exhaust rising white in the cold night air.
It’s not a coincidence. Either they were already in the area when Tyler got to his apartment, or he made a call before he came up that fire escape.
Either way, we are not driving through those bikes without a fight.
Razor squeezes my arm, then cuts hard right onto a side street so fast my stomach drops.
Gravel sprays under the tires as we lose traction for half a second before the bike bites and surges forward.
I grip his jacket with both hands and press close, trying not to think about the math of this.
How many of them are there versus how many of us?
Shadow’s van headlights appear at an intersection ahead. Hawk’s Harley comes up behind him, engine roaring through the quiet street loud enough to rattle windows.
For thirty seconds, I think we might actually make it.
Then I hear the bikes behind us.
Three engines, maybe four, closing fast. The Ruthless Saints know this neighborhood. They’ve been running territory here for years, which means they know where every side street dead-ends, every alley loops back on itself, and exactly how to funnel anyone trying to escape into a corner.
Razor knows it too. I can feel it in the way he stops accelerating and starts looking instead.
“Van’s stopping,” Shadow says in my earpiece—the Bluetooth from the operation is still live in my ear. “The street ahead is blocked. Two vehicles are parked sideways.”
I look up. He’s right. A pickup and a dark SUV sit nose-to-nose across the road two blocks ahead, and I can see figures standing beside them. Four, at least, that I can count from here.
We’re boxed in.
Razor pulls the bike up next to Shadow’s van as it rolls to a stop. Hawk comes up on the other side and kills his engine. For one second, nobody moves.
Then the bikes come around the corner behind us, and we’re out of seconds.
“Off the bike,” Razor says, and I swing my leg over and drop to the pavement on unsteady legs.
The Ruthless Saints pull up maybe twenty feet behind us and stop.
Four bikes. Six men by the time they dismount, two of them having had passengers.
Danny is among them—red hair, stocky build, I’d recognize him anywhere—and the man beside him I don’t know, but he’s enormous, shaved head, jaw like a slab of concrete.
Hawk steps in front of me without being asked. Shadow moves to my left. Razor to my right.
“Danny.” Shadow’s voice is completely flat. “You’re smarter than this.”
“Tyler called in a favor.” Danny shrugs like we’re not all standing in a street at midnight with weapons drawn. “You know how it is.”
“I do. I also know you want to think very carefully about the next thirty seconds, because every choice you make right now determines what the rest of your life looks like.”
Danny glances sideways at the men beside him. “There are six of us.”
“There are three of us,” Hawk says. “Run the math again.”
A beat of silence where everything balances on a knife’s edge. The flash drive sits in Shadow’s pocket with everything we need to end this. We are so close. We are so close to being done with all of it.
Then footsteps hit the fire escape above us.
I don’t have to look up. I know the sound of his boots.
Tyler drops from the lowest landing and hits the pavement at the mouth of the alley, breathing hard, jacket torn, and my stomach drops straight through the ground because this is not possible.
We left him in that apartment. We saw him retreat up those stairs.
The police were coming. He should be gone, he should be running, and instead he’s standing fifteen feet away from me, and I can’t understand how he’s here.
I can’t understand how he found us, and that terror closes my throat completely.
He sees Hawk first.
He doesn’t say anything. That’s what makes my stomach drop, because four years of Tyler taught me that the shouting is survivable, it’s the silence you run from, and right now he is completely silent, chest heaving, eyes locked on his father with the kind of focus that has no words left in it.
Hawk doesn’t move. “It’s over, Tyler. The evidence she copied goes to the Feds. Walk away before this gets any worse.”
Tyler laughs, and it’s too short, too flat, with nothing behind it. “She played you.” His eyes cut to me for half a second, then back to Hawk. “All of you. And you’re too far gone to even see it.”
“Walk away,” Hawk says again. “Right now.”
“You don’t get to tell me what to do.” Tyler’s voice drops to something I’ve only heard once before, the night he put his hands around my throat and spoke very quietly about what would happen if I ever left.
His hand moves to his waistband.
“Tyler—” Hawk starts.
He pulls the gun.
Everything compresses into fragments I process all at once rather than in sequence.
Tyler’s arm coming up, the barrel leveling, the angle pointing directly at Hawk’s chest, not at me, not at Shadow, at Hawk, and Tyler’s face completely empty of everything that used to be in it, whatever complicated need a son carries for a father burned all the way down to pure intention.
I don’t decide to move. My body just does it.
I shove Hawk sideways with both hands as hard as I can, and step into the space where he was standing.
The gun goes off.
The sound empties my head of everything else, and for one suspended second, I feel nothing. I think I missed it. I think maybe the angle was off, that some small mercy cut in at the last possible second.
Then the burn hits.
It starts in my left shoulder and radiates outward in every direction at once. My legs stop working. Not buckling so much as simply ceasing to be relevant, and the pavement comes up fast and I register the impact from a strange remove, like it’s happening to someone standing slightly beside me.
Someone roars, and it takes me a moment to understand that the sound is Hawk. What’s coming out of him, it’s not tactical or controlled, but entirely animal. The sound a man makes when something has been ripped from him.
Razor’s voice—she’s down—and Shadow shouting something I can’t untangle over the ringing in my ears.
I’m on my back on the cold pavement, and the sky above me is dark, no stars, just the orange bruise of city light pressed low against the clouds. Hawk is there, kneeling over me, pressing hard against my shoulder, and his hands are shaking.
Hawk’s hands don’t shake.
“Stay with me.” His voice cracks clean down the middle. “Jade. Look at me.”
“I’m looking.”
“Keep looking. Don’t close your eyes, you hear me? Keep them open and on me.”
The pain is expanding, filling me from the inside out, and it’s taking real effort just to keep my breathing even. Behind him, I can hear the situation resolving itself—Shadow’s voice cutting through the chaos. Sirens in the distance again, moving closer.
“Hospital,” I try.
“No hospital. Razor’s got someone. Thirty minutes north.”
“Shit.”
“You’re talking back,” he says, and his jaw is tight. “Good. Keep doing that.”
Razor appears at Hawk’s shoulder and applies fresh pressure over Hawk’s. His voice drops into a whisper. “She’s not bleeding out. That’s a good thing.”
I can hear him. I’m right here. I consider pointing this out, but decide it’s not worth the energy.
They get me to the van. My memory of it comes in pieces: Hawk lifting me, the white-hot flare of movement against the wound, the cold metal floor pressing up through my back.
The shock hits properly somewhere between the alley and the first turn, and then I’m shaking, fine and constant, teeth wanting to knock together no matter how hard I clench my jaw.
“Mason.” The word comes out before I can stop it. “Where’s Mason. Tyler said he’d find him, he said?—”
“Mason is safe.” Hawk’s hand tightens around mine. “He’s with Viper. Nobody outside this room has that address. Tyler cannot get to him.”
“You don’t know that.” I try to push up and the pain slams me flat. “You don’t?—”
“Jade.” His voice drops low and cuts straight through the shaking and the noise in my head. “Look at me.”
I look at him.
“Mason is safe. He’s safe.”
I hear it. I make myself hear it. My jaw is still shaking, but something behind my ribs loosens just enough to breathe.
Shadow drives. Hawk stays in the back with me, one hand pressed hard against my shoulder, the other wrapped around mine. He doesn’t say anything else. Just holds on.
Razor cuts the jacket sleeve away. I feel the blade moving close to my skin, and I don’t flinch because I can’t feel edges anymore, just the wrongness of a body that has gone somewhere else to wait while all of this gets handled.
He cleans the wound. I watch his hands move and I think distantly that I should probably be more frightened than I am, and then I think that I’m probably in shock, and then I stop thinking for a while.
“Bullet’s through,” Razor says to Hawk. “Nothing critical. She lost blood, but she’ll hold.”
“You should not have done that,” Hawk says to me. Not angry. Something worse than angry.
“You’d have taken it,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Then I did the right thing.”
“That is not—” He stops. Breathes. His thumb moves once across the back of my hand. “That is not how this was supposed to go.”
“Plans change.”
He’s quiet for a moment, watching my face the way he does, tracking everything.
“What’s the best day you’ve ever had?” he asks suddenly. “Not the biggest. Just the best.”
The question catches me off guard, which I think is exactly why he asked it.
I have to actually think. Have to push past the pain and the cold and the van lurching through city streets to find something real.
“Mason was about two,” I say. “We had no money, couldn’t go anywhere.
So we built a fort in the living room out of every blanket I owned and ate cereal for dinner inside it and watched a nature documentary about prehistoric creatures on my laptop.
” I pause. “He fell asleep on my lap halfway through, and I just sat there in the dark inside this terrible blanket fort, and I thought—this is it. This is the whole thing. This is what life is actually for.”
Hawk says nothing for a moment.
“Keep talking,” he says quietly.
“Your turn,” I tell him. “I’m bleeding. You don’t get to just listen.”
Something moves across his face. Almost a flinch, almost something else. He looks down at my hand in his, and then back up. “I’ll tell you when you’re not bleeding.”
“That’s a deflection.”
“It’s a promise,” he says. “Stay with me, and I’ll tell you.”
The van moves through the dark, and the sirens behind us fade, and thirty minutes has never felt so far away.