20. Jade
Jade
My fever breaks at noon and comes back by two, which tells me my body hasn’t decided yet whether it wants to cooperate.
I know it’s back because the ceiling above my bed starts doing something it shouldn’t—a slow, lazy drift to the left that stops the moment I focus on it and starts again the moment I don’t.
The bandage on my shoulder is dry, which Razor checked twice this morning and pronounced acceptable, but the skin around it is hot enough that I can feel it radiating through the gauze without touching it.
I should be sleeping. Every time one of them comes through the door they tell me I should be sleeping.
Hawk, who doesn’t repeat himself, Shadow with that easy half smile that means he’s genuinely worried but won’t say so directly, Razor with nothing but a look at the clock and then at me that communicates the same thing without a single word wasted.
I can’t sleep. My shoulder won’t let me find a position that works, and my brain won’t shut down long enough anyway, turning everything over and over. The alley, Tyler’s face when he saw Hawk, the gun coming up, the way my body just moved without asking permission.
So when Shadow appears in the doorway at half past three and says, “We may need you downstairs,” I’m already sitting up before he finishes the sentence.
“You sure?” He looks at the way I’m holding my arm against my ribs. “We can relay.”
“I’m sure.” I swing my legs over the side of the bed and wait for the room to decide which direction it’s going. It settles. “Give me a minute.”
Getting dressed is an education in what a bullet does to the muscles around your shoulder.
The flannel shirt I’ve been living in for two days goes on one-armed and slow, and by the time I’m done, I’ve broken a sweat from something that used to take ten seconds.
I stand in front of the small mirror above the dresser and look at myself—pale, dark-circled, moving like a woman twice my age—and then I straighten up as much as the shoulder allows and go downstairs anyway.
The kitchen table has become something else entirely.
Razor’s laptop sits open at the center, flanked by two burner phones and a yellow legal pad covered in his tight, economical handwriting with short lines, no wasted strokes, the same quality his speech has.
Shadow is standing at the counter with a coffee in each hand, and he sets one down in front of my chair before I even ask.
Hawk is at the window with his back to the room, but he turns when he hears me on the stairs and watches me cross the kitchen with that flat, assessing look that isn’t cold so much as it is thorough.
I pull out the chair and sit down carefully. “What’s on the laptop?”
Razor turns it to face me.
Tyler’s files. The ones copied from the lockbox laptop last night, back when the plan was clean, and nobody had been shot yet.
They’ve been open for hours by the look of it. Multiple folders spread across the desktop, documents and spreadsheets, and what looks like a series of encrypted messages that Razor has apparently already cracked because they’re sitting open in a column on the left side of the screen.
“Walk me through what you found,” I say.
Razor pulls the laptop back, angles it so we can both see the screen, and starts talking in that spare way of his, no preamble, no softening.
“Financial records first. Tyler’s been skimming from the Ruthless Saints for at least eighteen months.
Total’s just under sixty thousand dollars redirected to two accounts the club doesn’t know about.
” He scrolls to a spreadsheet, column after column of transactions with dates and amounts.
“The club will want him dead for this alone.”
“Okay.” I already knew Tyler stole. He stole from me for four years. This is just a larger-scale version of the same impulse.
“The gun deal.” Razor opens a different folder. “The meet that brought you into this—the one that got raided. Tyler set it up. But he didn’t set it up to go well.”
The ceiling does its drift thing again. I focus on the screen instead. “What do you mean?”
“He gave the ATF the location. Time, attendees, the works.” Razor’s voice doesn’t change, doesn’t editorialize, just delivers it like weather data. “He made an anonymous tip two days before the meet.”
The room goes quiet.
Hawk turns from the window.
Shadow sets his coffee down.
“He tipped off the ATF,” I repeat, because I need to hear it again in my own voice to understand it. “His own club’s gun deal.”
“And ours,” Razor says. “Both clubs at the same meet. One tip, two problems eliminated.”
“Why would he—” I stop. Start again. “What was he trying to accomplish?”
Razor opens the encrypted messages. Lines of text fill the screen, and even reading quickly, I can see the shape of it, the back and forth of two people planning something that goes well beyond one gun deal.
“Who’s he talking to?” I ask.
“Someone who goes by Sketch in the messages.” Razor glances at Hawk. “Real name’s Grant Ellison. Prospect-turned-member in our club. Been with the Reapers about three years.”
The name lands in the room like something dropped from a height. I watch Hawk’s face, the way his jaw tightens until the muscle jumps under the skin, and I understand that this name is worse than anything else on the screen.
“One of your own,” I say.
“Was,” Hawk says. The single word has a finality to it that I don’t ask about.
Shadow picks up where Razor leaves off, moving around the counter to stand behind the laptop, pointing at a block of text near the bottom of the message thread.
“Their plan was to use the ATF raid to take out the leadership of both clubs simultaneously. Reaper and the Ruthless Saints’ president in federal custody or dead in the crossfire.
Sketch takes over the Reapers from the inside.
Tyler takes the Saints. Then they merge what’s left under joint control.
” He pauses. “It was actually well-constructed, for two idiots.”
“It would have worked,” Razor says, and he doesn’t sound impressed, just accurate, “if the Feds had moved faster.”
I look at the screen. At the messages. At the timestamps that show weeks of planning.
Tyler did this. Tyler, who used to sit at my kitchen table eating food I cooked while Mason played on the floor between us. Who sometimes, in the early days, was almost gentle, almost something I could have loved if he’d ever let me.
Tyler built this. Spent months on it. While I was waiting tables and stretching my tips to cover rent, while I was teaching Mason to tie his shoes and reading the same dinosaur books until I had them memorized, Tyler was here, on this laptop, planning to burn two motorcycle clubs to the ground for the sake of his own ambition.
I press my good hand flat against the table.
“There’s more,” Razor says.
He opens a folder I haven’t seen yet. He clicks the first one, and a photograph fills the screen. My car. Parked outside Linda’s house on a street I recognize, taken from a distance with a long lens. The timestamp in the corner reads three weeks ago.
Then the next file. A spreadsheet. Dates, times, locations. Every place I’d been in the month before Friday. Linda’s house. The bar where I work. The grocery store on Fourth. Mason’s pediatrician. The gas station I always use because it’s the cheapest on my route.
My throat closes.
“He was tracking you,” Shadow says, quiet now. No lightness in his voice at all.
“He tracked my phone,” I say. “I knew about the phone. I thought—” I stop, because what I thought was that it was control.
The ordinary, terrible control that made him need to know where I was every minute, not because he cared where I was, but because not knowing made him feel powerless. I thought it was about me.
Razor opens one more file. A mechanic’s report, handwritten, on a form I don’t recognize. He points at two lines near the bottom. “Brake fluid line. Partially compromised. Designed to hold under normal driving conditions but fail under stress—hard braking, wet road, high speed.”
The storm. Friday night. The rain coming down in sheets, and my car shuddering under me, and the brakes going soft at the worst possible moment on the worst possible road.
“He sabotaged my car,” I say. “He knew I’d run that night.
” I’m working through it out loud, not for their benefit but because I need to hear the shape of it.
“He planned the scene at the clubhouse. The woman on the table—he wanted me to see that. He knew I’d finally leave.
He knew I’d call Linda and go for Mason, and he knew the route I’d take, and he made sure I’d break down exactly where I did. ”
I look up at Hawk.
“He put me on that road,” I say, “so I’d be there when you three came through.
He wanted me to witness the gun deal. Wanted me tangled up in it.
” My voice stays level, which surprises me, because inside something is tearing along a seam I didn’t know was there.
“He wasn’t trying to get me back. He was using me to get to you. ”
Hawk holds my gaze. He doesn’t look away, doesn’t soften it, doesn’t try to reframe it into something easier to swallow. He just nods once, slow and deliberate.
“Yes,” he says.
Four years of believing, underneath everything, that Tyler’s obsession meant something.
That the control and the cruelty were the dark side of something real.
That you don’t fixate on someone that completely unless they matter to you in some fundamental way.
I never said that to anyone, never even fully admitted it to myself, but it was there, a terrible consolation buried under all the fear.
I was a weapon.
That’s all. A tool he aimed at his father and fired.
Mason and I were instruments. Nothing more.
The kitchen is very quiet. Outside the window, the afternoon light is thinning, going pale and flat the way it does in late autumn when the sun drops early and takes the warmth with it. Somewhere in the tree line, a bird calls once and goes silent.
I become aware that my hand is shaking against the table.
Shadow sits down in the chair beside me. He doesn’t say anything at first. Just sits there, present and unhurried, the way he always is, like he’s got nowhere else to be and nothing more important to do than be in this chair next to me right now.
After a while, he says, “He built a story about you. In his head. It was never about you, Jade. Not for a single day.”
“I know,” I say.
I look at him. His hazel eyes are steady, with none of the usual lightness in them.
“Because you stayed,” he says. “Not because you were weak. Not because you were stupid. Because you were trying to find something real in a man who’d already decided you were a prop in his own story. That’s not your failure. That’s his.”
My eyes burn. I don’t want to cry. I’m so exhausted from the crying that happens at three in the morning when nobody’s watching, exhausted from holding my face together in the daylight.
But the tears come anyway, slow and without drama, just welling up and spilling over while I sit at this kitchen table in a cabin in the woods with a gunshot wound and a fever and the wreckage of four years finally making a different kind of sense.
Shadow doesn’t move away. He reaches over and puts his hand over mine on the table, covering the shaking, and leaves it there.
Across the room, Hawk closes the laptop without being asked, and Razor takes his coffee and his legal pad and moves quietly to the far counter, giving me the only privacy the room allows.
I let myself cry for exactly as long as it takes, and then I stop.
I lift my head. Wipe my face with the back of my wrist. Breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth until everything steadies.
“Sketch,” I say, looking at Razor. “Where is he now?”
Razor’s mouth curves at the corner. Not quite a smile. “Handled.”
“And Tyler still doesn’t know you have all of this.”
“No.”
I look at the closed laptop, at the four years of my life that turned out to be someone else’s chess move, and I feel something I haven’t felt in longer than I can remember.
For the first time in four years, I can see the board exactly as it is. No illusions, no hoping, no trying to find the version of the story where I was wrong about him and he was going to be different.
“Okay,” I say. “What’s next?”