Ryder crosses to the table, the floor creaking under his boots, and studies the device in Jake’s hand.
“Okay.” He ticks the points off on his fingers. “One: official incident reports and dispatch logs—what happened at the airstrip. Two: any federal activity—ATF, state police, anyone that bumps this higher. Three: chatter. Club boards, relay channels, wherever the fuck people like this talk.”
“Copy that. Incident, jurisdiction, chatter.” Jake glances up, eyes lit with the thrill of the hunt. “I’m starting local. Emergency dispatch mirrors, law-enforcement bulletins, anything tagged Redwater or Fremont. Then darknet relay boards. The O.D. uses a few private channels, which will be loud right now.”
He picks up the prepaid phone, checks the single flickering bar, and tosses it back beside the tablet.
“We’re crawling through molasses. Connection is intermittently dropping, so I’ll have to cache everything in bursts.”
I can feel Ryder’s heat beside me, his presence igniting a current under my skin. A faint hint of gasoline clings to him, along with the outdoor smell of earth and pine. He doesn’t look at me, but I feel his awareness of me too, the briefest shift in his stance, something about the way he folds his arms and steps back.
“Okay,” Jake mutters. “Dispatch mirror’s live. Timestamped call logs from Fremont Airstrip, multiple 911s within minutes of each other. Shots fired, explosion, probable fatalities.” He scrolls further. “And here it is: an ATF flag added twenty minutes later. Locals requested federal jurisdiction.”
The connection hiccups, screen freezing, then updates again. Lines of garbled text scroll down. Jake narrows his eyes, translating in real time. “All right…couple of encrypted forum posts…rumor thread says ‘two down at Disordered, boss and VP both confirmed.’ No names yet. Another thread says ‘feds crawling all over the hangar.’”
Boss down.Time slows down. I go very still.
“Checking the county coroner updates…” Jake mutters. He squints, reading. “Two fatalities confirmed on scene, Fremont Airstrip. ATF requested for investigation. IDs posted the following morning…Silas Blackwell…Billy Manning.”
A ringing starts in my ears.
“Confirmed?” Ryder asks.
Jake nods. “County upload time-stamped, mirrored from the morgue feed. It’s real.”
The recliner creaks as Wyatt stands up. “Billy’s dead?” he calls from the living room.
Jake nods and keeps reading. “Cause of death listed as smoke inhalation. Secondary thermal burns. Fuel-line ignition noted.”
The room folds in on itself. For a second I can’t breathe. The world narrows around the rhythm of my pulse.
Billy’s dead.
The shock of it is visceral, like someone punched me in the sternum.
For years his shadow has loomed over every part of my life. Even after I escaped, he still owned the air I breathed, his voice always in my head, his rules always in my bones.
Now, in an instant, it’s gone?
I should feel lighter. Instead I just feel…untethered.
Jake’s still talking, voice distant through the rush in my ears. “No active warrants, no BOLOs matching our vehicle. Local chatter’s all containment and cleanup.”
Ryder moves closer to the table, light catching the blond hairs on his forearm. “So no one’s looking out this way. That’s good.”
The room suddenly feels claustrophobic. Too close. Outside, wind stirs the trees, and for a moment I imagine the sound is the ocean instead of leaves.
“I just need some air,” I hear myself say, half-whispered. I’m not even sure if I’ve said it out loud. I get up and head through the living room feeling unsteady on my feet. When I push the screen door open, I suck back the cool air like there was no oxygen in the cabin. I breathe deeply until the taste of metal in my mouth fades.
Then I’m walking past the treeline toward the glint of the lake. The cold sand bites my feet through my socks.
Billy’s dead.
My captor, the monster.
Billy who once said he’d never let anything hurt me, and then did everything he could to hurt me himself.
It would be sick to mourn him. But the shock running through me is a kind of grief. There was a time when he was safety. When the world outside his arms was worse.
