Max would be at the top of that list.
“Okay,” I say slowly. “So what do we do?”
Wyatt exhales heavily and folds his arms over his chest. “What if we got our hands on Silas’s surveillance?”
“How are we supposed to do that?” Damian arches an eyebrow. “If Hargrove got out yesterday, wouldn’t the first thinghe’d want to clean up be the surveillance of an outlaw motorcycle club that’s sitting on a federal server somewhere?”
“Wyatt, you said Silas kept offline copies, didn’t you?” Jake asks.
Wyatt nods. “A whole wall of drives.”
“So we go get them,” Jake says, like it’s that simple.
“But Hargrove’s people would probably know about those too.” Damian runs a hand through his hair, scratching his scalp.
“They might,” says Wyatt. “But they don’t know the clubhouse the way me and Max do.”
Jake frowns, thinking his way through it. “If Silas was tech-minded—and he was—he wouldn’t have left a wall of drives sitting there readable like a fucking scrapbook. They’re probably encrypted. If it were me, I’d use a separate hardware key, like an HSM token. Basically a physical key. If we go back, we’re looking for both, the drives and the key. Without the key, those offline files are probably encrypted garbage. But with it, we could not only access the files but prove their legitimacy, too. Device signatures, timestamps. I could restore the whole provenance chain.”
A moment of silence passes while we look at one another, everyone calculating, weighing.
“So do we go back?” I ask, eyeing them in turn.
Wyatt shrugs. “Either we sit up here in the woods and watch him rewrite the story…or we go back and at least try to stop him.”
By late afternoon we’ve stripped the cabin bare. Gear packed, cars partially loaded, perishable food stashed, and our garbage divided into trash and recycling. Considering we brought almost nothing with us, it’s amazing how much stuff we have to manage now.
There’s no garbage pickup out here, you haul your own shit to the dump. Wyatt ties off the last bag and drops it beside the others with a wince while he and Jake debate tomorrow’s timing.
“It’s gonna add an hour if we take the garbage to the dump first,” Jake complains.
I eye the two piles. “Why don’t we haul the plastics out with us and dump them at home, and burn the rest?”
“Yesss,” Damian says behind me, going for a fist bump. I shut that down with a look.
“Fine,” Wyatt grunts.
“Saves us an hour,” Jake says. “That’s all I care about.”
Once the packing’s done, we throw ourselves into building the fire just to keep busy. Jake and Damian dig a pit and line it with rocks Max collects from the lake. I take a chainsaw to a downed tree near the road, cutting it into sections and hauling the rounds back to make benches.
The cabin is Wyatt’s. It was always meant to be his eventual retreat. But none of that matters right now. There’s no question he’s coming with us until the mission’s done.
And I can’t see him leaving Max. The realization lands without the spike of jealousy I’d expected. I don’t want him to leave us either.
We make salads and sandwiches to use up the fresh food, then head out to the fire pit as the sun starts to drop behind the trees.
Damian lights the kindling with a wooden match and says ceremoniously, “Well, happy Hellbent Eve, everyone!”
Jake actually laughs.
“That’s not a thing,” I tell him.
“Lighten up, grandpa,” Damian smirks. “You haven’t forgotten what tomorrow is, have you?”
No, I haven’t. Since our first mission five years ago, Damian’s insisted we mark the anniversary. What started as a jokebetween the younger guys turned into sacred canon. Even I’ve come to think of Hellbent Night as a tradition.
But Hellbent Eve is pushing it.
