The flames climb higher. We don’t have any booze, but Jake pours out the last of the orange juice into mugs and hands them around.
“This is the end of a chapter,” Damian announces. “We should have a ritual. Burn shit that doesn’t serve us anymore.”
“You’re just a fucking pyromaniac,” Jake says, but Max brightens at the idea.
“I have something!” She jumps up and skips into the cabin. A minute later, she comes back with a handful of black fabric bunched up in her fist. She shakes it out over the fire.
It’s the damn shirt she was wearing when we pulled her out—the O.D.’s screaming skull and that idiotic slogan: DISORDERED: RIDE HARD, PLAY HARD.
“This is the last physical thing that ties me to them,” she says, and tosses it onto the fire.
Jake and Damian whoop.
For a second it muffles the flames. Then it catches—the fabric curling, the skull wrinkling, the slogan charring into nothing.
The smile on Max’s face tells me this is closure for her. For me, it cracks open something old and ugly.
These damn motorcycle clubs.
I stayed out of that shit on purpose, and somehow they keep burning through my life.
I flash to Samantha at sixteen, making Kraft Dinner at midnight in Mom’s tiny kitchen while I was home on leave. Hoodie sleeves shoved up, chipped black nail polish, gushing about her new boyfriend—a hard-looking kid with dyed-black hair, scowling at the world from behind some shitty leather jacket. His cheap bike made his ambitions obvious.
“He’s a prospect,” Samantha had said, already reading the warning in my face. “Relax, big brother. They’re just a bunch of guys who like riding. And they look out for their own.”
She meant they’d look out for her, as if proximity counted.
But it didn’t.
I shake the image out of my head before it roots. Max is not Samantha. And these men—my men—they’d tear the world apart before they’d let anything happen to her.
Hell, so would I.
Which is its own problem.
We’ve fallen into silence around the fire, everyone staring at the flames, lost in their own thoughts, when Damian shifts forward, pokes the fire with a stick, and then looks around at all of us like he’s about to announce something.
My mug is empty. The heat is searing all of our shins while the cold creeps in at our backs. Max is seated on a log between Wyatt and Damian, knees pulled up to her chest, and I wish she was sitting beside me. The firelight flickers over her face, polishing the smooth curves of her flushed cheeks, and she looks warm and soft and, as usual, totally fucking touchable.
“All right. I’m just gonna say it,” says Damian.
Jake groans softly. “Here we fucking go.”
Wyatt smiles, but Damian’s expression is serious.
“We’ve been pretending this situation isn’t insane, and we’ve never talked about it, not once.” Damian waves the stick vaguely around the circle, and I immediately know what he’s talking about. I think we all do. The smile drops from Wyatt’s face. Jake dips his head. Max watches Damian cautiously, like she’s not sure if he’s actually going to say it.
Wyatt clears his throat. “We have a lot to discuss, son. All we’ve been doing since we got here is catching up. There are things we have to work through but we’ll get to them in time.”
He’s protecting Max, I think. Trying to keep this conversation from affecting her—because she’s the one it affects most of all.
But Damian shakes his head. He keeps his eyes on me. “We’ve been tiptoeing around it, never talking about it, and it’s not healthy. I think we should just come out with it, lay it all on the table.”
Max sighs, but no one says anything.
Then: “He’s right,” Jake pipes up. “Weshouldtalk about it. Isn’t that part of what we swore after that first mission night? To go all in with each other? We’ve never had something eating away at the group dynamics that we couldn’t talk about before.”
The fire pops, sending a trail of sparks skyward. Still, nobody says anything. I look over at Max, trying to gauge her reaction. I don’t want her to be uncomfortable.
