By the time I pad back downstairs, I smell pizza. Four boxes are sitting on the counters, steaming slightly in the cool air of the house. The sound of the furnace hums under the floorboards but there’s still a chill in the air.
“Grab a slice,” says Damian. He’s dressed in a black tank and joggers, hair damp and falling in his face, bare feet silent on the tile.
Jake is beside him at the counter, plating slices two at a time. He’s in a soft t-shirt and flannel pants, his wet hair dripping onto his shoulders. He’s trying to plate pizza and stare at his phone at the same time, distracted by the balancing act.
Ryder stands by the sink, sleeves shoved up on a dark long-sleeve shirt, forearms all tendon and ink, hair tied back at the nape of his neck. He moves around the others easily, grabbing glasses from the cupboard, reaching past Jake for the stack of napkins, washing some cutlery and drying it on a towel.
Wyatt’s at the cupboards, in a loose t-shirt and sweats, moving a little carefully as he reaches for plates. He has to pivot sideways to squeeze past Ryder—there’s no way four men this size fit in this kitchen without bumping shoulders.
I take a slice and drop into a chair. A moment later they all follow with their own plates. Wyatt sits on my left, his kneebumping mine under the table as he gives me a wink. Jake sits down on my right, sliding a glass of water in front of me without looking up from the screen in his hand.
It feels domestic and ordinary. Like we’re a kind of family. Not like five people planning to break into an outlaw motorcycle club.
Not like five people who turned a motel room into a den of sin last night.
If I think about how much it all means to me too much, I’ll cry. So I eat.
By the time the dishes are rinsed and loaded into the dishwasher, and the sky outside has gone from gray to black, the kitchen has morphed into a war room.
The overhead lights throw pockets of warm yellow across the table where two empty pizza boxes sit in the centre. Wyatt and I are drawing the layout of the clubhouse on them in as much detail as we can remember. Wyatt’s drawn the main hangar layout and surrounding outbuildings on his box, I’m marking out the bedrooms on mine and trying to list the people who live in the clubhouse, as well as those who live offsite. Most of the club members live in their own homes. Only a small number actually live full-time in the hangar. I’m trying to pull from memory who lives where. Jake has his laptop open in front of him.
Ryder is watching us intently, arms folded, the line of his shoulders tight, and Damian sits sideways in his chair, one ankle on his knee, the other bouncing.
Wyatt circles the areas on his map meant to indicate Billy’s office and Silas’s tech room. “These have biometric locks, only Billy and Silas’s fingerprints will open them. I have access to the boardroom and the armory, but it’s the office and tech room we’ll want to get into.”
“If only you’d cut that asshole’s fingers off,” Damian says to Ryder. The image—Silas’s head turning, snapping—hits me unexpectedly, making me flinch.
“Hindsight’s twenty-twenty,” Jake quips.
I shake it off and point to my pizza box. “Silas’s room is up here, next to Billy’s. And here,” I point a bit further down my sketchily-drawn hallway, “is the second-floor bathroom. There’s a utility closet in there that vents to the tech room. If we took the vent cover off I could probably crawl down into it.”
Four heads swivel toward me at once.
“The fuck?” says Damian.
“You sure?” Ryder asks, skeptically. “Seems like a bit of an oversight if you’re putting biometric locks on the front door, no?”
“I’m sure,” I say. “I’ve seen the vent. You can just unscrew the cover off.”
“Well, shit,” says Jake, looking up from his phone. “That’s convenient, now isn’t it?”
Ryder frowns. “Well, that’s one possible ingress, then. Just leaves us with the office.“
“For those locks,” says Jake. “I might be able to spoof the signal from the inside if I can get at the wiring or the board, but I’d have to see the hardware first. No promises.”
“Good,” says Ryder. “In any case, we can’t stake the whole thing on cracking those two doors. If we can get into them, great. If not, we take what we can from everywhere else and get the fuck out.”
“In and out,” echoes Damian. “No hero shit.”
“We need eyes on the building,” Wyatt says. “The leadership team is essentially wiped out, but we don’t know who’s left at the clubhouse.”
“How many people do you have on that list?” Ryder points to the column on my pizza box:Who lives in the clubhouse.
I run my finger down the list and count. “Fourteen,” I say, circling one name. “This guy’s been missing for months and might be dead, but I left it on in case he comes back. Better safe than sorry.”
Ryder nods. “What about quiet times? Any dead hours?”
“Mornings,” answers Wyatt, “but you sometimes have people crashed out in the main area. And weekdays—you’d be surprised how many of these guys have day jobs.”
