After Jake and Damian made their physical handoff of the dossier, their client’s instruction was to “go dark.” That means we stay put at Jake and Damian’s house and keep our heads down. The O.D. isn’t the threat anymore, but Hargrove is. Mercer was at Ryder’s house the night I was taken—proof he can reach us. So we wait, under the radar, until Hargrove is, as Ryder puts it, “neutralized.”
Going dark feels a lot like being in the cabin, except that here we have more room, with enough beds for everyone. And unlike at the cabin, everything has changed between us.
There’s no longer a question of whether closeness is allowed. There’s space for choice, and sometimes closeness looks different from one night to the next. Last night, when I ended up in Jake’s bed after the two of us stayed up late watching something dumb on TV and laughing like old times, it didn’t feel like a deviation. It just felt like part of how things work now.
I nod at him. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be to face the truth of Silas’s intrusions.
“Okay. I’ll show you where the file is and then I can leave you alone with it, if you want.”
He’s trying to respect how difficult this might be for me. I have no idea what’s on theMAXdrive. It could be stuff I want no one to see. But the idea of facing it alone is harder than the idea of facing it with someone here beside me. Someone I trust.
So I squeeze his hand. “Stay?”
He lifts his green eyes to mine. His hair is a mess, his jaw shadowed, he’s sleep-rough and impossibly adorable.
“Yeah?”
We’re still cocooned in the intimacy from last night. Jake got up and put on his boxer shorts to make coffee and came right back to bed, and I’m still nestled in the warmth of his comforter and his body and his touch.
“Yeah,” I answer with certainty.
“Okay.” He picks up the laptop and moves it over to my thighs. “Let me give you control. Here.”
He directs me to the containing folder,Evidence—Unviewed,and theMaxsubfolder within it.
The first thing that comes up is a list of subfolders:Bathroom, Billy, Face, Public, Restraint, Sleep.
My stomach turns.
“Jesus,” Jake says under his breath.
My finger hovers over the trackpad for a second, frozen. The categories shock me. Bathroom?Sleep?But I recover quickly. It was always going to be horrible. There is no version of Silas that’s not horrible.
I openFace, which seems like the safest bet, given the options. A grid of thumbnails loads—dozens of tiny versions of me.
I open the first one and the screen fills with my face in close-up, filmed from slightly above but zoomed in. Thirty seconds of me listening, blinking, swallowing, and looking at someone off-camera.
I take a deep breath. It’s unsettling. Creepy.
When the clip ends, I close it and notice that the names of all the files in the folder are meticulously labelled with my name and the shot angle. I open the next file,MAX_0917_002_FACE_FRONT.
I’m sitting at a table near the clubhouse bar. The background is a blur of activity, people moving back and forth, but I’m still, lost in my own world. My face is blank, my eyes empty. I don’t even recognize this version of myself. It’s as if someone animated a wax sculpture of me. Very close but not quite right.
“Man,” Jake says. “That doesn’t even look like you.”
It’s so strange to see myself like this, from the outside. To remember how empty I always felt in the clubhouse. Lifeless, shut down, trying to survive.
“I look dead.”
“You look a little dissociated,” he agrees.
I close the file and stare at the grid of thumbnail versions of my face. All those tiny little boxes of private moments. Silas trying to collect pieces of me because Billy wouldn’t let him have me. Everything had already been taken from me and Silas was trying to take more.
I could push through, endure the discomfort, just to…what? Know how deeply perverse his interest was?
I’m not in that place anymore. And suddenly it occurs to me that I don’t owe Silas another hour of my life. I don’t owe him my eyes. I don’t owe him the strength it would take to see everything he tried to steal from me.
I don’t have to pay for closure with my own nervous system.
