Forbidden fruit.
That was what men called girls they wanted and should not touch.
But Destiny wasn’t fruit.
She wasn’t temptation dressed up pretty for some outlaw’s downfall.
She was fire.
Wounded, reckless, half-wild fire.
JD Northport arrived twenty minutes after the first video played.
He did not come in like an outlaw.
That was the first thing I noticed.
Every man in the clubhouse was running hot by then. Edge was upstairs with Destiny. Regan was with him. Tarak had left with two Santa Fe brothers and two of ours to recover the bike before cops or fire crews widened the search area. Hacker had three phones plugged into his laptop and a face pale enough to tell me the footage was worse than anyone wanted to say out loud.
The kids—Tris, Jake, and Nyla—sat at one of the back tables with untouched water bottles in front of them, wrapped in borrowed hoodies, looking like they had aged five years in one night. Tris kept wiping at her face like tears were an inconvenience she didn’t have time for. Jake watched every door. Nyla stared at the phone Hacker had taken from her like she had handed over a live grenade and was waiting to see who it killed.
The room smelled like coffee, smoke, leather, blood, and panic.
Then JD walked in.
Clean jeans. Dark button-down. Boots polished but not pretty. Cut over his shoulders like he had earned it and still remembered what life looked like without it. He had businessman written into the set of his jaw and Royal Bastard in his eyes, which made him more dangerous than half the men in the room who wore their violence on the outside.
Some men entered a crisis looking for someone to hit.
JD entered looking for the weak point in the legal structure.
That was worse.
His gaze swept the room once. Kids. Phones. Hacker. Callum. Me. Blood on my shirt. Blood on my hands. Then the stairs.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Upstairs,” Callum said. “Doc says stable for now.”
“For now,” JD repeated, like he hated the words.
He turned toward Hacker. “What do we have?”
Hacker pushed back from the table, rubbing both hands over his face. “Too much. Not enough. Depends how screwed you want to feel.”
“Start with the worst.”
“Videos,” Hacker said. “A lot of them. Most shaky. Most useless. Some show Destiny at the party. Some show her visibly intoxicated. Some show kids laughing at her. One shows someone handing her the blunt, but the angle’s bad. Nyla’s got the best evidence that something was wrong with her before the fire started.”
JD’s eyes cut to Nyla.
She shrank a little, but she didn’t look away.
“I wasn’t trying to record her to hurt her,” she said quickly. “I swear. I just—she was acting wrong. I thought maybe if we could show her later, she’d understand why we were scared.”
JD’s expression softened by half an inch. “You may have saved her.”
Nyla’s mouth trembled.
