Page 100 of Beautiful Ruins
Iron had always been stone—unmovable, unreadable. This crack in his armour wasn’t just new. It was dangerous. But what was worse was I knew whatever was on that USB, was going to change everything.
Iron exhaled sharply and ground the cigar into the ashtray. Then he stood, his old bones cracking under the movement. He didn’t quite stretch to his full height, the set of his jaw a sign that being upright was more painful than he’d ever let on.
He shuffled over, pausing beside me, and placed a hand on my shoulder, giving it a slight squeeze—half comfort, half goodbye. “I never wanted it to be like this, Rowan.” He lingered there, his touch like a dying man’s last attempt at anything real. “If you don’t believe any other words out of my mouth, at least believe those.”
I didn’t say anything, just sat there in silence, letting him believe that maybe I did give a shit. There was a time when I would have cared enough to appease him, to hold on to whatever half-truths he was feeding me. That time was long gone, buried with the rest of it.
With a slight nod of his head, he gave me a tight smile, then disappeared out of the room.
The USB sat in my palm like a brand—hot, permanent, and impossible to ignore. Iron had already told me it was going to change everything, and I didn’t doubt that. I just didn’t know if I was ready for what was to come.
I sat there alone, the silence pressing in. Somewhere behindit, I could still hear Logan’s laugh. My father’s slurred rants. The lies we used to tell ourselves about family. Ghosts. Every one of them.
When I knewI wouldn’t be disturbed by any wandering eyes or ears, I darted to my office and flipped open my laptop, dropping into my chair behind the desk. The old leather creaked, too loud, in the quiet of the room. My movements barely registered, running on muscle memory.
Every sound blurred into static as quiet panic settled into my bones. Hands shaking, I shoved the USB into the socket on the side of the device and waited for the files to load.
I wasn’t about to hand this shit over to Sadie without knowing what was on it first. She deserved the truth, but at what cost? Her fucking sanity? Over my dead body.
The files—or file—loaded up. Just one video. I swallowed over the lump lodged in my throat and clicked on the grainy still-image. It flickered to life, the images blurry at first before the camera zoomed in and the image cleared up. The video had been taken outside of what looked like a farm shed, like the ones at Hollow Creek Farm.
At first, there was only a muffled static, then distant voices before two people came into view.
I leaned forward, squinting. “No. No fucking way,” I muttered. “What the hell was Patricia up to?”
Patricia Cooper, Sadie’s mother is the one I recognised. The other? No fucking idea. What I did know was that he was wearing club colours. Not the Ridge Riders colours—a rival club.
My heart set a fast pace in my chest. I didn’t want to believe what I was watching, but there I was, struggling for breath, and any fucking sense as to what the hell had happened.
I guessed the video had been shot just before her death. The scene dragged on in slow motion as the stillness pressed in from all sides, a silence too thick for what I was witnessing.
The man stepped between Patricia’s legs, close—too fucking close considering she had been a married woman—and she threw her head back, laughing like she wasn’t burning everything else down around her. But more importantly, was the way he had his hands on her waist and his lips against her neck.
She didn’t know she was being filmed. If she had, I wouldn’t have been watching at that moment. Had she even realised she was about to blow up the only life Sadie had known?
The image stuttered, focus scrambling. But it was too late. I’d seen it. Every fucking second of it. The way she touched his face. The way they kissed like they were the only two people alive. They were almost too happy. Too in love. Sickeningly so.
My eyes burned as the footage played out in front of me—a past that was now haunting my present, my future. Sadie’s too.
Patricia had been cheating on John. She had a whole other life. A secret one. One that didn’t involve Sadie. And what the fuck had she been doing sleeping around with a member from a rival club?
The longer I stared at the screen, the more the pieces began falling into place. And the darker and more fucked up the image became.
We knew from our half-arsed attempt at digging into Patricia’s notebooks, her last days had been filled with investigating the mayor, the Ridge Riders. But for what? For that fucking arsehole slobbering all over her like a goddamndog to gain the upper hand? Had she sold out her own town to a rival club? Or was this something else entirely?
The camera shifted, as though the person holding it was settling in, getting comfortable. On screen, motorbikes rumbled in the distance.
Then came a voice from behind the camera. “Shit. This isn’t good.”
Those four words sucked all the air from my lungs until I was barely breathing at all. I didn’t move. Didn’t blink. The breath in my chest went stale. That voice had haunted my memories, my nightmares, and my waking hours for the past six years.
At that moment, everything else ceased to exist except for the incessant voice in my head reminding me that no matter how much I had tried to escape my past, it was always going to come back to drown me.
My brother . . . I knew it was him behind the camera, the way you know yourself in a mirror. He’d been the one to film whatever the fuck happened that night. I hadn’t heard his voice in years, but it still sounded like failure. Like I should’ve done more. It was practically screaming at me from the past.
I shoved the laptop away and shot to my feet, yanking at my hair.
My heart pounded. My chest ached.
