Page 46 of The Order of Disorder
The tide swells. Crests.
Bursts.
And suddenly I’m crying.
A full-body sob that rips out of me like my body’s trying to purge something it can’t hold anymore.
I haven’t cried since I got here. Billy didn’t give me time. One horror to the next, no room to feel, no room to fall apart.
But now it finds me, and everything hits me all at once.
“Ryder—” I choke out, but the word breaks apart in my throat, swallowed by the flood.
I double over, arms locked around my knees, collapsing into myself and rocking. It hits all at once—the grief, the loss, the devastating reality I’ve been living with. Losing Ryder shatteredme so thoroughly that, in a way, it made being here easier. No hope meant nothing to live for. No future meant nothing to fight for. It let me stop trying to be anything but gone.
But Wyatt being here rips that hopelessness away from me—and that makes it worse. He pulls me back into a world where I might still live.
And Ryder’s not in it.
A wail escapes me, and then Wyatt’s arms are wrapping around me, pulling me in against him as if he could shield me from everything I’m feeling. Just hold me together through sheer determination and muscle.
“You kept saying his name when you were sick,” he murmurs.
“He’s gone,” I sob. The words tear out of me.
I feel him flinch against me.
“No,” he whispers. Like he’s saying it to himself.
“Silas shot him,” I babble, voice breaking, my words wet with my tears. “He shot him. Ryder is gone.”
And then I break completely.
The dam inside me ruptures. Every wall, every barrier, every lie I’ve told myself collapses. I cry like I’ve never cried before.
I cry until my body gives out. Until the exhaustion that overtakes me is a kind of peace. I cry and let myself be held, and Wyatt doesn’t say a thing. By the time my eyes are dry and he’s lifting me to my feet, the sky has turned soft with dusk.
Time is a strange, slippery thing. I get better in increments, although it takes an enormous amount of concentration to push away the relentless hankering for pills.
Wyatt gets worse.
Something in him hardens. Crystallizes. I wake up at night to find him sitting in a chair, staring at the wall. He smiles less. Withdraws more. Even the other guys notice.
“Must’ve been all that cum in his balls keeping him happy,” someone jokes. “Now that Max is sucking it out, he’s a miserable bastard.”
Wyatt doesn’t respond. He just walks away without smiling.
He becomes obsessed with getting us out as fast as possible—whispering ideas to me under the covers at night, pressing me for anything I might have noticed. Security patterns. Door locks. How often the guards rotate. He’s building a plan inside his head, looking for the cracks and the weaknesses. But most of the surveillance is new. It wasn’t like this before.
I start noticing it too. Tiny cameras tucked into corners. Bulky ones bolted in plain sight. Mic pickups hiding inside smoke detectors, ceiling vents.
Wyatt points out the rest—RFID tags stitched into the vests, club-issued phones that are tracked, maybe even listened to. Half of it goes over my head, but I listen anyway because knowledge feels like power.
I watch as biometric locks get installed on Billy’s office door, the boardroom, and the armory. Fingerprint access only.
I see Silas pull guys aside for quiet conversations that leave them pale.
Wyatt tells me he’s running loyalty tests—fake errands, impossible choices. Setting traps and watching who flinches.
