Page 81 of The Order of Disorder
“I’ll fucking kill you both,” I spit. “If he dies, it’s on you.”
Maze curses, reaches behind him. One smooth motion and there’s a sharp bite of plastic around my wrists—zip-ties, fastened tight in front of me.
“No!” I lunge forward but Maze grabs my waist, hauls me up like a ragdoll, and throws me over his shoulder.
The towel slips down my thighs and pools on the floor. My bare legs kick wildly as he locks an arm around the backs of my knees.
“Let me go!” I scream. “Please! He’s out there! They’re going to kill him!”
“I said stop,” Maze growls. His voice is hard now. Cold. “You’re going to see Billy. You want to make it worse? Keep screaming.”
I scream anyway. Wordless, guttural cries from somewhere deep within.
Rox follows, a few steps behind, whispering useless comforts. “It’s gonna be okay. Just breathe, babe. We’ll figure this out. Just stop fighting, okay?”
Down the stairs we go, me over Maze’s shoulder like a bag of laundry, wrists bound, ass in the air. My sobs break loose into screams.
“Wyatt!” I howl, too wild with fury and rage to remember to call him by his undercover name. “Wyatt!”
The sound tears through the hangar. People turn. Some laugh. One yells something I can’t make out. A woman gasps. Someone pulls out a phone. No one helps. No one stops it.
“Let me go!” I shriek. “He’s in the booth—they’re hurting him!Wyatt!”
But Maze doesn’t react at all. It’s useless. He tightens his grip and keeps walking, as if I’m hardly an inconvenience at all.
Rox trails behind us, stunned and crying, pleading with me to stop.
Outside now. The air hits my bare skin like a thousand needles. We pass the cage and go down the dirt path through the bushes to the cracked asphalt of the airstrip.
My screams collapse into sobs. Every breath hurts. My throat’s torn raw.
I slump against Maze’s shoulder, my ribs burning. The strength drains out of me all at once.
The sky is going purple. The color of bruises. The air tastes like oil and fire, hot and acidic like my useless, impotent rage.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE RUNWAY’S BEEN turned into a carnival. Fires burn in metal drums, half-dressed girls are dancing to the music that’s pounding out of the speakers, and the sound of engines revving is deafening. Floodlights turn everything white-hot and unreal.
Up ahead, a makeshift stage has been rigged on the back of a flatbed truck. Billy sits on a chair at its center, leather vest open, no shirt. A girl straddles one of his thighs, dancing on his lap. When he sees us approaching, he smiles.
"Well, well. Now that’s an entrance.”
Maze pushes past the first row of onlookers and heads for the back of the stage, kicking open the door of a trailer. Inside, it’s lined with event supplies: boxes of merchandise, stacks of water bottles, clipboards, and a small table with a first aid kit.
He sets me down on a plastic chair. "Jesus fucking Christ," he mutters, massaging his shoulder.
I try to lunge up but the chair topples sideways. Maze catches it before I hit the ground, swearing again, then pulls a fresh zip tie from his pocket and binds my wrists to the chair.
“Rox!” he roars. “We need to fucking do something about this.”
She appears in front of me, and kneels.
“Max, babe,” she says softly. “You gotta calm down, okay, honey?” She unscrews the cap of a water bottle and presses it to my lips.
I choke, coughing water down my chin. “He’s in the booth,” I rasp. “They’re going to kill him.”
“Holy fuck,” Maze says to Rox. “It’s like she just snapped. What did you give her?”
