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Let the Riders get lazy. Let them think nobody was watching the edges anymore. The more comfortable they got, the easier it would be to map the shape of whatever they were building.

I fastened the strap and adjusted the angle twice before stepping back to check the line. Through the gaps in the trees, I could just make out the faint outline of the route that led deeper into Rider land. Somewhere beyond that, hidden by distance and trees and more barriers than I cared to count, was Gabriella.

I told myself that wasn’t why my stomach tightened every time I looked in that direction.

I told myself the route mattered because of the product, the girls, the rising tension, the chance of finding out where the Riders were moving their shipments before they flooded our streets with cut-up poison and left bodies in the aftermath.

All of that was true.

And still, beneath it, there she was.

When I made my way back to Hacksaw, he was kneeling in the dirt with the audio recorder laid out in front of him. “This one should pick up enough if they’re using that side route by the service track,” he said, tapping the map we had scrawled over earlier. “Voices won’t come through crystal clear unless they’re nearby, but we might catch enough to know who’s moving what and when.”

“Assuming they’re dumb enough to talk whilst doing it.”

He gave me a flat look. “Have you met bikers?”

“Tragically, yes.”

He gave a small laugh. “If they don’t talk, then they don’t talk. We’re in no worse a position than we’re in now. But on the off chance they say something useful, we’ll be ready.”

We set the recorder together, both of us crouched in the dirt and working mostly in silence, and it struck me then how easy this part used to be when I was younger. Not the work itself, but the compartmentalising. Club business in one box. Personal life—or whatever scraps of one I could claim—in another.

But the older I got, the more those lines bled into each other.

The Riders moving product mattered because it was club business. Missing girls mattered because they were vulnerable and because men like Nico never stopped at one kind of cruelty. And Gabriella… Gabriella mattered because she had always mattered, long before logic or practicality had anything to do with it.

Hacksaw rose to his feet and brushed the dirt from his hands. “That should do for tonight,” he said. “If they’re moving anything through these tracks, we’ll know soon enough.”

I stood a second later, rolling the stiffness from my shoulders and taking one last look around the woods. The cameras were hidden well. To anyone passing through, the land would look untouched. Just trees, brambles, and darkness.

But now there was a net in place.

Not around her.

Around the world that kept swallowing her up.

We started back toward the bikes in companionable silence.

“You know,” Hacksaw said after a while, his voice casual in that way that usually meant he was about to be a prick on purpose, “you always were pathetic where that girl was concerned.”

I huffed out a laugh before I could help it. “You weren’t around to see the worst of it,” I said, without bothering to deny it.

“It was worse than this?”

“I’m fine.”

“Sure you are, brother. And the only reason you volunteered to come tonight was for strategic purposes.”

“This is strategic.”

“Course it is.”

“It is,” I insisted, though there wasn’t much force behind it.

Hacksaw unlocked his bike and slung a leg over it before looking back at me. “Whatever helps you sleep, brother.”

I rested my hand on the handlebars of my own bike and looked out through the trees one last time, my mind snagging not on Gabriella as she was now, trapped behind locked doors and fear, but on something older. Softer. A version of her that existed before the cage had fully closed around her, before Nico, before all the years of damage and blood and wrong turns.