The Rich Boss’s Black Belt Son Challenged a Single Dad — Unaware He Once Commanded a Team
Chapter 11
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Tyler stood. He was unsteady, and Jack put a hand on his arm to keep him upright, and they walked out through the loading door, along the east wall, over the fence, and into the car without another word spoken between them.Jack started the engine, pulled out from the curb, and drove back toward Manhattan through streets that were mostly empty at that hour, the lights of the bridge ahead of them reflecting off the river below.Jack's hands were steady on the wheel. He was focused on the road, on the route, on the logistics of the next hour. But somewhere behind all of that, in the part of his mind that was not currently occupied with the practical demands of the moment, something had shifted.He had carried a version of himself for three years that he believed he had chosen: the quiet man, the careful man, the man who drove the car and made the eggs and sat beside the hospital bed. He had believed that version was complete. What the last 90 seconds had made undeniably clear was that it was not complete. It was partial. The rest of him was still there, had always been there, and had just proven it in a building in Astoria without breaking a sweat.He did not know yet whether that was something to be afraid of. He suspected it was.They drove for nearly 20 minutes before Tyler said anything. The bridge was behind them, and Manhattan was opening up on either side of the highway, the city doing what it always did at that hour: running parallel to itself, indifferent to whatever had just happened in a garage in Queens.Tyler was in the passenger seat with a folded jacket pressed against his ribs and his good eye tracking the road ahead. He had stopped shaking somewhere around the middle of the bridge. His breathing had steadied.Jack had said nothing during the drive, had not asked about the debt or the gambling or the chain of decisions that had produced the zip ties and the metal chair, because none of that was relevant to the current task, which was simply to get Tyler Cole back to his father in one functional piece.Then Tyler spoke. His voice was rough and low, stripped of everything that usually lived in it: the performance, the edge, the particular register of a young man who had spent years using his voice as an instrument of social positioning. What was left sounded considerably younger than 22.He asked if Jack could have done that to him at the party, at the Hamptons, during the match.Jack kept his eyes on the road and said he had been trying not to hurt Tyler.Tyler absorbed this. He looked down at his hands, which were marked with the indentations the zip ties had left, and then out the passenger window at the lights passing in the dark. He said he had thought Jack was holding back because he was afraid of losing his job.Jack said nothing, which was its own answer.Tyler said he had thought a lot of things about Jack that he was now fairly certain were wrong, and that he wasn't sure what to do with that information.Jack told him he didn't have to do anything with it tonight.