Page 25 of Axle
Ashlynn sat on the chairs across from him. One of her knees was hooked over the other, and hair fell over her shoulder in a loose, messy wave. Every time she shifted, it slid across the leather like silk. She was wearing my extra cut over a black tee that I’d bet money was mine too. Not that I minded, I loved seeing her in my clothes.
The vest dwarfed her a little, but she wore it like armor—chin up, eyes steady, mouth soft until she was about to argue.
She’d healed fast. Cage said the bruising on her ribs would fade in another week if she “didn’t do anything stupid.” She’d given him a sweet smile that fooled nobody, least of all me.
Kane took the corner by the window, arms folded, expression carved in a way that made most men find somewhere else to be. Edge was next to him with the easy lean of someone who could go from relaxed to lethal in the time it took to blink.
“Tell me you have something besides a migraine.” The past seven days had been a blur of hurry-up-and-wait, and my patience was down to threads. The only thing keeping me sane was spending most of that time buried inside Ashlynn.
“I’ve got a lot,” Jax said, pushing his glasses up with the back of his knuckle. “And I brought a friend.”
On cue, the third screen flickered to life, and a hard-faced man with dark hair and sharp eyes appeared. The video was feed crisp despite the secure tunnel we’d set up between the twonetworks. Deviant. The Iron Rogues’ tech genius. He sat in a room that looked like he lived inside a server rack.
Deviant tipped two fingers in a lazy salute. “Axle, Edge, Prez.” Then his eyes moved to Ashlynn, and he grinned slyly. “Don’t believe we’ve met. You’re?—”
“Mine,” I grunted even though I knew he would never look at any woman other than his old lady.
Deviant’s smile grew, and he held up his hands. “Noted.”
“Alright,” Jax said, voice hoarse, “you’re gonna want to see this.”
He swiveled the center laptop around. “I’ve been reconstructing internal Helix docs from residue—draft saves, thumbprints in temp directories, and dev chat logs that were ‘deleted’ but not really. There’s a lot of redaction. There’s also a lot of sloppiness in how they handled their metadata. Which is where we live.” His fingers flew. Windows stacked, slid, and magnified. “Started as what I thought was a garden-variety internal investigation: resource leakage, missing keys, and unusual traffic from a sandbox cluster. Then we found this.”
A directory tree populated. Folders nested like Russian dolls.
“This”—he tapped the screen—“is The Ledger. That’s not me being dramatic. That’s the file name.”
A heat that wasn’t from the Florida summer crawled up my spine. “Open it.”
“Been doing just that, a sliver at a time.” He hit a quick series of keys, then glanced at Deviant. He dipped his chin once—do it. Jax hit return.
The rows of file names scrolled down, each one decrypting in a flicker of green, and the screen filled with a list of names.
No…not a list. A spreadsheet. A flood of neatly cataloged information.
Names. Thousands of them. Maybe tens of thousands.
Politicians, CEOs, high-ranking feds. Every one tied to files thick with dirt so detailed and damning that you could ruin a man’s life from the comfort of your couch. Blackmail material so deep it could bury half the country.
They were organized in rows upon rows, columns inside columns. Each entry had a face thumbnail, a handful of unique IDs, and tags. Senator. Chair. Deputy Director. CTO. CFO. Prosecutor. Special Agent. Publisher. “Friendly.” “Handle available.” “Debt: personal.” “Debt: financial.” “Debt: legal.”
Under each, subfiles: recordings, transcripts, offsite backups, hashes. Some were labeled with dates and places. Some were blurrier—just strings that meant nothing unless you spoke Helix.
Edge let out a low whistle like he didn’t want to but couldn’t help it.
“This isn’t leverage,” he murmured, eyes scanning fast. “It’s a fucking economy.”
It was essentially a hit list in digital form. My gut tightened because I knew power when I saw it, and this wasn’t the kind you shared. This was power you killed for.
He toggled to a different pane. “These are the metadata logs. Shows who accessed it, from what subnet, with what keys. Who touched the encryption, who tried to move it. Who authored each layer of encryption.”
“Who built it?” Kane asked, words flat enough to cut.
“That was the first thing I looked for.” Jax sucked in a breath, clicked twice, and zoomed. “One name keeps showing. Not a lot—he’s careful—but enough.”
A new window opened. The personnel file for E. Leek.
Edge’s mouth quirked. “Like the vegetable?”
