Page 41 of Axle
I gave him a dry glance and whispered, “No. A fucking raccoon with an attitude.”
He winked and flipped his knife open and shut. “Long as I get to kill something…never said it had to be human.”
Sometimes I wasn’t quite sure when the dude was joking.
Kane’s voice was calm and gravelly. “Elias Leek,” he said through the door, not quite loud, but not bothering with pretend courtesy. “Open it.”
Silence. Then metal rasped, a chain being unhooked, and a bolt slid. The steel plate gave an inch, and the door cracked just enough for a single bloodshot eye to peek out.
He was gaunt and dirty, with patchy stubble as if he’d been shaving without a mirror. The door widened another inch, and behind him, I caught sight of a thin mattress on the floor, a laptop on a milk crate, and a tangle of coax cable coiled like a sleeping snake. Then we were staring at the muzzle of a pistol. The cheap polymer and thirty-round stick mag were notched toward my chest.
“Back up,” he croaked. “If she sent you, you can tell her she’s already too late.”
Nitro appeared at my flank—one breath, he wasn’t there, and the next, he was. Neither Kane nor Edge moved at all. The fastest way to spook a cornered animal was to look like you wanted it to run.
“She?” I used a nonchalant tone as if we were trading the weather. “Bellatrix Creed?”
His eyes narrowed, sweeping over us, and his grip wobbled. “You work for her or the Broken Skulls. Tell me and see if it keeps you alive.”
“Not a chance.” I kept my weapon pointed at the floor, palm open on the frame. “We’re not hers or Skulls. We’re Redline Kings. Came to get you out, not put you in the fucking ground.”
“Prove it,” he demanded, and though the gun shook, his voice gathered a hard vein underneath. This was a man trying to sound like he could still decide his own ending.
I slid a look at Kane. He gave the slightest nod.
“We’re here because of Ashlynn.”
He could hear the truth in my voice.
The barrel dipped a fraction. That bloodshot eye went wide.
“Ashlynn?” He sucked air like he’d dropped something heavy on his foot. “She’s?—”
“Alive,” I confirmed. “And safe.”
The gun stuttered lower, then lifted again like habit was heavier than hope. “I didn’t…I never meant—” A swallow worked down his dry throat, and he blinked so hard that he swayed on his feet. We didn’t want to spook him anymore, so both Nitro and I slid our pistols into their holsters, and Edge put away his knife.
The door scraped as Elias opened it. He stepped into the corridor just enough for the fluorescent light to show a haggard man in an overwashed T-shirt, jeans that had seen too many days, and bare feet gone gray with dust. A lanyard hung around his neck with a small black fob at the end, scuffed, edges worn—the kind of hardware key a man wore to bed when he didn’t trust his surroundings.
Kane’s voice was quiet steel. “Gun, Elias.”
He was making it clear that nothing else would be said or done until we were no longer being threatened.
Elias looked at the pistol like he’d forgotten it, then placed it on the floor with deliberate care and nudged it toward Nitro with his toe. Nitro scooped it up, weighed it with a face that said tragic, then cleared the chamber and pocketed the mag.
Elias sagged back against the jamb, both hands braced behind him like the door was the only thing keeping him vertical.
“Start at the top.” Edge’s voice was almost gentle, which is a trick if you know him. “Who’s the she you’re terrified of? How did we get here? And if I like the answers, you get shoes and something hot that isn’t ninety-day-old coffee.”
“Bellatrix Creed,” he spat, the name like a pitch-black pit he couldn’t see the bottom of. “Chief compliance on paper. Functionally? Queen of rot. She built a private market outof fear.” He pushed off the jamb and gestured with two fingers at the humming racks. “They call it The Ledger because this country loves a polite lie. It cataloged weaknesses. Debts, secrets, pressure points. The access was supposed to be ring-fenced. Legal would call it liability control. Internal language. Guardrails. She loved that word. Guardrails.” His laugh went thin, all edges. “What she built were rails for a cattle chute.”
Nitro had stepped just inside the room. He set a fallen office chair upright with a toe, then dropped onto it, elbows on knees, eyes steady on Elias. Combat-patient—which was Nitro’s version of a hug. “How does a ledger turn into a blackmail factory?”
Elias’s hands moved like he was assembling a patch cable while he talked. “We made a product that could see correlations at stupid speeds. ‘If X then Y’ across five hundred data sets. The code was beautiful. We told ourselves we were protecting infrastructure.” He breathed harder now. “You start by tracking a senator’s schedule to keep him safe from a nut with a manifesto, but when the wrong person gets ahold of the information, you end by tracking his mistress’s credit card so you can ‘nudge’ a committee vote. Or you start by mapping a cartel’s laundering tree, and you end by running a risk profile on a cop’s kid’s tuition and deciding the safest way to move cash is to hold the kid hostage without ever touching her. You understand?” His throat worked. “I built the locks because that’s my skill set. I wrote the failsafes because I believed systems should survive the worst people in the room. But the worst person in the room learned which wires to cut. Then she figured out how to sell people’s secrets. Sell their lives to the highest bidder.”
Edge’s gaze flicked to Kane’s. Our prez didn’t shift, but I felt the temperature drop a degree. We were all feeling the deadly rage coming on.
“How did Ashlynn land in it?” I asked, keeping my tone level while fury continued to race through my veins.
