Page 45 of Axle
“Yup,” Deviant answered. “Footage uploaded that night to the secure server where she’d previously kept The Ledger. Mercenaries were all wearing recording devices, button cams, dash cams, and shit.”
“So the potential buyers would know what happened if they tried to fuck with her,” Jax finished.
I blinked as realization hit me. “And I screwed up her plan by surviving.”
“So she knew who you were,” Deviant muttered. “It’s a damn good thing Axle had you sequestered in the clubhouse.”
There was silence. No one wanted to say the next part out loud. So I summed it up for them. “Or I’d be dead.”
My heart thudded, sharp and fast, like my body was finally catching up to what my brain had just pieced together. Mason cursed under his breath as his hand slid from my shoulder to my hip, fingers curling in a grip that bordered on bruising. It should’ve grounded me. Instead, all I could think was that Bellatrix had marked me for death long before I’d even known I was in danger.
“C’mon, angel.” Mason helped me from the chair, keeping himself locked at my side as we stepped out of Jax’s office.
His touch was warm, steady…the opposite of the cold knot in my chest.
The chain of events reeled through my head. If that ambush had gone the way Bellatrix planned, I never would’ve met him. Never would’ve known what it felt like to belong to someone so completely. And now, it wasn’t just my life on the line. I had his baby growing inside me.
I pressed my palm over my stomach, like I could shield both of us from the danger still circling out there. A rush of heat surged through my veins at the thought of Bellatrix wanting to get rid of me because, to her, I was just a loose end. Not fear, but fury.
Almost as though he heard the thoughts circling my brain, Mason muttered, “Not gonna let anything happen to you.”
His thumb stroked along my spine, and I breathed in deep, letting the strength in his presence sink into my bones. She could try to erase me. She could come at me with every trick in her arsenal. If I went down, it’d be while I was fighting. And I wouldn’t be alone. Not anymore. Not ever again.
18
AXLE
Jax didn’t look like hell anymore, but he rode on caffeine and adrenaline instead of sleep. Behind him, the wall of monitors blazed with maps, green lattice graphs, and a handful of feeds I didn’t have the time or patience to ask about.
He lifted a hand without turning. “Close it.”
I kicked the office door shut with my boot. “Tell me you’ve got it.”
After that key Elias had pressed into my palm last night, Nitro ghosted him to a safe house, and the coil spring of rage that had been living under my sternum for weeks…if Jax didn’t have it, I was going to put my fist through a wall for the simple pleasure of hearing cinderblock complain.
Jax tapped three keys, and the central screen swapped to a topographic slice of North Florida. He zoomed in, the map telescoping down until a wedge of pine and marsh resolved into a fenced triangle and a single long structure set back from a road.
“Bellatrix’s last clean footprint.” He turned his baseball cap backward and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Pulled from her burner’s baseband pings and the micro-drifts in the key laddernow that Elias handed us the salts. She thought she was dark. She was fucking wrong.”
“What is it?”
“Private rental. Off-book. Between Tallahassee and Crossbend and tucked behind timber rights so the county line cameras don’t catch faces or vehicles. On paper, it belongs to a phony LLC that never filed taxes, which is cute. In practice?” He pointed with the end of a pen he’d clearly been chewing. “Safe house. It’s a fucking fortress, though. High fence, reinforced doors, perimeter cameras pointed everywhere but at the structure. Of course, she has a private security response instead of county dispatch. Silent alert pathways and a backup generator.”
“You look into the full drive?”
He finally turned, and his expression said I’d asked a fucking stupid question. “We did more than look, brother. Leek and I took the gloves off. That key you hauled out of his cave cracked the vault. Full drive decrypted in less than five minutes.” He gestured at two different screens. One was a spreadsheet that looked like a building collapsed into columns, and the other had a bank routing interface with more zeros than sense. “We burned her leverage. Dumped curated copies of The Ledger into six inboxes that still respect what laws are—DOJ, two IGs, two Senate staffers who haven’t been bought, and a reporter who actually fucking fact checks. We slipped in trip lines and fingerprints. When they go public, she’s done, and anyone who tries to suppress it will leave prints. We also walked her accounts into the desert and let the sun have ’em.”
I grinned. “You drained her.”
“Legally? No. Morally?” He rolled one shoulder, and his lips slanted into a lopsided smirk. “I just steered her money into a holding pattern inside institutions that suddenly care very much where Helix’s compliance leads got off to with a bag of otherpeople’s secrets. Consider it ‘forensic retention.’ She can’t buy a plane ticket. Can’t pay a cleaner. Can’t even bribe a handler. She tried to purchase a new identity, and we pulled the teeth out of the sale mid-bite. Her buyers have evaporated. The Skulls and the mercs whose names surfaced with the dump are now furious they’ve been exposed without a paycheck. Helix is bleeding out contracts faster than they can draft internal memos. The empire is on fire, and the empress only has one plastic bucket.”
A slow heat slid down my spine. “She’s at the safe house now?”
Jax flicked to a live satellite pull. It was grainy and in gray scale, but clearly showed a rectangle of roof and two vehicles in the tree line—a black SUV and a van. He highlighted a grid. “Here. Heat signatures read six, maybe eight bodies. Two outside walking patterns, four inside, and one that’s either a server rack or a panic room AC unit.”
“Of course she has a panic room.”
“Rich sociopaths love boxes,” he said dryly. “She wrote a policy for them. Bellatrix’s ‘play dead’ box leads to a private outfit out of Miami whose contract we just canceled with a spoofed compliance dispute. They’ll spend three hours arguing about billable rates in a Slack channel while their client prays in a titanium coffin. She’s on her own.”
