Page 8 of Axle
Tight bricks banded with blue straps, all fresh and smug. I whistled low under my breath and slid a bundle free. Hundreds. The ink was crisp, edges sharp. I thumbed one band and held it to the light because I’d had people try to pass me the kind of funny money that stains your fingers.
Nope.This shit was real. Probably around ten grand. No wonder she’d been so twitchy when I wouldn’t give it back.
Beneath the money was something small and flat, wrapped in plain brown paper with the clean corners of a package nobody wanted to be special. I peeled it open, expecting some documents, but inside was a sleek, matte-black solid-state drive, heavy in my palm. It was the size of a cigarette pack with a tamper seal snapped across its face but no markings. It wasn’t your average drive. This was military grade. Industrial.
“What the hell are you carrying, angel?” I murmured, turning the drive over, looking for anything—names, tags, stickers. But there was nothing.
Digging through the rest of the duffel, I didn’t find anything personal. No phone. No wallet. Not even a lip balm someone like her might’ve lost at the bottom. She’d come in anonymous and planned to leave the same way. Except she hadn’t left. She’d burst into my life on two wheels, crashed, and passed out in my arms while the whole damn world watched.
She was ghosting on purpose.
And doing a pretty damn good job of it since I had no idea who the fuck she was or what she was running from. But whatever this was—whoever she was—none of it screamed criminal. She wasn’t some drug mule or con artist. She was scared and on the run. And considering that she’d been facing down with me—a big, tatted guy in leather whose very presencescreamed danger—she stood her ground with more guts than most men I knew.
I re-wrapped the drive and tucked it into the pocket of my cut, then grabbed the bag and headed to the clubhouse. My boots crunched on the gravel as I stalked out the front door and across the lot toward the clubhouse and Jax’s office.
Entering through a side door, I went down the hall and knocked once before pushing into his office. It sat under the eaves, a wide room with an industrial fan and too many monitors throwing ghost-light across his face. He was hunched over one of them in a backward cap and a hoodie, glasses sliding down his nose while his fingers sprinted over the keys like they had their own engine rev limiter. Edge had a hip against the side of the table with his arms folded, road dust still on his boots, and Nitro leaned in the doorway, expression carved out of granite.
I didn’t bother with hello.
“Drive. Need you to tell me what this is,” I said, tossing the package to Jax.
He caught it one-handed and raised a brow. “Let me guess. Came from the mystery woman who kamikazed your track?”
With a nod, I dropped onto the chair across from him.
Nitro grunted. “Saw the replay. Thought you were gonna rip that man’s head off the second he reached for her.”
“Man had no sense of self-preservation,” I muttered.
Jax flipped the drive in his hands, studying it closely. “Definitely not standard.”
“It’s not. It was buried under a mountain of cash in her duffel. Nothing to identify her, or the drive, though.”
Edge gave a low whistle as Jax spun in his chair to a separate rig: air-gapped, triple-cased, with more stickers than a NASCAR quarter panel—NO WAN, EYES ONLY. He popped the tamper seal with a plastic pick, plugged the drive into a hardwareadapter, then into a bay on the side of the unit that looked like it used to belong to a lab. “Let’s see what Cinderella left at the ball.”
He tapped the screen. “Air-gapped encryption. Hardware enforced. And not the cheap kind some start-up CTO brags about on social media. We’re talking multifactor key escrow with geo binding and a kill switch that will brick the drive if I sneeze wrong. I couldn’t even peek at the contents without tripping three warning flags. If this is somebody’s Christmas list, it’s got a top secret code name and a clearance badge.”
Edge’s mouth curved. “Makes sense. Elves are shifty little fuckers.”
Jax ignored him. “Whoever gave this to your girl either trusts her a lot, or expects she’s going to get arrested and wants plausible deniability when the feds start pulling threads. Right now, I can see the device manufacturer, firmware build, checksum, and the fact that the last time this drive was plugged into anything was…sixteen hours ago. The rest of it’s a fucking vault. I can try a couple of nondestructive handshakes, but if this thing has an on-chip tamper counter, I’m not risking it without prep.”
“What’s inside?” Nitro asked.
Jax shot him a look. “If I knew, I would’ve started with that instead of the lap around the track. Give me a few minutes, and I’ll see if there’s anything else I can learn without destroying the information.”
While he worked, I grabbed the duffel from the corner of his office and carried it upstairs. After I tossed the bag in a small safe in my closet, I took a second to breathe.
She’d be safest here.
I didn’t know her. Not even her fucking name. But the idea of my angel being anywhere but under my roof made something primal and ugly crawl through me.
When I returned to Jax’s office, Edge had moved off the desk and was leaning against the far wall, arms crossed and eyes sharp. He lifted a brow. “You look like someone pissed in your fuel tank.”
I didn’t answer.
Jax didn’t look up as he spoke. “Traced the origin code. It belongs to Helix Core Systems.”
Edge pushed off the wall. “Helix? As in the government’s go-to data vault?”
