Page 8 of Cipher's Baby Girl
I move to the window, looking out at the compound below. Security lights illuminate the gravel lot where motorcycles are parked in neat rows. Men move between buildings, some laughing, some serious. This world is so alien to me—these people with their leather and tattoos and loud motorcycles. They’re violent, I have no doubt about that, yet in less than a day, they’ve treated me with more kindness than my stepfather showed me in eight years.
I lie back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to process everything that's happened. I should feel relief, gratitude, even joy at my rescue and the generosity of these strangers. And I do. I really do.
But I also feel...lost. Who am I? What do I do with a life I never expected to have? How do I exist in this world?
And why can't I stop thinking about a man with hard, haunting eyes who looks at me as though he sees something no one else does…then walks away like he can't bear the sight of me?
Tears slip silently down my cheeks as the enormity of my situation finally hits me. I'm free, yes. But freedom is terrifying when you've never learned what to do with it.
Chapter 2
Cipher
I track Rose's movements through the compound on my wall of monitors. My surveillance system covers nearly every inch of the clubhouse—thirty-two high-definition cameras with infrared capability, twenty-two directional microphones, all feeding into my custom-built server farm that processes over 40 terabytes of data daily. The system runs through seven layers of encryption that I designed myself during my NSA days.
The brothers call it my "bat cave."
Leaning forward in my chair, I manipulate the PTZ controls to zoom in on Rose's face. She's smiling politely at something Sophie said, but the smile doesn't reach her eyes. Those hazel eyes remain vigilant, constantly scanning her surroundings, cataloging exits, assessing potential threats. It's a survival mechanism I recognize all too well. I've used it myself since I was six years old.
"What have you been through, Baby Girl?" I mutter, the endearment again slipping out before I can stop it.
I still don't understand what’s going on with me. I've participated in countless extraction operations, rescued numerous victims, all with professional detachment. I couldsort through body parts while knee-deep in rivers of blood without flinching. But the moment I laid eyes on her huddled in that corner…a primitive possessiveness crashed through my carefully constructed walls like a sledgehammer.
Her small form was pressed against the corrugated metal, those wide eyes looking up at me not with fear but with something that felt dangerously like recognition. When I lifted her into my arms, her slight weight triggered a response so feral it terrified me. My skin actually tingled where it made contact with hers, like a circuit completing.
Mine.Again, I hear that voice in my head.
I push away from the monitors, disgusted with myself. She's not mine. She can't be. I have no right to claim anyone, much less someone so fragile, so wounded, so deserving of care and comfort.
I don’t comfort. Not with these bloodied hands, this fractured mind, this soul that was carved out piece by piece many years ago in a basement in Damascus.
I turn to my main terminal—a custom-built system with processing power that would make most government agencies jealous—and continue the background check I've been running since we brought her back to the compound. Rose Hartley, eighteen years old. Mother deceased when she was twelve, breast cancer according to the death certificate. Stepfather Richard Hartley became her legal guardian. No further school records after sixth grade, supposedly homeschooled, but no registration with state education authorities. No social media presence whatsoever. No employment history. No medical records beyond age twelve.
It's as if she disappeared from the world six years ago.
My fingers fly across the keyboard, executing commands that bypass firewalls and security protocols with practiced ease. Child protective services had been called to the Hartley hometwice shortly before her mother's death—suspected neglect, both times dismissed without investigation. After her mother died, nothing. Not a single welfare check or follow-up.
She fell through the cracks in the system.
Richard Hartley's record paints a picture of a two-bit criminal—three arrests for petty theft, two for check fraud, multiple illegal gambling charges, nothing that stuck due to insufficient evidence or witnesses who mysteriously recanted. His financial records show a pattern of accumulating debt. He's exactly the type of lowlife scum who would sell his stepdaughter to settle a debt.
White-hot rage floods my system. I've seen the worst humanity has to offer, but the calculated selling of your own child—even a stepchild—ignites something dark and vengeful inside me that I haven't felt since I hunted down my torturers after my escape.
My fingers tighten on the mouse, imagining they're wrapped around his throat instead.
“He’s a dead motherfucker.”
I glance back at the screen where Rose is trying to make herself invisible even as my cameras render that impossible. She's tucked into herself, taking up minimal space, shoulders hunched slightly as if expecting a blow.
"She's a survivor," I say aloud to the empty room.
The signs are clear. Hypervigilance. Evidence of long-term psychological conditioning consistent with emotional abuse, possibly physical. Adaptive behaviors typical of trauma victims—minimizing her presence, avoiding eye contact, anticipating negative outcomes.
I understand the signs all too well. I displayed most of them by age seven.
"There's something wrong with you, boy,” my father says, his face twisted with disgust. “Something missing upstairs,” heannounces as he taps the side of his skull with his index finger. “You ain’t like the rest of us."
The man was right, though not in the way he thought. What was missing was his ability to accept a child whose brain worked differently than his own.
