Page 22 of Drift
I parked by the back door, killed the engine, and swung off my hog.
Inside, the clubhouse was a low hum. A few brothers were at the bar in the common room, voices low over the sound of a race replaying on the TV. I passed them without a word, heading straight for my office.
The door shut behind me with a click, and I dropped into the chair, opened my laptop, and flexed my fingers. If Ethan wanted to play the harmless-college-boy act, fine. I’d strip that shit down to the bolts and see what rattled underneath.
I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for.
But I knew I’d recognize it when I saw it.
It would’ve gone faster if I’d brought Jax up to date on the situation, but I talked myself out of it. The guy had earned his damn honeymoon, and if this turned out to be nothing, I wasn’t about to ruin it with paranoia.
Besides, calling him meant explaining why I was watching Alanna’s every move—and I wasn’t ready to pull that trigger.
So I did what Jax taught me.
Lines of code flickered across the screen of my laptop as I worked through the club’s secure network, tracing digital threads the way Jax had drilled into me years ago. Other than the click of the keyboard, the faint hum of the air-conditioning was the only sound in the room. Outside, a bike revved once before fading into the distance.
I leaned back in my chair, arms crossed, eyes on the search results rolling in. Ethan Miller. Twenty-two. Local. Clean record. No priors, no traffic citations, no debts, and no social media posts that set off alarms.
On paper, the guy was harmless. Boring even. The poster child for the clean-cut “boy next door.”
That was what bothered me. Every detail looked like it had been written for a novel. No rough edges or traces of the kind of stupid mistakes everyone made. No noise at all. It was like he was trying to be invisible.
My instincts were firing on all cylinders, and every one of them was blaring an alarm. I’d learned a long time ago that nothing was ever as clean as it looked—the dirt was covered up.
I narrowed the search, running his name through a few darker databases Jax had built into the system. Nothing. Not even a parking ticket.
“Fuck.” I rubbed the back of my neck, the skin strained from tension.
If it had been anyone else, I might’ve shrugged the worry off. But Alanna’s flinch, the way her voice had tightened when she’d said his name…it kept running through my head.
Eventually, I typed in her address and pulled up the live feeds from the cameras outside her building. The club’s security network covered half the damn city—partly for protection but also for leverage.
This was about her safety, I told myself.
Not obsession.
Four angles popped up on the screen. The front lot, side entrance, stairwell, and a split screen that showed the hallways outside the apartment doors.
The time stamp rolled over to 9:42 p.m. The feed was quiet—no motion and no noise. Alanna’s SUV sat in her space, gleaming under the security lights.
A low knock hit the door, distracting me from my inspection.
“Yeah,” I called without looking up.
The door swung open, and Edge stepped in—his cut hanging open, and his T-shirt clinging to him like he’d just come out of the shower. His dark auburn hair was damp, and that slightly unhinged, movie-star grin was already in place.
He leaned against the doorframe, his arms folded against his chest. “You look like a man trying to stop himself from doing something stupid.”
“Depends on your definition of stupid.”
He snorted, pushing off the frame and walking over to the desk. His gaze flicked to the screen before I could do anything about it, lingering on the feed showing Alanna’s apartment door. “Ah. That kind of stupid.”
“Don’t start,” I warned, but his smile just widened.
“Relax, brother. No judging. Just surprised you’re still pretending your recent brooding isn’t over a woman.”
“I don’t brood.”
