Page 49 of Drift
“You can help us predict him,” Kane confirmed with a nod. “We already noticed a pattern in his uploads—there was almost always one right around your meetings. It’d help to know how he behaved when you were with him. Patterns, behavior, habits. We can use them to find him, and the hope is that he leads us to whoever is behind the shell corporation.”
I tried to think back, but my mind kept replaying the moment Ethan showed up at my door. “He always pushed for in-person meetings. He said it helped him focus. I was the one who suggested The Drift Café because I’d been there before and knew the club frequents it. We met there every time. He wanted tocome over to my apartment instead, but I refused to give him the address.”
Chance tightened his hold on me, and I felt safe enough to tell more of the story.
“He texted constantly,” I added. “Which I’m sure you already know. The way he talked to me in person was similar to those messages. It was like…he needed control. If I didn’t answer fast enough, he’d send another text within minutes.”
“What about his phone?” Jaxton asked. “Ever notice any apps he acted weird about?”
I frowned, sorting through flashes of memory. “There was one with an icon that looked like a key. He minimized it right away when I glanced over once. I think it looked like a key icon, maybe yellow with a black background.”
That earned a smile from my brother. “Good catch.”
“Anything else come to mind?” Kane wanted to know.
I searched my memory again before shaking my head. “Nothing I can think of right now, but I’ll let one of you know if anything else pops into my head. Once I shift my mind to other things, my unconscious mind will continue the search, restarting another pathway or maybe finding the information incidentally during some other neural activation. That’s why it seems like a word you’re searching for earlier comes out of nowhere later on.”
Jaxton shook his head with a laugh. “Tell me you’re a psychology major without saying you’re a psychology major.”
Kane’s lips quirked into a grin. “She’s definitely your sister with a brain like that.”
“She’s fucking amazing,” Chance murmured.
Kane gave him a loaded look, and Chance got to his feet and settled me on mine. “Give us a few minutes, beautiful.”
I bristled at being dismissed, especially since I thought we were just getting to the planning part of our discussion. But the mix of apology and resolve in his gaze stopped me cold.
“Club business.”
My parents might’ve kept me away from Jaxton as much as they could after he became a Redline King, but I knew what that phrase meant. If I wanted to be with Chance, I had to accept that some parts of his world came with locked doors.
“Fine.” I stood, trying to ignore the worry knotting in my stomach. “I’ll go take a shower.”
“And put on some of your own damn clothes while you’re at it,” Jaxton growled.
The shorts I grabbed before I headed into the bathroom were mine…but I made sure the shirt was one of Chance’s. Just to needle my brother because that was what little sisters did best.
19
DRIFT
Thirty minutes later, the door shut behind them with a low, final thud. I slid the bolt into place and leaned my shoulder against the frame, listening to the engines fade down the gravel road until nothing was left but the distant crash of waves. The beach house settled—old wood creaking and the faint hum of the generator thrumming through the floor. Outside, the wind carried the smell of salt and wet sand. Inside, the air still felt charged, like gunpowder after a shot.
Kane’s words replayed in my head. “We’ll bait him.”
A fake drop, where one of their servers rerouted through an intercept node Jax had designed. Ethan would think he was uploading to his handler at the tech-broker hub—one of those deep-web middlemen that ferried stolen data through layered uplinks—but the packet would reroute straight into our hands.
Once that happened, Jax would trace it through the encrypted uplink, and lock down the broker hub before those bastards could cover their tracks. A quick and lethal setup, the kind we were built for.
After laying out the plan, Kane growled, “Intercept the upload. Find the hub. Erase every name tied to it.”
And that meant every dirty broker who’d ever sold out a student, a scientist, or a whistleblower for a paycheck.
Jax had stood there with his arms folded across his chest, his jaw tight, still working through the last of his temper. “Ethan’s gonna take the bait. He’s too desperate not to.”
“Desperate men make mistakes,” I murmured. “That’s when we hit them.”
Kane nodded, then met my gaze. “Get her back to the clubhouse. We’ll have everything in place by tonight.”
