Chapter 10
AXLE
J ax looked like hell.
Not the fun kind—more like when you’ve been riding too hard, drinking too much, and letting a woman try to convince you she can drink you under the table.
This was caffeine and sleeplessness with a side of near madness. Pale, hollow-eyed pupils riding high like the man was seeing code in his dreams, and enough stubble to suggest he’d forgotten razors existed.
My office was similar to the other officers—concrete walls, sturdy carpet, a scarred desk that had seen more contracts than coasters, and a window that looked down over the small garage attached to the kitchen where brothers tuned their rides when they didn’t want to drag something up to The Pit.
Where the walls had been bare a few months ago, someone had recently stuck a Redline Kings banner on one wall, and another had trophies and framed win photos.
It wasn’t a stretch to assume it had been Kane’s wife, Savannah.
She’d made a lot of subtle touches around the clubhouse, but we had no complaints about them.
The place seemed homier without losing the edgy vibe.
Jax had three laptops open on my desk, three separate external drives plugged in, cables snaking everywhere.
On the center screen, lines of text crawled, the kind of stuff that gave most people a headache and made Jax grin like Christmas.
Deviant’s digital fingerprints were all over it as well.
His kind of code was like a cocky signature scrawled in neon.
They’d been working this thing layer by layer for over a week, tearing encryption apart like wolves stripping bone.
Ashlynn sat on the chairs across from him.
One of her knees was hooked over the other, and hair fell over her shoulder in a loose, messy wave.
Every time she shifted, it slid across the leather like silk.
She was wearing my extra cut over a black tee that I’d bet money was mine too.
Not that I minded, I loved seeing her in my clothes.
The vest dwarfed her a little, but she wore it like armor—chin up, eyes steady, mouth soft until she was about to argue.
She’d healed fast. Cage said the bruising on her ribs would fade in another week if she “didn’t do anything stupid.” She’d given him a sweet smile that fooled nobody, least of all me.
Kane took the corner by the window, arms folded, expression carved in a way that made most men find somewhere else to be. Edge was next to him with the easy lean of someone who could go from relaxed to lethal in the time it took to blink.
“Tell me you have something besides a migraine.” The past seven days had been a blur of hurry-up-and-wait, and my patience was down to threads. The only thing keeping me sane was spending most of that time buried inside Ashlynn.
“I’ve got a lot,” Jax said, pushing his glasses up with the back of his knuckle. “And I brought a friend.”
On cue, the third screen flickered to life, and a hard-faced man with dark hair and sharp eyes appeared. The video was feed crisp despite the secure tunnel we’d set up between the two networks. Deviant. The Iron Rogues’ tech genius. He sat in a room that looked like he lived inside a server rack.
Deviant tipped two fingers in a lazy salute. “Axle, Edge, Prez.” Then his eyes moved to Ashlynn, and he grinned slyly. “Don’t believe we’ve met. You’re?—”
“Mine,” I grunted even though I knew he would never look at any woman other than his old lady.
Deviant’s smile grew, and he held up his hands. “Noted.”
“Alright,” Jax said, voice hoarse, “you’re gonna want to see this.”
He swiveled the center laptop around. “I’ve been reconstructing internal Helix docs from residue—draft saves, thumbprints in temp directories, and dev chat logs that were ‘deleted’ but not really.
There’s a lot of redaction. There’s also a lot of sloppiness in how they handled their metadata.
Which is where we live.” His fingers flew.
Windows stacked, slid, and magnified. “Started as what I thought was a garden-variety internal investigation: resource leakage, missing keys, and unusual traffic from a sandbox cluster. Then we found this.”
A directory tree populated. Folders nested like Russian dolls.
“This”—he tapped the screen—“is The Ledger. That’s not me being dramatic. That’s the file name.”
A heat that wasn’t from the Florida summer crawled up my spine. “Open it.”
“Been doing just that, a sliver at a time.” He hit a quick series of keys, then glanced at Deviant. He dipped his chin once— do it . Jax hit return.
The rows of file names scrolled down, each one decrypting in a flicker of green, and the screen filled with a list of names.
No…not a list. A spreadsheet. A flood of neatly cataloged information.
Names. Thousands of them. Maybe tens of thousands.
Politicians, CEOs, high-ranking feds. Every one tied to files thick with dirt so detailed and damning that you could ruin a man’s life from the comfort of your couch. Blackmail material so deep it could bury half the country.
They were organized in rows upon rows, columns inside columns. Each entry had a face thumbnail, a handful of unique IDs, and tags. Senator. Chair. Deputy Director. CTO. CFO. Prosecutor. Special Agent. Publisher. “Friendly.” “Handle available.” “Debt: personal.” “Debt: financial.” “Debt: legal.”
Under each, subfiles: recordings, transcripts, offsite backups, hashes. Some were labeled with dates and places. Some were blurrier—just strings that meant nothing unless you spoke Helix.
Edge let out a low whistle like he didn’t want to but couldn’t help it.
“This isn’t leverage,” he murmured, eyes scanning fast. “It’s a fucking economy.”
It was essentially a hit list in digital form. My gut tightened because I knew power when I saw it, and this wasn’t the kind you shared. This was power you killed for.
He toggled to a different pane. “These are the metadata logs. Shows who accessed it, from what subnet, with what keys. Who touched the encryption, who tried to move it. Who authored each layer of encryption.”
“Who built it?” Kane asked, words flat enough to cut.
“That was the first thing I looked for.” Jax sucked in a breath, clicked twice, and zoomed. “One name keeps showing. Not a lot—he’s careful—but enough.”
A new window opened. The personnel file for E. Leek.
Edge’s mouth quirked. “Like the vegetable?”
“Like the guy who built the fucking locks on this thing,” Jax replied. “Senior Data Security Engineer at Helix Core. Specializes in encryption protocols. And according to these logs, he’s been inside The Ledger more than anyone else.”
Deviant jumped in. “He wrote big pieces of the vault tech this thing sits on. He also wrote a lot of the test harness that’s supposed to keep it from…
becoming this. I did not find his keys anywhere they shouldn’t be, but I found his fingerprints on the failsafes.
And then fourteen days ago”—Jax switched the screen to another log.
A line of access pings marched across the screen, each stamped with a time, a geo, and an internal ref—“someone using internal Helix credentials started pulling a string. Not a download. A check. It threw a probe at The Ledger host every two hours, then at six-minute increments, like someone was watching a clock and daring the guard dog to bark.”
Kane quirked a brow. “That isn’t a thief’s pattern.”
“Nope.” Jax drummed his fingers against the desk. “That’s a test pattern. A guy checking whether he can lift something out of the vault without tripping the sirens.”
“Leek?” I asked.
“Best guess.” Jax’s eyes cut to Ashlynn for the first time since he started. He didn’t soften the question. “Name ring a bell?”
Ashlynn’s brows pulled tight. “Leek…” She sat back slowly.
“That was the alias used to hire me through the broker. I didn’t think twice about his name.
Most of them use produce names, or birds, or colors.
I never would have guessed it was a real one.
” Her voice scraped at the end, a rasp of memory.
“He said the contact would have a red cap. Was supposed to ask for directions to Redline Speedway. Cash on hand. No phones. No questions.”
“Which is why you didn’t carry ID.” It wasn’t an accusation, just putting it back in play so nobody pretended she’d been careless.
She nodded. “My clients don’t want a digital footprint. I don’t give them one either.”
Smart, angel .
Jax nodded. “That tracks. My read? He built the failsafes for storage. Only somebody decided to weaponize it. My gut says he found out what they were using it for and tried to get the information out before it burned him too. My instincts are screaming whistleblower. He wrote the harness. He would know exactly how it could be abused. So he tries to get it out. Something goes sideways. He hires a courier who won’t set off alarms. Only she does—because somebody else is already listening. ”
“You were the delivery method,” Deviant added.
She frowned. “So he’s not the one after me.”
“No.” Jax’s tone was blunt. “The ones who owned The Ledger before it went missing are the ones after you.”
Kane scratched his chin. “The way they came at you? Probably trying to keep him from getting it into the wrong hands. Or the right ones, depending on which side you’re on.”
“And they’re not the type to let something like this slide,” I growled, my fury building with every word.
Kane’s voice was calm steel as he asked, “We know who hit her?”
Jax had that answer ready. The window shifted to a grid of scrapes he’d pulled from traffic cams, the speedway gate, two liquor stores, and a church front that still thought security was a “thou shalt not” sign.
“Same white van shows up on four feeds, two cars do lag-and-lead. Plates are a salad. The van got a county fleet tag welded over the real one for an hour on two cameras. That trick is not a hobby move. The driver profile matches a private-sector security outfit out of Jacksonville that moonlights for anyone with a checkbook and no scruples.”