Chapter 18
AXLE
J ax didn’t look like hell anymore, but he rode on caffeine and adrenaline instead of sleep. Behind him, the wall of monitors blazed with maps, green lattice graphs, and a handful of feeds I didn’t have the time or patience to ask about.
He lifted a hand without turning. “Close it.”
I kicked the office door shut with my boot. “Tell me you’ve got it.”
After that key Elias had pressed into my palm last night, Nitro ghosted him to a safe house, and the coil spring of rage that had been living under my sternum for weeks…if Jax didn’t have it, I was going to put my fist through a wall for the simple pleasure of hearing cinderblock complain.
Jax tapped three keys, and the central screen swapped to a topographic slice of North Florida. He zoomed in, the map telescoping down until a wedge of pine and marsh resolved into a fenced triangle and a single long structure set back from a road.
“Bellatrix’s last clean footprint.” He turned his baseball cap backward and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Pulled from her burner’s baseband pings and the micro-drifts in the key ladder now that Elias handed us the salts. She thought she was dark. She was fucking wrong.”
“What is it?”
“Private rental. Off-book. Between Tallahassee and Crossbend and tucked behind timber rights so the county line cameras don’t catch faces or vehicles.
On paper, it belongs to a phony LLC that never filed taxes, which is cute.
In practice?” He pointed with the end of a pen he’d clearly been chewing.
“Safe house. It’s a fucking fortress, though.
High fence, reinforced doors, perimeter cameras pointed everywhere but at the structure.
Of course, she has a private security response instead of county dispatch.
Silent alert pathways and a backup generator. ”
“You look into the full drive?”
He finally turned, and his expression said I’d asked a fucking stupid question.
“We did more than look, brother. Leek and I took the gloves off. That key you hauled out of his cave cracked the vault. Full drive decrypted in less than five minutes.” He gestured at two different screens.
One was a spreadsheet that looked like a building collapsed into columns, and the other had a bank routing interface with more zeros than sense.
“We burned her leverage. Dumped curated copies of The Ledger into six inboxes that still respect what laws are—DOJ, two IGs, two Senate staffers who haven’t been bought, and a reporter who actually fucking fact checks.
We slipped in trip lines and fingerprints.
When they go public, she’s done, and anyone who tries to suppress it will leave prints.
We also walked her accounts into the desert and let the sun have ’em. ”
I grinned. “You drained her.”
“Legally? No. Morally?” He rolled one shoulder, and his lips slanted into a lopsided smirk.
“I just steered her money into a holding pattern inside institutions that suddenly care very much where Helix’s compliance leads got off to with a bag of other people’s secrets.
Consider it ‘forensic retention.’ She can’t buy a plane ticket.
Can’t pay a cleaner. Can’t even bribe a handler.
She tried to purchase a new identity, and we pulled the teeth out of the sale mid-bite.
Her buyers have evaporated. The Skulls and the mercs whose names surfaced with the dump are now furious they’ve been exposed without a paycheck.
Helix is bleeding out contracts faster than they can draft internal memos.
The empire is on fire, and the empress only has one plastic bucket. ”
A slow heat slid down my spine. “She’s at the safe house now?”
Jax flicked to a live satellite pull. It was grainy and in gray scale, but clearly showed a rectangle of roof and two vehicles in the tree line—a black SUV and a van.
He highlighted a grid. “Here. Heat signatures read six, maybe eight bodies. Two outside walking patterns, four inside, and one that’s either a server rack or a panic room AC unit. ”
“Of course she has a panic room.”
“Rich sociopaths love boxes,” he said dryly.
“She wrote a policy for them. Bellatrix’s ‘play dead’ box leads to a private outfit out of Miami whose contract we just canceled with a spoofed compliance dispute.
They’ll spend three hours arguing about billable rates in a Slack channel while their client prays in a titanium coffin. She’s on her own.”
“Fucking perfect.” I felt the snarl break free in my chest like a dog off a leash. “Gonna call Prez.”
Kane and Edge were already two steps into the office before I could lift my phone. Nitro sauntered in behind them, and the door clicked shut again. The temperature of the room shifted in the way it always did when a decision was about to calcify into action.
Kane’s gaze cut to the map and then to me. “We in business?”
“We are,” I confirmed before sharing everything Jax had just laid out, short and sharp.
“Could let the others tear her apart,” Kane suggested, not because he wanted to, but because he was our prez and his job demanded he lay down every option on the table, even the ones that tasted like ash. “No tie back to us if they do it. No clean-up. Just another monster eaten by other monsters.”
Jax and Nitro watched me with steady focus, while Edge rolled his knife over his knuckles, somehow managing not to get sliced by the lethal blade.
Kane wasn’t asking me to fall back and let someone else dole out my retribution. If I chose to act, he’d back me with blood. It was no less than I would give him if the one wrapped up in this tangle had been Savannah.
I didn’t have to visualize Ashlynn to feel her, but I did it anyway.
The way she’d looked this morning, hair a wild spill across my chest, my T-shirt hitched high on her hips, the flat of her palm resting unconsciously over her belly like her body already knew what we’d made.
She was everything to me, and I needed to make sure this shit never touched her or our child.
To make it happen with my own hands and see the cause of my woman’s pain bleed.
“We end it now,” I growled, my voice threaded with steel.
Edge’s grin was a flash of teeth—feral and pleased. Nitro pushed off the wall he’d been leaning against, coiled for action. Kane nodded once, and it felt like the air pressure in the room changed to something darker, thick, and sizzling with anticipation.
“Get your gear,” Kane ordered. “We roll before dawn.”
Ashlynn was on the bed when I walked in, sitting cross-legged near the headboard in only my T-shirt, which did absolutely nothing to hide how she filled it.
Despite all the shit crowding my mind, my body reacted immediately.
My cock swelled, and my hands itched to feel her silky skin beneath them.
She looked small and gorgeous; soft and stubborn; mine in every way that mattered.
She read my expression before I spoke, and suspicion narrowed her eyes. “Club business?”
“Yeah,” I replied, because that part was true.
Her mouth tilted. “Is it my business too?”
I hated and loved her all at once for that question.
“It touches your life,” I admitted. “Which is why I’m telling you instead of making you guess. We’re going after Bellatrix.”
She unfolded from the bed in one smooth motion and planted her feet on the floor like she was bracing for a fight. “Then I’m going.”
“No.”
She crossed her arms and tapped a finger against her bicep. “I can stay in the van. I won’t get in the way. I just—” She faltered, and it killed me. “I just don’t want you shouldering this alone. You’ve had my back. Let me have yours.”
“That is my favorite sentence you’ve ever said,” I told her, too honest for my own good.
Then I closed the distance and caught her jaw in my hand, not hard, but enough that she felt the strength in my resolve.
“But you’re mine. And you’re carrying our kid.
There is nothing on this earth that would make me agree to put you in danger. Not now. Not ever.”
Her chin tipped up another notch. “I know how to stay out of the way. I won’t try to be a part of the action.”
“I know. That isn’t the point.” I pressed my mouth to hers, slow. Then a second kiss that was sharper and deeper because I needed the taste. When I pulled back, her eyes were glassy with heat and frustration. “I walk into hell so you don’t have to, angel.”
She was still simmering when I stepped to the closet.
I reached up to the highest shelf and pulled down the box Kane had slid into my hand three days ago.
I hadn’t asked him to make it, though I’d intended to, but he hadn’t waited for me to find time.
He’d handed it to me after we found out about the baby.
He understood the timing, especially with his own woman pregnant.
I cracked the box and took out the vest. Black leather. Smaller than mine, a perfect fit for her. Her name was stitched across the left breast, but the patch I cared about most took up the whole back. The Redline Kings logo in the center and the words PROPERTY OF AXLE arched beneath it in bold.
I turned and held it out to her.
“Be my old lady.” The words felt tight in my throat because I’d never said them to anyone, and I never would again.
She looked at the vest and then at me. Heat, shock, a flicker of fear that wasn’t about me at all.
When she didn’t make a move to take it, a small pulse of hurt thumped in my chest. I didn’t let it show, but she must have seen the hint of fear anyway because her face turned soft.
“I want it,” she said quickly, almost tripping over the words.
“I want you. I want this.” She lifted her chin, her gaze unwavering, but with moisture gathered in her stormy gray eyes.
“But I don’t want you to give it to me now because you think you might not come back.
” She stepped close, and her hand touched the leather, then flattened over my heart.
“Go handle that bitch. Come home to me. Then give this to me, and I’ll wear it with pride. ”
I huffed out a laugh, not because her answer was funny, but because it was perfect.
She was fucking perfect. For a second, all I could do was look at her.
My heart thumped hard, and my every instinct screamed for me to admit how I felt.
But like the vest, I wouldn’t give her the words until nothing was hanging over us, so she knew for sure that I meant them.
I tucked the vest back into the box, set it on the dresser, and fisted a hand in the hem of the shirt she was wearing to pull her to her toes.
“Fine,” I growled, mouth slanting over hers. “But you'd better be waiting for me when I get back. Naked and in our bed. Because I want you wearing my brand and nothing else the next time I’m buried deep inside you.”
Color climbed her throat as her eyes flared, and her fingers bit my shoulders. “Just keep that picture in your head so it brings you back to me.”
I kissed her once more—hard enough to burn something into both of us—then broke away before my control was lost. I strapped on my blade at my ankle and holstered my gun at my hip. Then I took one last look at her standing by the bed, afraid for me, but with faith braided tight behind her eyes.
“Waiting for me, angel,” I said, voice low.
“Be careful,” she whispered. “Then be fast.”