Chapter 3
KAILA
Afrantic rhythm beats against my ribs. I refuse to let these imposing men see me sweat.
Daniel’s palm presses a heavy heat into the small of my back, marching me down the metal staircase of the clubhouse. The air down here sits thick in my lungs. It smells like old leather and stale beer. Gun oil coats the back of my throat.
"Keep your head up," Daniel murmurs. His voice sends a low rumble vibrating straight down my spine. "Don't look at the Prospects. Look at me."
"I’m not a golden retriever, Daniel," I whisper back. My eyes stay glued to his broad shoulder anyway. "I don’t need the 'heel' command."
His grip tightens on my waist. Daniel pulls me flush against his side as we pass a group of men playing pool in the main common area. The click-clack of billiard balls stops. Silence sweeps across the room. Heavy stares drag across my skin, raising the hairs on my arms.
I’ve spent the last eight months living in the dark, existing only in code and shadows. Being this visible feels like having my epidermis peeled off.
"Eyes front," Daniel growls to the room at large.
The pool players look away. Daniel wears his rank like a heavy cloak. The man who kidnapped me doubles as royalty in this kingdom of grit and gears.
We stop in front of double oak doors carved with a skull sporting a cracked halo.
"The Chapel," Daniel says, his thumb tracing a heavy line over my hip bone. "Logan is inside. He’s going to ask questions. You answer them. Don't lie, and for the love of God, Kaila, don't try to hack his phone while he’s talking to you."
I smooth down the front of my oversized hoodie. "I only hack people who annoy me."
"That's what I'm afraid of." Daniel pushes the doors open.
A massive table slab cut from a single redwood tree dominates the room. The walls are lined with topographical and satellite maps. At the head of the table sits a man making Daniel look almost approachable.
Logan Gunnar. I recognize him from the encrypted files I’ve been monitoring. The pixels didn't do him justice. Dark hair frames black eyes, and his utter stillness triggers every flight instinct I possess.
Two other men flank him. Austin leans back in a chair, while Shane sits with clenched fists, looking ready to punch through the drywall.
"Tracker," Logan says. His voice grinds like gravel on concrete. He fixes his stare directly on me. "You brought a stray into the Chapel."
"She's not a stray," Daniel replies, his tone flat. He guides me to a chair but remains standing behind me. His body forms a solid wall of heat against my back. "She's the leak. She's also the patch."
"The girl in the cabin," Austin remarks, tilting his head. "The one Costa is hunting."
"Kaila," I announce. The syllables leave my throat with surprising force. "My name is Kaila."
Logan narrows his gaze. "You’ve been inside our servers for eight months, Kaila. You’ve seen our routes and our safe houses."
"And I haven't sold a single byte of it," I shoot back. My grip cramps on the edge of the redwood table. I hold his stare. "If I wanted to hurt you, I would have drained your accounts in November when Elias left that port open on the treasury server. I patched it instead."
Shane snorts. "Elias isn't gonna like hearing that."
"Elias can get better at encryption then," I counter.
Daniel's chest rumbles against my shoulder blades. He’s enjoying this.
"Why?" Logan demands.
"Because the Costas have my brother." The confession rips out of my throat. "Kevin. He’s nineteen. They took him to force me to crack your network. They want your shipping routes for the new guns you're moving out of the warehouse on Fourth."
The room goes deadly silent.
Logan stands, placing his hands flat on the table. "We don't move guns, Ms. Reyes. We run an outfitting business."
"Cut the crap," I snap, adrenaline burning through my veins. "I know about the crates marked 'Tent Spikes.' You need to realize Dominic considers the Broken Halos a mere side-quest."
I lean forward. "He has something much bigger happening in Chicago. I’ve seen the encrypted pings.
A rival clan with no name in the public records is squeezing his operations.
He’s losing millions in the city every night, and he needs my hacking skills to find the leak in his organization before his whole world implodes.
You’re the pest he’s trying to swat while he fights a phantom in the Windy City. "
A jagged breath leaves my lungs. "I don't care about his wars. I care about the photos of my brother he sends every single day. Kevin’s got a split lip in the last one. Dominic is showing me exactly how easily he could break him. I have to get him out before Dominic loses his patience."
I pull my phone out and slide it across the table. The screen shows the latest picture. Kevin sits tied to a radiator, one eye swollen shut above a split lip.
Logan examines the photo. The temperature in the room seems to plummet ten degrees. He slides the phone back toward my hand.
"Tracker claims you can find him," Logan states.
"I can find anyone," I confirm. "I need access. Real access. I have to infiltrate the Costa internal comms, and I can't do that from a frozen cabin with a satellite uplink dropping during every snowfall."
"You want to use our resources," Austin muses. "To start a war with the Costas."
"They started it," Daniel cuts in. His broad hands clamp over my shoulders. "They took a kid. They hunted her. She's under my protection, Logan. Mine."
The word echoes. Mine.
It’s an archaic caveman declaration. I code in five languages. I don’t belong to anyone. Hearing the iron-clad certainty in his voice forces a hot flush through my chest. It unknots a tension I’ve carried since November.
Logan shifts his stare from me to his brother. A silent conversation passes between them. Logan inclines his head.
"If she’s yours, Tracker, she’s your responsibility. She leaks one coordinate to the Costas, and the fallout lands strictly on you."
"I know," Daniel replies.
"Set her up," Logan orders. "Shane, double the perimeter guard. If Costa figures out she’s gone, he’ll come looking."
"On it," Shane grunts, stalking toward the door.
Daniel steers me out of the Chapel before I can speak. We bypass the loft stairs entirely. He shoves open a side door revealing a repurposed supply closet packed tight with server racks. The steady hum of cooling fans washes over my frayed nerves.
"Sit," he commands. He points to a rolling chair parked in front of a massive custom rig featuring triple monitors.
I take the seat. My fingers itch to hit the keys. "You trust me?"
Daniel leans over the desk, bracing one hand on the wood and gripping the back of my chair with the other. He cages me in. He lowers his face inches from mine. I track the harsh line of stubble covering his jaw. He smells like spearmint and cold leather.
"I checked your logs," he says, keeping his voice low. "I saw the patches you wrote and the viruses you quarantined. You’ve been guarding my family better than some of my own brothers."
A tight knot forms in my throat. "I had to keep you alive so the Costas wouldn't win."
"Bullshit," he whispers. He leans closer, letting his nose brush mine. "You care. I saw the sub-routine you wrote to hide Blake’s bakery orders so the IRS wouldn't flag them. You went out of your way to be kind."
Heat floods my cheeks. "I like pastries. Sue me."
He pulls back, a smirk playing on his lips. He digs into the deep pocket of his cargo pants, extracting a bundle of black fabric trailing a tangled wire. He drops it on the desk.
The fabric unrolls to reveal a customized 60% layout mechanical keyboard with blank keycaps and Cherry MX Blue switches. I used this exact model in my cabin before fleeing into the snow.
I stare at the keys, dragging my gaze up to his face. "Where did you get this?"
"I keep spares," he says, lifting one broad shoulder. "I noticed you cramping up on the laptop's membrane board upstairs." You type heavy. You need the tactile feedback."
I blink at the offering. Amid the chaos of my kidnapping and the subsequent interrogation, this man managed to catalog my typing habits. He caught the way I shake my hands out when membrane keys lack resistance.
"You cataloged my hardware preferences?" I ask.
"I catalog everything about you, Ghost." His voice drops an octave. "I watch you chew your lip when you're thinking. I see you favoring your left leg when you walk."
"Skiing accident," I murmur. "Three years ago."
"I know." He reaches out, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear. Calluses scrape along my temple with shocking gentility. "Connect the board. Show me what you can do."
I plug the USB cord into the tower. The familiar click-clack as I test the keys settles the frantic jumping in my chest. He hands me a weapon over a peace offering.
"Okay," I agree, stretching my fingers over the home row. The screen flares to life. "We want to find the Costa compound. I need to bypass their localized jamming by piggybacking off a signal they refuse to block."
"Like what?" Daniel drags a second chair directly next to mine.
"Like their money," I grin. "I’m tracing the automated crypto-payments they send to their guards. The signal has to leave the compound to hit the blockchain. If I catch the handshake, I can triangulate the source."
Daniel watches the screens as I start typing. Lines of code stream down the center monitor. The chaotic Clubhouse fades away, narrowing my world entirely to syntax and logic.
"You're fast," he notes.
"I'm highly motivated."
"Stop."
My fingers freeze over the keys. "What?"
"Line 40," he points to the screen. "You missed a syntax loop. If their firewall pings back, the server traps you."
I squint at the code. My exhaustion glares back at me through a sloppy coding error. "Damn. Good catch."
"We do it together." He reaches across the desk, his forearm brushing mine. He types a correction on his own keyboard, inserting it perfectly into my stream. "I track the packets. You strip the encryption."
We fall into an intimate rhythm. Hacking usually demands absolute solitude, pitting me against the machine.
Daniel turns the process into a duet. He anticipates my moves before I make them.
When I need a port opened, he clears the lane.
When he needs a decoy signal, I spin up a botnet to distract the target.
We merge seamlessly into a single unit.
"Got it," I breathe. I slam the enter key with a satisfying clack.
A map pops up on the third screen. A red dot pulses in the middle of the jagged terrain along the Eastern Cliffs, miles past the town limits.
"That's it," Daniel grates. "The old mining outpost. We assumed the place sat abandoned."
"Far from it." My fingers fly over the keys to overlay the thermal data. "Look at the vent output. They’re running a massive server farm and full living quarters down there."
The realization of the location hits my tired brain.
"Dominic's grandfather referred to the Eastern Cliff as the 'family soul' in his old journals. Dominic and Lucia spent every summer here as children. His grandfather told him a Costa holding the Cliff could never be truly defeated. It’s his sanctuary, Daniel.
Hitting his servers here equates to trespassing on sacred ground. He will absolutely snap."
My finger trembles over the monitor glass, indicating a smaller, cooler cluster of heat signatures. "The cells. Kevin is locked in there."
Daniel captures my hand to stop the tremor. He interlaces his fingers tightly through mine, his massive palm engulfing my grip. "We found him, Kaila. That completes step one."
"Step two requires getting him out," I whisper, staring at the fortress on the screen. "That place looks like a bunker."
"Step two falls strictly under my job description," he replies. "You act as the eyes, and I handle the violence. You point, and I shoot."
He turns his chair to face me fully. The blue light from the monitors casts sharp shadows across the harsh angles of his jaw.
"You did good today," he remarks. "Standing up to Logan. Most people piss themselves."
"I was too busy trying not to vomit."
A low chuckle rumbles deep in his chest. "You fit here, Kaila. You fit perfectly."
"I don't fit anywhere," I argue. I stare at the monitors to avoid the heavy weight of his gaze. "I’m a glitch. I break things."
"Then break things," Daniel murmurs. His hands clamp over my hips, pulling me firmly between his thighs as he sits.
He cages me against the edge of his chair, pressing his solid warmth against my stomach.
My lungs seize. "Break their walls. Break their encryption codes.
Just don't break your promise to stay put. "
"I'm not going anywhere," I breathe out.
He doesn't let go. Daniel leans in, cupping the back of my neck to drag my face down to his.
His thumb presses a heavy brand into my jawline.
His mouth crashes down on mine, stripping away every coherent thought in my brain.
He replaces my logic with absolute chaos.
He tastes like dark coffee and rough tobacco.
I meant to pull away, but my fingers tangle in the thick fabric of his shirt to drag him closer.
Daniel groans into my mouth, releasing a low, primal sound that vibrates straight through my teeth.
His tongue parts my lips, sweeping inside to take complete ownership.
He brands me with a starving desperation.
Every thrust of his tongue, every harsh scrape of his stubble against my chin, seals a brutal claim over my body.
"Mine," he mumbles against my lips, his hot breath washing over my skin. "Every bit of you, Ghost."
My knees finally buckle under the sheer drop in adrenaline.
Daniel catches me effortlessly, scooping me up against his chest. I bury my face into his shoulder, breathing in the scent of his leather cut as he carries me out of the server room.
The steady, hammering rhythm of his chest lulls me under, leaving me entirely at the mercy of the man who just marked me as his own.