Chapter 21
Jasper
My mood begins to shift the second I step out of our suite.
Tessa is by far the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
Once she feels safe, she’s playful and fun-loving.
The perfect counterbalance to my more serious nature.
Between the two of us, we could raise a child or two.
I’ve already set my sights on that goal.
I just need to wait for her to catch up with me.
I head downstairs, noting that it’s cooler in the hallway.
It’s a lot quieter too. Unfortunately, the silence doesn’t last. The moment I reach the door, I feel the clubhouse noises drifting up from below.
Music filters up from the bar. I’ve never liked music first thing in the morning, but the club girls do.
It doesn’t matter because once I get to our meeting room and close the door, I won’t be able to hear it anyway.
As I step off the last stair and look around, the scent of coffee and bacon is so strong it makes my stomach growl.
My body still hums from what just happened upstairs.
Sex with the woman I’m hoping to make my old lady was fuckin’ amazing.
She’s beautiful in her own way, all long hair and delicate features.
I like every fuckin’ thing about her, right down to the way her taste still lingers on my tongue.
The way she looked at me when I left convinced me this is the real thing.
And for some godforsaken reason, I gave her the first Harley shirt my old man ever bought for me.
It’s one of my most prized keepsakes, from back when I was a skinny runt.
I’ve taken really good care of it, so it looks almost new.
It fit her though. Seeing it hugging her curves was satisfying in a way I can’t explain.
Two of the brothers nod as I pass through the main room.
Garret’s got a cigarette tucked behind his ear, half-distracted playing darts.
His breakfast is growing cold on a nearby table.
Onyx’s big body is parked at a table in the back.
He’s picking at his breakfast with that half-feral look he gets when he’s hungover.
Neither of them says a word, but I catch the quick glance they trade.
They know where I’ve been. Neither’s dumb enough to make a joke about me moving Tessa into my suite.
I walk into our meeting room and Striker and two other guys I don’t recognize are standing around the drone, which is sitting on a long fold-up table. They’ve got a dozen or so tools laid out and are in the process of taking it apart.
My old man is sitting at the end of the table with a phone in one hand, and a cup of coffee in the other. He nods when he sees me, and I slide in across from him. “You know our women folk are goin’ out today, right?” he asks me.
“Yeah, I already texted the prospects that I want a full escort on them every step of the way.”
Striker hears my voice and pops his head up. “Hey Jasper, we’re trying to unfuck this drone enough to get to the SIM card. It would have been helpful if you’d shot it with something less than a .45-caliber weapon.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job, brother.”
“If you want our help, you should take our advice,” one of the men poking around the drone’s innards says.
I rise to my feet and stare him down. “Are you speaking for everyone or just yourself today?”
Both of the techs murmur, “Not me.”
Striker just shrugs his shoulders. “They’re just telling it like it is.”
“I didn’t ask for their opinion, though, did I? Who are they, anyway? And when did we let strangers into our office?”
“Sounds like someone got out of bed the wrong side today,” Striker mutters. “Donnie and Mitch have been vouched for, and your old man okayed it.”
I run my hand through my hair as I watch the tech gremlins work. Dunno why I’m being so grouchy today considering I was in such a good mood. Maybe it’s because I’d prefer to be in bed with Tessa rather than dealing with the reality of our life as outlaw bikers.
I can’t resist getting the last word in though, “That drone might have had weapons on board. My main concern was keeping me and my woman safe.”
My old man watches me for a second, then sets his phone down. “You sleep last night?”
“Yeah, I did. We got a shower and hit the sack right after you and Ma left last night.”
“Did Tessa get settled in?”
“Yeah, she got settled right into my bed where she belongs.”
He knows that means I’m keepin’ her. I see the flicker in his eyes. It’s something akin to approval. “Queenie likes her.”
“Ma should like her. Tessa’s carrying our family’s first grandchild.”
He takes a drink of his coffee and leans back in his chair.
I glance back at the IT guys. Striker’s older, ex-military like me and he joined Sons of Rage after he left the Army. Donnie and Mitch look out of place but seeing them work together tells me that this probably won’t be their last job for us. They seem to know what they’re doing.
Mitch gives me a nod. “You really emptied a .45-caliber handgun into this thing?”
“Yeah, of course I did. The damn thing was stalking me and my woman late at night. I wanted it to stop, and the only weapon I had was my trusty fuckin’ .45.”
“Oh, that makes more sense,” Donnie says, shoving his glasses up onto his nose.
“I’m pretty sure the drone didn’t transmit anything in real time, or else we’d have had the Hyenas all over us last night, so I figured it’s running onboard storage,” I say.
They continue to work. Striker flips the drone over and starts checking the casing for screws. Mitch opens his laptop, boots up into something that looks more black ops than Geek Squad.
Donnie glances up. “Striker was telling us about how those guys ran you off the road a while back? Why do the Hyenas have a hard-on for harassing you in particular?”
“Probably because I’m the only one who might be able to take their club down before it gets into full swing.”
Striker nods without lifting his eyes. “Recon before escalation. That’s standard op.”
“Except these assholes aren’t standard. They’ve got wild edges but smart hands underneath. Let’s not underestimate them.”
Striker starts prying the shell open, careful not to damage the circuits underneath. “I never do, brother.”
Sitting back down with my old man, I want to be eyes-on for whatever they pull out of this fuckin’ thing.
Mitch hooks into the drone’s mainboard with a micro connector. The other end runs into a black box that feeds into his laptop. I watch lines of code scroll as he taps out commands with quick, rhythmic strokes.
“We’re in,” Mitch says after a few minutes. “The drone ran local storage with no wireless offload. Good news for us.”
“Bad news for the Hyenas,” I mutter under my breath.
Striker pulls out a heat tool and starts warming the adhesive around the flash chip.
“Once we have the SIM card free, I’ll dump the data into an isolated environment.
There will be no chance of triggering a fail-safe or trace.
You’ll get raw video, uncompressed. Depending on their setup, we might even pull GPS tags. ”
Mitch types another command and leans back. “Firmware’s basic. Nothing military. But it’s custom-loaded. Hyenas paid someone to flash this thing with a stripped-down OS. Makes the boot time faster, and it doesn’t leave a log trail.”
I nod, filing that handy bit of information away.
The Hyenas prefer to jump in, do damage, and then make their escape.
It’s the most primitive kind of warfare imaginable.
But this proves they’ve got someone with brains on their team.
Either someone in their ranks is smarter than they show, or they’ve partnered up with outside help.
“Do you have a timeline on how long this is gonna take?”
“Ten to pull the SIM card. Maybe another twenty to scrape the memory and decompress the files.”
“I’m gonna wait and see what you pull from it.”
They get back to work without another word.
I stay close, watching the shell of the drone come apart piece by piece.
The frame makes a grating sound as Striker cracks it open, exposing the guts.
Wires, chips, circuits, soldered traces.
I don’t need to know the names of every component to understand one thing.
This little machine saw more than it should have, and I’m going to find out exactly what.
Striker finally digs the SIM card out and puts it into a reader the size of a cell phone, and clicks it into place. Mitch keys in a series of commands, eyes glued to the screen. The software running on his laptop isn’t flashy. Just a grid of file paths and blocks of code blinking in soft green.
“The SIM card was formatted in four partitions,” Mitch explains. “There’s a primary video cache, a backup log, a metadata map, and something encrypted. Probably corrupt. I’ll flag that last one for later.”
“Start with the video cache,” I tell him.
He doesn’t nod, but his fingers fly across the keyboard.
The first video boots fast. A window pops open with a timestamp in the top corner.
There is no sound, just clean, steady footage.
It takes me a second to realize that it’s Tessa’s street.
The drone floats over it smooth, locked in hover mode.
The image is crisp enough that I can see the shine off the chrome on my bike.
Then the frame shifts. A slow pan down the driveway.
The drone was watching us before the fire—maybe even long enough to track movements. My gut tightens.
“That’s minutes before the bike lit up,” I tell them.
“Matches the timestamps,” Mitch replies. “Camera auto-adjusted exposure. They were trying to record in varying light. That’s not casual fly-by shit.”
I already knew that. Still doesn’t make it easier to watch. Two men jump out of the hedges, pour motor oil all over my bike, light it up and disappear, barely looking up at the drone. My bike burns everywhere the oil touches. The drone caught all of it in high definition.