Knox (The Outsiders MC #3)

Chapter 1

Knox

Chicago tastes of road salt and expensive loss.

Hood up, head down, I ghost through commuters and drunk office workers. No one notices the battered messenger bag, the plain black clothes. They never do, not with billboards to look at.

Whitcomb's name is on half of them. Harold Whitcomb: Building a Better Chicago. He likes his name in lights. Most sociopaths do.

The billboard glares down like a threat dressed as a promise.

His high-rise sits beneath it. Glass, steel, ego.

Stabbing the gray sky. He doesn't live there.

That's the first tell. Men with his money don't sleep where they do business.

Their actual houses hide behind gates and fake lakes up north.

Neighbors pretending not to notice the blood on the driveway.

The real operation lives three blocks away, in a squat building that looks forgotten on purpose.

The kind of place that would disappear if you stopped believing in it.

Whitcomb leases an unmarked suite there under a dead cousin's name.

In his encrypted emails, he calls it a "disaster continuity node. "

Night air slices my cheeks. Wind tunnels between the buildings, carrying with it the distant noise of honking cars, sirens, and somebody yelling at nobody. I pass under a tired streetlight and adjust the strap. Inside is everything I need to break Whitcomb open without him ever seeing my face.

The lobby's empty except for a security guard mesmerized by his phone with his chair tipped back and his feet on the desk. The only camera angles toward a hallway so scuffed it hasn't seen a mop since the Bulls mattered.

Perfect blind spot.

The lock on the suite door is digital. New keypad. Gleaming card reader. Little red light blinking, convinced it's fit for purpose.

Ten seconds to make it stupid. The EMP coin warms between my fingers. Six-inch kill radius, just enough to lobotomize a lock. A flicker. A soft click. As if it had always been waiting, the door opens.

Small and sterile, the suite has the feel of a catalog order no one bothered to argue with. The only thing with a pulse is the custom server rack under the desk, humming, convinced it's the most important thing in the room.

Now that is beautiful.

One knee hits the floor. I pop open the side panel and slide in the clone drive. Lines of code pour across my laptop screen; each line is a vein in a body Whitcomb thinks no one can dissect.

"Come on," I murmur. Habit more than hope.

The server plays nice. Scripts I wrote in an airport terminal start their dance, pulling everything: clean money, dirty money, emails, backups he thought buried deep.

Most of it's local. One new name isn't.

A Mississippi-based "real estate revitalization fund," incorporated six months ago, is already sucking down Whitcomb's slush accounts for "affordable housing builds" that exist only as glossy renderings. On paper, it has a board. One signature matters.

Silent partner: Donovan Castiel. Never heard of him. Means he's either clean or new. Either way, a problem.

The name gets flagged and filed into a separate folder. Malachi will want eyes on this. So will Jenna's reporter friend at the state paper who likes exposing snakes in suits.

After six minutes and change, Whitcomb's financial life is zipped and sitting in my bag.

On my way out, I leave a present in his system. An admin alert, innocuous as a smoke detector. Active intrusion detected. Please review access logs.

Paranoia will do the rest. I don't have to lift another finger.

The wind hits harder outside. The glass tower disappears behind uglier buildings as I cut down an alley that reeks of stale beer and piss. By the time I reach the hotel, my fingers are numb inside my gloves.

The elevator shudders upward, walls lined in fake brass and real fingerprints. Bleach, mold, and old fryer grease. My room's on sixteen. I unlock it with my left hand, right hand ready at my side.

No overhead lights.

The city throws enough neon and sodium glow through the windows to paint the room in bruised blue and dirty gold. I drop the bag on the desk. Burner comes out. Upload starts to a secure drop.

The progress bar crawls from zero to one percent as if it resents being watched.

My reflection in the glass is a vague shape. Hood up. Jaw tight. Eyes that'd rather be anywhere but here.

Whitcomb. Donovan Castiel and his shiny new pipeline to Mississippi. Another predator circling my state, convinced he's untouchable. New partner. New playground. Same disease.

The upload hits one hundred percent, and the laptop lets out a soft chime. Local encryption done. The secure drop will verify on the other end.

I don't socialize mid-operation. I don't bring strangers into my orbit when my name is still warm on someone else's servers. Rules keep things clean. Clean keeps people alive.

The job is done, and the cage is open.

Stillness feels wrong after an operation. It carries the weight of the hit that always follows. I roll my neck until it cracks, then push away from the desk.

Adrenaline is a live wire under my skin, and I need movement to burn it out before it burns me. Since the hotel bar is open late, that's where I head. It sits off to the left, pretending to be upscale with dim overheads. Polished wood still showing its dents. Lighting the color of old pennies.

The stool at the far end has the best sightline: entrance, bathroom corridor, emergency exit. Taking it all in is a habit. The mirror behind the bar gives me a second angle on everything.

Which is how I see her.

She's parked at the opposite end, angled half away from the room but not the door. A martini glass sits untouched in front of her, the liquid throwing Ghostbuster green from a backlit bottle.

She's dressed to disappear. Dark jeans, black boots, a gray sweater too soft for this place.

But she doesn't disappear. Not to me.

Hair a little too wild for the forgettable outfit. Long, dark, wavy, pulled over one shoulder, away from her neck. Someone taught her to scan doors and exits. She never unlearned the lesson.

Her scan isn't fear. She's already decided what to do if the room turns.

It’s the same predatory stillness I carry in the field, wrapped in different skin.

The bartender wanders over, dragging a rag that's seen better decades. He sets a short glass in front of me. Amber. Neat.

Fine. Let him play.

I'm not here for the drink. My brain doesn't know how to power down without a target. Right now, she sits ten yards away making the whole room look cheap by comparison.

She shifts on the stool, sweater riding up to flash skin at her waist. Heat kicks under my ribs.

When my eyes lift, she feels it.

She turns her head, not all the way. One eye catches mine in the mirror. Her gaze is tired and a little wild at the edges. Cornered. Deciding whether to bite or bolt.

My hand stiffens on the glass.

Then a pack of suits stumbles in, laughing too loudly, reeking of cologne and entitlement. They crowd the space between us, blocking half my sightline with their overeager shoulders and bad jokes.

I don't like losing angles.

One stool down. Then another. Until the view clears and I'm closer. The distance down to a few empty seats and a stretch of polished wood.

Close enough to feel the tension rolling off her.

Her hand closes on the stem of the martini glass. It shakes once and a bead of condensation slides over her knuckles. She doesn't lift the drink.

The rye goes down rough.

She glances my way. A slide of eyes, up and down, cataloging. If I were anyone else, I might believe she was indifferent.

But her shoulders lock mid-exhale when our gazes catch. The air between us goes tight. I hold it a second longer than necessary.

My phone buzzes. The screen reads: Upload complete. Secure. I pocket it.

The job is over.

"What are you drinking?"

She looks at the glass as if it appeared while she wasn't watching, then at me. Up close, her eyes are a problem. Hazel, but not the soft kind. Layered, almost amber near the pupil, darker at the edges. Tired, but still burning.

"Something they can't screw up," she says.

Her voice is low, rough. Hasn't been used in a while, or used too much on people who didn't listen.

I glance at the untouched martini. "How's that working out for you?"

A corner of her mouth flicks upward. Small, crooked, and gone too fast, but it hits like a round I didn't hear coming.

"I wasn't planning on finishing it. Needed somewhere to sit."

The way she says it makes it sound finite. This place is a means.

"You picked the one seat that watches the door and the mirror, but you haven't touched your drink."

Her grip locks on the stem. "You noticed."

"I notice a lot." I look her over, unhurried, then find her eyes.

She studies me, chin tilted. I let her see the plain black shirt, the scuffed boots, the scars across my knuckles, how I've angled my body to watch the room without appearing to watch the room.

"You always sit where you can see everything?" she asks.

"Yeah." Another sip of rye. "Who doesn't?"

"Those who trust the world," she says.

Nobody's born watching exits that way. Someone taught her what happened if she didn't.

"Do you?"

She laughs once, a short sound with no humor in it. "No."

"Didn't think so." I don't smile, but the muscles across my shoulders drop a fraction. "You've been looking at that door as if you expect it to bite you."

Her attention snaps to the entrance. "Maybe I do."

"Whoever you're waiting on? They're not worth that kind of vigilance."

She swallows. "You don't know that."

"I know fear when I see it," I say. "And I know it's not the only thing there."

"What else?"

"Wanting," I say. "You're tired of being hunted and really fucking tired of being alone."

Her focus settles on my hand, lingers on the faded scars. She traces their shapes, imagining the stories without asking for them.

"What's your name?" she asks.

"Knox."