Chapter 8 Elias
ELIAS
My boots hit the concrete floor of Peak Wilderness Outfitters with a thud that echoes the pounding in my skull.
Canvas, treated leather, and pine fill the air. The smell is supposed to be comforting—the legitimate face of the Broken Halos, the mask we wear for the town—but right now, it just smells like exposure.
"Lock it down," Chase barks, his voice rough with exhaustion. "I’ll take the front door. Oliver, you’ve got the back alley. No one comes in unless they know the secret knock—or they’re wearing a badge and carrying a warrant that’ll actually hold up in court."
"And if they are?" Oliver asks, racking the slide of his sidearm. The sound is loud and violent.
"Then we buy Elias time," Chase says, turning his dark eyes on me. "How long do you need?"
I look at the mountain of bankers' boxes stacked in the back office. Years of physical manifests. Shipping receipts. The hard copy reality that the digital world can't erase. "All night," I say, my voice sounding like gravel grinding in a mixer. "Maybe more."
Mia stands beside me. She looks like a stiff breeze would knock her over.
She was still drowning in my heavy flannel shirt, the wool smudge-stained and smelling of our recent sex.
Her hair was a chaotic halo around her face, and those sharp intelligent eyes that stripped me bare in the Vault are glazed with fatigue.
"I can help," she says, reaching for the first box. Her hand trembles with a faint vibration.
I catch her wrist. Her pulse hammers against my thumb. One, two, three… Too fast. "No," I say. "You sleep."
"I can't sleep, Elias. My life is in those boxes.
The Feds are going to come back with a federal judge's signature, and if we don't have the proof that the 'mirror' account exists, I'm going to prison for twenty years.
" She tries to pull away, but I hold fast. "I'm the auditor. I know what to look for."
"And I'm the Treasurer," I growl, stepping into her space until all she could see was me. "And you're mine. Which means your problems are my problems. And right now, your problem is that you're about to collapse."
I steer her toward the display floor. We sell high-end camping gear to tourists who want to play mountain man for a weekend. Right in the center of the showroom is a display tent—a six-person dome setup with sub-zero sleeping bags.
"Elias—"
"Get in," I order.
She blinks, looking at the tent, then back at me. "You're serious."
"Deadly." I point a scarred finger at the sleeping bag. "Sleep. If I hear so much as a rustle from that nylon, I’m crawling in there to pin you to that sleeping bag and fuck you into a coma. I’ll stretch your pussy until you’re too exhausted to do anything but dream of me.
We both know I’m done being gentle with what belongs to me. "
Her cheeks flush. The reaction is visceral and immediate. Good. She is still fighting.
"Three hours," she negotiates, her chin tilting up. "Then I switch out with you."
Silent and unmoving, I watch her crawl into the tent, the nylon rustling like a whisper. She curls up on the display bag, looking small and vulnerable, but the steady rise and fall of her chest is the only anchor keeping me grounded.
Since the federal raid on the Chapel, a dark, suffocating panic has been clawing at the edges of my mind—a primal terror of losing her that triggered the same violent flashbacks I’ve fought since the fire.
I grip the doorframe, my knuckles turning white as I force my brain to execute a grounding protocol.
One. Two. Three. Four. I count her breaths. I count the seconds since I last held her.
Only when the numbers stabilized, and her shivering stopped, does the phantom smell of blood fade from my memory. I turn my back on her before I can do something stupid, like crawl in there with her and forget the world burning down around us.
"Three hours," I mutter, the promise as much for my own sanity as hers.
I walk into the back office and shut the door.
The silence in the office is heavy. I sit at the desk, the wood scarred from years of inventory checks and weapon cleanings. I pull the first box toward me.
2019 Q3. Logistics.
I open it. The smell of old paper and dust hits me.
I start counting. People think math is cold.
They think numbers are rigid, unyielding things.
They’re wrong. Numbers are a language. They tell a story.
If you look at a ledger long enough, you can see the ghosts.
You can see where money is desperate, where it is greedy, where it is frightened.
I am looking for the lie.
The digital "mirror" the Costas had used to frame Mia is sophisticated. It copies my keystrokes, duplicates my approvals, and then routes the phantom transactions to shell companies registered in Mia’s name.
To a digital forensic team, it looks like she is the architect.
But physical paper doesn't lie. If a shipment of timber goes out on September 12th, there is a physical bill of lading, a signature, and a weight check at the weigh station on the interstate.
I pulled a file. September 12th. 0900 hours. I cross-reference it with the digital log I pulled from the cloud before we left the Vault.
Digital: 10,000 units. Destination: Eastern Cliffs. Physical: 10,000 units. Destination: Pine Valley Construction.
There it is. The divergence.
But it isn't enough. One error is a mistake. I need a pattern of deceit so dense that even a Fed with a hard-on for a conviction can't punch a hole in it. I work. My brain shifts into that familiar, cold gear. The place where emotions die and only logic survives. I become a machine. A processor.
Scan. Verify. Reject. Keep.
Hour three arrives. The door creaks open. I don't look up. I know the tread of those boots.
"Coffee," Chase says, setting a steaming mug on the desk. It smells like the Cozy Cup—Christie must have run a thermal carafe over to the boys out front.
"Thanks."
"How's it looking?"
I lean back, rubbing a hand over my face. The stubble on my jaw scrapes against my palm. "It's bad, Chase. They've been inside for eight months. Maybe longer. The 'mirror' didn't just copy us; it anticipated us. They knew our shipping routes before we did."
Chase pulls up a chair, spinning it backward to straddle it. "The mole?"
"The mole is an algorithm, not a person," I say, tapping the paper. "A predictive model. It's smart, but it's lazy."
"Lazy?"
"It didn't account for the manual overrides." I hold up a crinkled, coffee-stained receipt. "October. The blizzard. The power went down at the warehouse. We switched to manual logs for three days. The digital system was offline."
Chase’s eyes narrow. "But the mirror kept recording data?"
"Exactly," I say, a grim smile touching my lips.
"The mirror kept logging transactions as if business was usual.
But the physical records show zero movement.
The trucks were snowed in. We have three days where the digital ghost was moving millions of dollars of inventory that was physically sitting under six feet of snow. "
"That proves the hack," Chase says.
"It proves the data is corrupted," I correct. "But it doesn't clear Mia. Not entirely. The Feds will say she rigged the manual logs later to cover her tracks."
"So what do we do?"
I look at the pile of documents. The real documents.
The problem is, the Broken Halos aren't saints.
We run guns. We move things that aren't timber.
And those records—the ones I keep separate, the ones I encrypt—are tangled up in the same timeline.
If I hand these boxes to the FBI, I prove Mia is innocent of fraud, but I also prove the club is guilty of trafficking.
The choice is binary: her freedom or the Club’s survival.
"I need to clean it," I say quietly.
Chase goes still. "Elias. You know the rule. We don't touch the sacred books. If you alter the hard copies, you break the chain of custody. If you get caught..."
"I won't get caught."
"If you do, you go down for obstruction. Tampering with evidence. You take her place in that cell."
I look at the door. Through the glass, I can see the dark shape of the tent where Mia is sleeping. I counted her breaths in my mind, even though I can't hear them. I know the rhythm. In for four. Hold for two. Out for four.
"She's mine, Chase." The statement stands as a fact, immutable as gravity.
Chase stares at me for a long time. Then he stands up and claps a hand on my shoulder. "Burn it down, brother."
He walks out.
Pulling the lighter from my pocket, I stare at the flame. Burning the whole office isn't the goal. I'm not an arsonist; I'm an auditor. I need surgical focus. Snatching the pages that implicated the club—the gun runs, the off-book cash drops from the MC underground—I isolate them.
Then I forge them.
Reaching for a fresh ledger from the stack, I pick up my pen—the cheap plastic one, because Mia still has my good one.
Grinding my teeth, I start writing. It takes three grueling hours to recreate eight months of financial history.
It is 0400 when the final entry hits the page, the ink barely dry on the masterpiece that will trade the club’s secrets for her life.
I don't change the numbers that matter for Mia.
I keep the discrepancies. I keep the blizzard anomaly.
But I replace the illegal shipments with legitimate ones.
I turn guns into generators. I turned cash drops into charitable donations for the Pine Valley orphan fund.
I create a perfect lie that wraps around the truth of Mia's innocence like armor.
My hand cramps. My eyes burn. The sun begins to bleed through the blinds, turning the dust motes into gold. I don't stop. To save her, I have to destroy the Treasurer. I have to become a criminal. I have to cook the books so hard they char. And I don't regret a single stroke of the pen.
"Elias?"
The voice is soft and sleep-rough. I stop writing. The pen hovers over the final total.