Chapter 4
AXLE
I stared at the closed door longer than I should’ve. My angel was still in there—battered, bruised, and trying way too fucking hard to be calm about it. Which only confirmed what my instincts were already screaming.
She wasn’t running from something small. No, she was running from hell.
And now, I’d stepped into the fire with her too. But despite having just met her, I didn’t regret it.
The reception area in the front of the clinic was silent.
Dim morning light filtered in through the blinds, dust catching in the sunbeams. The room smelled faintly like antiseptic and motor oil.
Cage had set up his clinic like any typical doctor’s office, with two exam rooms, except there was also an operating room.
The building was across a small parking lot, close to the small garage.
Oil and blood. Fitting combination for our lives.
Her duffel was where I left it, right by a padded chair. I crouched, and with tension buzzing just under my skin, I unzipped it slowly. The metal teeth rasped, loud in the quiet.
I expected maybe a weapon. A burner phone. Some kind of ID. Instead?
And the cash I’d gotten a glimpse of.
Stacks of it.
Tight bricks banded with blue straps, all fresh and smug. I whistled low under my breath and slid a bundle free. Hundreds. The ink was crisp, edges sharp. I thumbed one band and held it to the light because I’d had people try to pass me the kind of funny money that stains your fingers.
Nope. This shit was real. Probably around ten grand. No wonder she’d been so twitchy when I wouldn’t give it back.
Beneath the money was something small and flat, wrapped in plain brown paper with the clean corners of a package nobody wanted to be special.
I peeled it open, expecting some documents, but inside was a sleek, matte-black solid-state drive, heavy in my palm.
It was the size of a cigarette pack with a tamper seal snapped across its face but no markings.
It wasn’t your average drive. This was military grade. Industrial.
“What the hell are you carrying, angel?” I murmured, turning the drive over, looking for anything—names, tags, stickers. But there was nothing.
Digging through the rest of the duffel, I didn’t find anything personal.
No phone. No wallet. Not even a lip balm someone like her might’ve lost at the bottom.
She’d come in anonymous and planned to leave the same way.
Except she hadn’t left. She’d burst into my life on two wheels, crashed, and passed out in my arms while the whole damn world watched.
She was ghosting on purpose.
And doing a pretty damn good job of it since I had no idea who the fuck she was or what she was running from.
But whatever this was—whoever she was—none of it screamed criminal.
She wasn’t some drug mule or con artist. She was scared and on the run.
And considering that she’d been facing down with me—a big, tatted guy in leather whose very presence screamed danger—she stood her ground with more guts than most men I knew.
I re-wrapped the drive and tucked it into the pocket of my cut, then grabbed the bag and headed to the clubhouse. My boots crunched on the gravel as I stalked out the front door and across the lot toward the clubhouse and Jax’s office.
Entering through a side door, I went down the hall and knocked once before pushing into his office.
It sat under the eaves, a wide room with an industrial fan and too many monitors throwing ghost-light across his face.
He was hunched over one of them in a backward cap and a hoodie, glasses sliding down his nose while his fingers sprinted over the keys like they had their own engine rev limiter.
Edge had a hip against the side of the table with his arms folded, road dust still on his boots, and Nitro leaned in the doorway, expression carved out of granite.
I didn’t bother with hello.
“Drive. Need you to tell me what this is,” I said, tossing the package to Jax.
He caught it one-handed and raised a brow. “Let me guess. Came from the mystery woman who kamikazed your track?”
With a nod, I dropped onto the chair across from him.
Nitro grunted. “Saw the replay. Thought you were gonna rip that man’s head off the second he reached for her.”
“Man had no sense of self-preservation,” I muttered.
Jax flipped the drive in his hands, studying it closely. “Definitely not standard.”
“It’s not. It was buried under a mountain of cash in her duffel. Nothing to identify her, or the drive, though.”
Edge gave a low whistle as Jax spun in his chair to a separate rig: air-gapped, triple-cased, with more stickers than a NASCAR quarter panel—NO WAN, EYES ONLY.
He popped the tamper seal with a plastic pick, plugged the drive into a hardware adapter, then into a bay on the side of the unit that looked like it used to belong to a lab.
“Let’s see what Cinderella left at the ball. ”
He tapped the screen. “Air-gapped encryption. Hardware enforced. And not the cheap kind some start-up CTO brags about on social media. We’re talking multifactor key escrow with geo binding and a kill switch that will brick the drive if I sneeze wrong.
I couldn’t even peek at the contents without tripping three warning flags.
If this is somebody’s Christmas list, it’s got a top secret code name and a clearance badge. ”
Edge’s mouth curved. “Makes sense. Elves are shifty little fuckers.”
Jax ignored him. “Whoever gave this to your girl either trusts her a lot, or expects she’s going to get arrested and wants plausible deniability when the feds start pulling threads.
Right now, I can see the device manufacturer, firmware build, checksum, and the fact that the last time this drive was plugged into anything was…
sixteen hours ago. The rest of it’s a fucking vault.
I can try a couple of nondestructive handshakes, but if this thing has an on-chip tamper counter, I’m not risking it without prep. ”
“What’s inside?” Nitro asked.
Jax shot him a look. “If I knew, I would’ve started with that instead of the lap around the track. Give me a few minutes, and I’ll see if there’s anything else I can learn without destroying the information.”
While he worked, I grabbed the duffel from the corner of his office and carried it upstairs. After I tossed the bag in a small safe in my closet, I took a second to breathe.
She’d be safest here.
I didn’t know her. Not even her fucking name. But the idea of my angel being anywhere but under my roof made something primal and ugly crawl through me.
When I returned to Jax’s office, Edge had moved off the desk and was leaning against the far wall, arms crossed and eyes sharp. He lifted a brow. “You look like someone pissed in your fuel tank.”
I didn’t answer.
Jax didn’t look up as he spoke. “Traced the origin code. It belongs to Helix Core Systems.”
Edge pushed off the wall. “Helix? As in the government’s go-to data vault?”
“Yeah,” Jax said, tapping keys. “They do secure cloud infrastructure for DHS, FBI, and even military intelligence branches. This isn’t a tax return she stumbled across. Whatever’s on this thing? It’s not meant to see daylight.”
I clenched my jaw. “And she was carrying it around like it was nothing.”
Jax leaned back and whistled low. “What the hell is she doing with shit like that?”
I didn’t have an answer. Just the growing certainty that she hadn’t stolen it. Someone gave it to her. Or she intercepted it. Either way, she was now the target of whoever wanted it buried.
“She knew,” Nitro said. “She’s not stupid. It had to be a handoff, and she obviously didn’t count on it going to shit.”
“Maybe she didn’t know what she was delivering, and she’s being used as bait,” Jax suggested.
“Could be both or a combination of them,” Edge offered mildly, his knife flipping open and shut in his fingers without him looking at it. “Pretty girl with a hot potato and someone dangerous on her heels. That’s a recipe for a man to stop thinking straight.”
Edge had the looks of a damn movie star, but his eyes hinted that he was a bit psycho. “Since when did you start giving lectures about thinking straight?”
“Since this afternoon after you snarled at a track marshal for breathing near her,” he shot back, but his smile didn’t have any bite. “Relax. I trust your instincts. Kane will too. If you think she’s clean?—”
I cut him off, my voice certain. “My gut says she’s scared, stubborn, and innocent enough to make me crazy. She’s carrying something somebody wants very badly.”
Jax’s chair squeaked as he pushed back and swiveled.
“This Helix stamp isn’t a joke, Axle. It means we’re already in the blast radius.
Whoever lost this drive is going to move heaven and earth to get it back, and they won’t give a shit who they have to trample.
If I’m right, there’s federal awareness here, even if it’s not formal yet.
Might be a rogue operator. Or a contractor.
Could be someone with a badge and an ego. But they’ll have toys.”
Edge gave me a long, thoughtful look. “If someone’s chasing her, and she crashed on our track…there’s eyes on this shit show now.”
“Too late to sweep it,” Nitro muttered.
Jax nodded. “Someone was already watching. The chatter on local comms jumped during the crash. Spike in scanner traffic. We have maybe twelve hours before some asshat from the feds comes sniffing.”
Edge scratched the corner of his jaw. “Kane’s not going to like guests at the compound when they come with heat.”
“I’m not taking her to a safe house,” I said before any of them could suggest it. “Don’t even start.”
“So you have considered a safe house,” Edge said, dry as the desert.
“I considered it for half a second and threw the thought in the trash,” I snapped.
“She stays at the clubhouse. We built this place to hold under pressure. We have men twenty-four seven, cameras, steel, and the kind of lock work that makes a locksmith sweat. If someone wants her, they’ll have to come through us. ”
Jax lifted his brows. “Through you.”
I didn’t bother to deny it.
“She stays here,” I repeated, voice like steel.
Edge nodded. “She can sta?—”
“In my room. With me,” I interrupted.
He blinked. “Wasn’t suggesting anything else.”
Nitro’s lips curved. “She in your bed already?”
I gave him a flat stare. “She will be. But not for that.”
Edge and Nitro traded a look like men who had just caught a scent of gasoline. Edge’s grin went slow and feral. “Didn’t say it was. Just saying…your voice got real possessive real fast.”
“Fuck off,” I muttered.
Nitro’s mouth twitched. “He didn’t say he disapproved.”
Before I could respond, Jax snapped, “Could we get back to business?” He tapped the Helix drive back into its case and sealed it with a fresh strip from a roll in his desk.
“I’m going to build it a sandbox with training wheels.
Give me a day. Maybe two. I’ll pull at metadata from the edges, see if anyone’s pinged it for location or sent heartbeat checks.
If there’s a signal, I’ll isolate it. If there’s a map, I’ll draw it. ”
“Good,” I said. “And if you get even a whiff of someone sniffing our way, you tell me first.”
“We’ll go from there, but I’ll be honest, brother. While this shit is above my level, it’ll go a lot faster if I had some help.”
Edge cocked his head. “Got someone in mind?”
“Deviant,” Jax replied without hesitation.
Deviant was another tech genius who belonged to an MC in Tennessee we had very close ties with.
The Iron Rogues’ road captain, Storm, had been a friend of Kane’s since childhood.
And one of their enforcers, Racer, helped manage Kane’s tracks and races in that state.
He was a brilliant driver, one-of-a-fucking kind, and he also happened to be my brother-in-law.
We’d traded help many times and trusted them almost as much as we did each other.
“I’ll run it by the prez,” Edge conceded. “And let him know we have a situation bigger than a stray with pretty eyes. He’ll want to look her in the face before he cosigns your plan.”
“Not tonight,” I said. “She needs to rest.”
Nitro shoved off the wall. “And you need to babysit.”
“I need to make sure she’s safe,” I snapped, stepping out before I could decide to put a hole in anyone who didn’t agree.
The hallway outside Jax’s office was dim, lined with framed photos of championship nights and charity runs and an old panorama of Kane and Edge standing on either side of their father in front of a junkyard Chevy that won trophies it had no right to win.
The clubhouse was filled with its usual nighttime sounds—laughter in the common room, a pool ball cracking off a break, a low run of bass from somebody’s speaker—but underneath was a thick thread of alert I only felt when things were turning.
The Redline Kings was more than a motorcycle club, it was a brotherhood.
We were family—by choice, not by blood. Our bond was forged with loyalty and trust. To the club, and to each other.
We stood together against our enemies. A threat to one brother meant they were facing the wrath of the whole club.
So it wasn’t surprising that tension was already in the air, and the boys felt the storm coming.
My angel would have a solid wall of protection from the MC, but most importantly, I wouldn’t let anyone touch her. And although she didn’t know it yet, I was pretty fucking certain I wouldn’t be letting her go.
The walk back to the clinic was fast. I didn’t like leaving her alone, even if Cage had secured the building.