Chapter 11
CIPHER
When Bex and I walked into the Black Castle interview suite to meet Nina, it was set up exactly as I’d specified in the instructions I’d sent my assistant the night before.
The overhead fluorescents had been replaced with warmer wall lighting.
Nina’s chair was angled so she could see the door without sitting directly in front of it, and the visible camera was shifted far enough to one side that it no longer stared at her from across the room.
Raines would watch through a secured feed from the adjoining observation room, so Nina wouldn’t have to sit between two large men while wondering whether anyone would let her leave.
Bex stopped inside the doorway and took in every adjustment. “I like the changes.”
“You said frightened people talk more easily when they don’t feel trapped.”
Her lips curved as she glanced up at me. “You listened.”
“Of course.” I brushed my thumb along her side, enjoying the warmth that entered her expression before footsteps approached in the corridor. “I’ll start the interview, but if she starts shutting down, take over.”
I knew she’d be able to calm Nina if she started to fall apart because it came naturally to her.
Bex nodded, her face shifting into the focused woman who had kept Nina grounded during a whispered emergency call. One of Black Castle’s female protection specialists escorted Nina into the suite a few minutes later, waited until she was settled, then withdrew, gently closing the door behind her.
The bruising along Nina’s jaw had begun fading from dark purple to sickly yellow, but she still held one shoulder carefully.
Her breathing eased when Bex sat nearest to her, her body angled rather than squared off, while I took the chair farther away and kept my hands visible instead of looming against the wall, as I usually did during interviews.
Nina gave Bex a faint smile that carried gratitude and exhaustion in equal measure.
“How are you feeling?” Bex asked softly.
“Better than I look.” Nina tried to laugh, but the sound thinned before it fully formed. “I’m sleeping at least. Not well, but some.”
“That’s still something. We have a few more questions, but if you need to stop, we can end whenever you need to.”
Nina nodded, glancing once toward the camera before returning to Bex.
She knew Raines was watching and had agreed to the recording, but Bex’s presence kept the equipment from becoming the center of her attention.
I waited until her hands loosened around the bottle of water Bex gave her before asking the question that had been sitting beneath every timeline we had reconstructed.
“Think about the week before Jeff showed up.” I kept my tone as close to gentle as I knew how to. “Any unexpected visitors, calls, deliveries, or vehicles near the house? Something that seemed strange but not threatening enough to report?”
Nina’s brows pulled together while she searched her mind. She shook her head first, then stopped with the movement barely begun and stared down at her hands. “There was a man. Two days before Jeff.”
Bex remained still, giving Nina space to reach the memory without filling the silence for her. I watched the tension return to Nina’s shoulders and cataloged the way her thumb began worrying at the edge of the water-bottle label. “What did he want?”
“He said he was looking for someone who used to live there. Something about a civil matter.” Nina swallowed and lifted her gaze toward me. “I didn’t open the door. I spoke through the doorbell camera and told him he had the wrong house.”
“What happened next?”
“He asked if I was sure. I told him I was and he said, ‘Thank you, Nina.’” Confusion deepened the faint lines between her brows. “There was no record of my real name attached to the house. I used a proxy to sign the lease. But he’d sort of mumbled it, so I thought maybe I misheard him.”
Bex leaned forward slightly, her expression remaining gentle even as her attention sharpened. “Did he leave after that?”
“Not right away.” Nina’s fingers tightened around the bottle.
“He stood near the walkway and took a picture of the front of the house. Then he walked toward the curb, photographed my car, and got into a dark SUV. I figured he wanted to double-check that he hadn’t gotten the house wrong.
The car isn’t in my name, either, so I didn’t think too much about it. ”
My entire body went still as the pieces shifted into a shape I recognized. “You still have the doorbell recording?”
“Yes. The account keeps clips for a couple of weeks.” Nina looked uncertainly toward the camera. “I haven’t opened the app since the attack.”
“I can retrieve it from the provider if you authorize access.” I set a clean Black Castle tablet on the low table rather than reaching for her personal phone. “The original stays preserved in your account, but I’ll make a copy for the sheriff.”
“Okay.” She gave me the email attached to the account, entered the temporary verification code herself, and pushed the tablet back toward me. “Whatever helps you find the people who did this.”
The cloud archive still contained the motion clip from the afternoon the man had shown up.
I opened it without playing the audio at full volume, then mirrored the image to a small wall display.
A man in a tan jacket and baseball cap stood several feet back from the door, his face angled so the camera captured the lower half while he spoke into the intercom.
The footage confirmed everything Nina remembered.
My muscles tensed when he crossed the lawn, and the camera’s wider field caught him returning to a dark full-size SUV and typing something into his phone before pulling away.
I froze the image as the vehicle turned at the curb, and Bex gasped. “That’s the same SUV that was watching us.”
Her gaze had moved from the screen to my face, reading the answer before I gave it. “Yeah.”
Nina’s breath caught, and Bex immediately turned back toward her.
“You couldn’t have known that man mattered,” she reassured, her voice calm but firm when guilt started entering Nina’s expression. “He didn’t threaten you or say anything that sounded dangerous. He gave you a story that was meant to feel ordinary enough to dismiss.”
“I should’ve told someone.”
“You had no reason to,” Bex reminded her. “Most people wouldn’t report a stranger asking about a former tenant, especially after he left without trying to get inside.”
She was right, but the visit had never been harmless. He’d gone there already possessing the protected address and her first name. He’d been there to verify that the correct woman lived inside, document her vehicle, and report back.
I replayed the visitor typing into his phone before the SUV moved out of frame.
Nina’s eyes filled, but Bex reached for her hand before fear could pull her backward into the attack.
She guided Nina through several slow breaths while I saved a forensic copy of the clip and preserved the account metadata.
Once Nina calmed, she remained with Bex for another fifteen minutes, answering smaller questions about the man and his vehicle.
She couldn’t provide much, but Bex never pressured her to manufacture certainty, and when the interview ended, Nina left steadier than she had arrived.
I watched Bex walk her to the hallway, one hand resting gently at Nina’s back, then she leaned close to say something that made Nina manage a real smile before the protection specialist took over and led her away. Pride and possession tightened together beneath my ribs. My woman was amazing.
I closed one hand around her waist when she reached me and drew her against my side, but I released her before Raines emerged from the observation room and caught more than the possessive hand he had already resigned himself to seeing.
“She okay?” he asked.
“She will be,” Bex answered. “She thought the visit was too ordinary to matter.”
“That was the point.” I led them toward my office, keeping Bex tucked beside me as Black Castle personnel moved through the corridor. “He needed her to dismiss him long enough to confirm the address.”
My office sat inside a restricted executive wing in Black Castle’s main building, separated from the operational floors by controlled access and enough reinforced glass to provide clients with transparency without proximity to anything sensitive.
I put stills from the footage onto a mounted screen display while Bex and Raines took seats at a conference table that took up half the space.
“I’ll have trusted deputies canvas Nina’s street.” Raines studied the images. “We’ll keep the reason broad so nothing gets back to the department.”
“Already sent the stills to Stryker,” I told him. “Black Crowns will circulate it through local contacts. Anyone likely to recognize the vehicle or the man.”
Raines’s mouth tightened. “Tell your people not to contaminate witnesses before mine reach them.”
“They know the difference between asking whether somebody recognizes a face and telling them what answer we want.”
The sheriff released a breath through his nose but did not argue, because he knew the club’s local network reached people who would never answer a deputy’s questions.
Then he closed the folder he had brought and rested one hand over it.
“We found a second phone when we searched Jeff’s apartment last night.
It’s secured in evidence, warrant application is with the judge, and no one touches the device until the signature comes through. ”
I waited to make sure he was done, then replied, “Understood.”
His eyes narrowed. “That answer should not make me more nervous.”
Bex lowered her gaze toward the table, but the small smile tugging at her lips told me she knew exactly why I had accepted the restriction so easily.
Raines was waiting for authority to enter the physical device.
But phones existed inside ecosystems, and Jeff had left a trail scattered well beyond the device sitting in county storage.
Raines pointed at me without lifting his hand from the folder. “Nobody searches that phone before I have the warrant.”
“Your phone. Your warrant,” I agreed with a nod. “I won’t touch the device.”
He stared hard at me. “Just like that?”
I didn’t bother to confirm with anything but a steady stare.
Bex’s shoulders shook once with a laugh she disguised as a cough. I looked at her, and the amusement in her eyes confirmed she was already learning the difference between my compliance and my patience.
My phone vibrated against the table before Raines could say anything else. I saw the name Wrangler on the display and answered to the sound of tools and an engine running in the background.
“Your woman’s SUV passed the full sweep,” he reported. “Tamper sensors are live, secure tracking is isolated from the manufacturer account, and the remote alert package is tied into your profile and operations.”
“We’re coming down.”
Wrangler grunted his acknowledgment and ended the call.
Raines gathered his folder and headed toward the observation wing to speak with Nina’s protection specialist before she took her through the secured visitor route.
I locked my office, placed Bex on the inside of the corridor beside me, and kept my palm at her waist as we crossed the busy campus toward the garage elevators.
Black Castle employed hundreds of people across protection, intelligence, transportation, medical response, and crisis operations.
Most recognized me well enough to offer a nod and keep moving, but Bex drew attention simply because no woman had ever walked through the executive wing tucked beneath my hand.
She noticed the glances without becoming self-conscious, her body staying close to mine while her fingers occasionally brushed the back of my wrist.
One of our newer threat analysts—a young kid just out of college—stepped from the elevator as we approached, carrying a tablet against his chest. His gaze found Bex, lingered on her mouth, then dropped briefly to her chest, before returning to her lips and drifting up to her eyes.
He offered a friendly smile, once again staring at her mouth as he extended one hand.
I closed mine around Bex’s first, threaded our fingers together, and drew her tighter against my side before his palm came within reach.
“She’s mine,” I snarled, my voice carrying an unspoken threat.
The analyst looked at our joined hands, then at the expression on my face, and wisely converted the attempted handshake into a small nod. “Good to meet you.”
He scurried away, and Bex waited until the elevator doors closed behind us before turning her face up to look at me. Amusement danced in her eyes, and the smile she was trying to suppress made my cock stir.
“Did you just intercept a handshake?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“He looked at your mouth three times.”
Her lips twitched harder. “You counted?”
“I count everything.”
I didn’t mention the ogling of her breasts because I was still fighting the urge to go after the fucker and take him apart piece by piece.
Bex laughed and leaned into my shoulder. “Military-grade caveman tactics.”
“Stopped looking.”
“That probably had more to do with the deadly expression on your face.”
“Same result.”
She shook her head, but the pleased warmth in her expression made it clear she enjoyed my jealousy far more than she intended to discourage it. I lifted our joined hands and pressed my mouth to her knuckles, watching the humor soften into heat as the elevator descended.
Wrangler waited inside the secure vehicle garage beside Bex’s SUV.
The building held armored transports, executive sedans, tactical response vehicles, and enough specialized equipment to move clients through almost any threat in the world.
Bex’s compact SUV looked ordinary among them, which was the point.
Nothing visible advertised how thoroughly the systems beneath it had changed.
Wrangler greeted Bex, then walked her around the vehicle while I explained what every modification meant in practical terms. When I was done, Wrangler handed Bex the new key set, explained the emergency-start sequence and panic control, then excused himself to deal with an armored transport waiting in the next bay.
I opened the passenger door for Bex and placed one hand at her nape before she climbed inside.
She paused close enough for the scent of her skin to cut through engine oil and warm metal, her smile softening as she looked up at me.
“Between the phone, the house, and the car, I’m beginning to think there isn’t anything in my life that doesn’t report to you. ”
“Even you, baby.”
Her brows lifted. “I report to you?”
“Like you already agreed, you call me first when something’s wrong.” I let my thumb slide beneath her ear, feeling the quickening pulse there. “Everything else is so I know if you can’t.”