Chapter 5
JAX
M orning bled slowly into my office, but I’d barely noticed the change until now. The world outside my screens barely existed. Only she did.
My glasses dug into the bridge of my nose, and my cap was still backward from when I’d flipped it hours ago. I hadn’t slept. Not really. The Redline Kings weren’t a nine-to-five and neither was I. We ran best in motion, and my motion ran through wires.
I’d showered somewhere around four, changed my clothes, drank enough coffee to make my hands buzz, and then gone right back to the one thing my brain refused to let go of.
Lark.
The ache in my spine told me I’d stayed hunched too long, bent over the glow of screens, coaxing secrets out of systems that were never meant to give them up.
I dragged the heel of my hand across my eyes and settled deeper into the chair.
The leather grip on the armrest had molded to my palm over the years; this seat knew every bad night I’d ever had.
Lines of text flowed across three monitors—one scraping financials for patterns human eyes never caught, one parked on DMV and county clerk portals, and the third running a slow crawl through records that weren’t supposed to be accessible to anyone who didn’t have a badge.
And clearance for these files in particular.
When I came back to my office, I started peeling past the WITSEC layer I’d already cracked yesterday. That should’ve been enough. Confirmation was all we needed, all I’d normally hand over before walking away. But I couldn’t. My gut wouldn’t let me. I wanted more than their file gave me.
I wanted to know everything. Not the alias—the real woman who existed under it.
The one who’d bumped into me and flushed pink when my silence landed like a punch.
The one who’d looked me in the eyes and made something in my chest go live like a circuit I didn’t remember wiring.
Whose lips had been softer and sweeter than I’d imagined.
I wanted her real life. Her real story.
I craved every damn detail, every footprint, every shadow she left behind before the feds boxed her up in a neat alias and shoved her into Crossbend.
Didn’t know what the fucking marshals were thinking putting Lark in a place like this.
We were tightlipped around here, but we still lived in the spotlight.
This wasn’t the place for her. Not with that history. Not with enemies still breathing.
And not with me sitting here, feeling hardwired to protect her like I’d been fucking born for it.
Because there was no denying it anymore. She was mine. It had been a quiet thought, but the truth of it had settled hard.
Even though I’d already spent hours going through her legend, I skimmed it again on my way to her past life.
I chased the threads beneath it, the places sloppy techs always forget—temp files, batch job logs, and admin comments they assumed no one would ever read.
Whoever built her cover had recycled assets like a lazy thief passing the same bill at ten different stores.
“Amateurs,” I muttered.
Then I went after the algorithmic shadow—what the numbers said about the person when they weren’t looking. Spacing in transactions, time-of-day patterns, IP drift from the bank’s web portal. A durable cover lived there. Lark’s patterning was good…until it wasn’t.
Three months back, everything shifted twelve hours as if someone had flipped her schedule with a spreadsheet command. The kind of thing a tech did when they remembered they forgot to build a night owl into a day person. Not a normal human shift.
I made a note on a yellow legal pad, adding to my to-do list from the day before—fix time drift—and moved to the phone records.
Her carrier billed on the same cycle every month.
Voice usage low. Texts average. Data a hair below normal because WITSEC tells you to keep your head down.
What jumped out was tower handoff history—the path between her apartment, Brake Point Run, and a grocery store three miles north.
Clean triangle. No nightlife. No beach detours.
No bar crawls. She’d been living like a ghost.
I dug into the DOJ vault again. Not through the obvious door since the last thing I needed was a recorded handshake with my name on it. I was better than that.
There were older tunnels—maintenance pathways older than me by now—that never got sealed because the agency outsourced the job and the contractor cut corners. I threaded one.
I’d skipped the interview recordings over yesterday, so I clicked on several, watching them to gain any new information they contained.
That was what I told myself at first. But the reality was simply that I wanted to hear her voice again.
See her incredible lips moving in that naturally seductive way that she clearly didn’t know she possessed.
My chest tightened at the fear filling her pretty brown eyes.
After viewing those, I forced myself to move on rather than replay them. Skimming the details of the op again, anger coiled low and hot in my belly. These were the kind of men who put bounties on witnesses and waited.
And whoever built her legend had left seams large enough to slide a truck through.
My jaw clenched as I pulled a deeper packet of historical IP logs from the federal relay they had routed her mail through for the first six months in the program.
It was a trick I’d taught them—bounce a witness’s email through a safe net to obfuscate their origin.
But the field tech had been lazy. One week in, he’d changed a setting without thinking and left bounce confirmations in a debug folder where anyone clever and stubborn could find them.
Which I had. Real fucking easily.
She’d lived in Georgia before the switch. Too close to the private military contractor’s footprint for my blood pressure.
I continued tunneling past a gateway I shouldn’t have touched. The firewall was heavy, the kind that hummed like a warning before you ever laid a finger on it. But my fingers flew anyway, thanks to muscle memory from years of dancing through locks DOJ never thought anyone would check.
There weren’t many out there who were at my level.
I’d accessed deeper channels than this and never left a trace.
But I’d never been this focused on the subject.
This determined to get to the root. So much so that I made the kind of mistake I hadn’t done since I was a fucking teenager breaking into digital vaults for the first time.
I caught the faint pulse in the code too late. Subtle. The kind of tripwire only meant for people like me.
“Shit.”
I leaned back, chair creaking, eyes narrowing as my fingers hovered above the keys. Quickly, I backed out two layers without closing the connection. Waited. Watched the net.
There it was again—the faintest echo of a watcher script waking up to sniff. Silent alert. No sirens, and no flashing red banners. Just a whisper that would land on a marshal’s desk somewhere and ruin my damn day.
The fan overhead clicked in a slow circle. The hum of my servers filled the silence with a steady heartbeat. I shoved away from the desk, ripped the cap off my head, dragged my hands down my face, and swore again. “Fucking hell.”
Yeah. I’d just pinged the fucking marshals. The kind of alert that triggers a small blue LED in a quiet office and alerts a junior analyst, “Eyes on this access.” If they were smart, they’d log and wait. If they were twitchy, they’d walk it up the chain and send an attitude in a suit.
Either way, the clock had started.
I closed every door I’d opened and scrubbed the fingerprints, then did it again, and again a third time because paranoia was the only reason I was alive. When the code went still, I leaned back and finally let out the breath I’d been banking. It might have been enough, but only time would tell.
Time to loop in Kane.
I grabbed the tablet off the desk and stalked down the hall toward his office, my shoulders tight. The clubhouse felt different on mornings like this. Quieter. Like a hangover after a race night buzz.
A couple of brothers’ voices drifted from the kitchen, low and grumbling about eggs being too runny. Somebody banged around in the garage, a tool clattering on concrete. Normal noise. My world.
Nitro crossed the hall with a black Pelican case and an expression that meant the world should be grateful he was on our side. He jerked his chin. “You look like you fought a modem and lost.”
“Modem’s dead,” I threw back without slowing, catching the quick flash of a grin before he disappeared into the garage.
Kane’s door was cracked, but I still rapped my knuckles on it and waited for him to call out, “Enter.”
He sat behind his custom desk made of black walnut, heavy enough to anchor a hurricane.
The afternoon bled through the window, slicing light across spreadsheets and track maps.
He didn’t look up when I stepped in. His eyes were focused on the dual monitors propped on the corner of his desk.
Race data scrolled across the screen—lap times, fuel usage, and telemetry shit that bored most people but Kane tracked like scripture.
“You look like shit,” he muttered, still watching the screen.
“Not here for makeup tips.” My voice came out flat, but sharp. I slammed the door shut with my boot. “We’ve got a problem.”
That got his attention. Kane turned, leaning back in his chair, arms folding across his chest. He studied me the way only he could—like he already knew the story but wanted to hear how bad I’d make it sound.
“Tell me I won’t need bail money,” he rumbled.
“Depends on how allergic the marshals are to curiosity.”
He lifted his gaze, but his eyes didn’t flicker. Not once. Kane didn’t posture; he processed. After a second, he raised one brow. “You sure?”