Chapter 1 #3
It wasn’t that he wasn’t smart enough to remember to do such basic things.
He was more like the Absentminded Professor.
Once he got absorbed in a project, there was no turning back.
Rather than creating Flubber, though, he was working on a security code that would ensure that none of his club brothers or their families would be at risk again.
He was going to make Mount Grove a sanctuary for them—and after all they’d done and gone through, they deserved no less.
His new business partner, Tom, was taking a leap of faith with Keys being able to write, complete, and manufacture this code. It had to work, and it had to be beyond perfect.
“Yeah?” he half-heartedly answered into the lime green Razer BlackShark V3 Pro headset on his head.
A modulated voice replied, “Is this Keys?”
Keys’ fingers immediately stopped typing on his left keyboard, and with a small twist of his two-thousand-dollar gaming chair, his hands landed over his middle keyboard as his eyes shifted to the two monitors mounted to the wall over the three large ones resting on his desk.
“Depends,” he said without missing a beat, “who’s this?”
“I’m a friend of Poison’s. She said she was going to reach out to you to expect my call. You can call me ‘MV’.”
M-V? Interesting moniker, but he’d heard worse during his time in Navy Intelligence as a Cryptologic Technician.
Hell, he had a club brother named Pumpkin, who had suffered through six years of their club harassing him for having woken up naked next to a pumpkin instead of the woman he insisted he’d had sex with the night before. So who was Keys to judge a nickname?
Poison was Ivy Benson, a friend of the Via Daemonia and the new President of the Non Cras MC, an all-female motorcycle club.
She was as badass as they come, and honestly, Keys was a bit terrified of her.
Then again, he was terrified of most women.
He had no fucking clue how his brothers could have a one-on-one conversation with one without losing their tongue, their mind, or any claim to their manhood.
Keys had been trying for twenty-four years and had yet to have any success.
The exception to that rule being the women his club brothers had claimed, and Keys could only assume that to be because they were off-limits to him and essentially his sisters now.
It was quite possible Ivy had contacted him. When Keys dove into a project, he only allowed two people in the world to be able to interrupt him: Steel, because he was the VDMC’s president, and Ghost, because he was the closest thing Keys had to a real brother these days.
He opened a command line for a privacy guard on his monitor.
The fact that the voice was modulated was interesting, but more like a riddle to be solved, rather than an inconvenience.
Now would be a great time to test the code he’d just implemented into his new AI security software, which was a much smaller version of current popular large language models.
“Maybe she did and maybe she didn’t,” Keys responded as he typed. “Doesn’t answer the question of who you are.”
“I’m Poison’s tech. I’ve been helping her for years before she met up with Scar in Miami. But now I’ve got a problem, and she said to reach out to you.”
That sounded plausible, but Keys was still going to figure out the voice beneath the voice. True enough, when Keys looked, there was a message from Ivy waiting for him in the secure IRC chat link he’d given her. But just because Ivy trusted this mystery person didn’t mean Keys had to.
“Sorry, I’ve been working on a project. How can I help?
” His voice was a bit monotone as he continued typing.
The call had come over a burner app, but only amateurs believed those to be untraceable.
He wondered if the modulator being used was computer-generated or if the person on the other end of the phone was using a hand-held device.
That would be annoying, but Keys knew not everyone could afford the equipment he had.
He’d sold his first coding software for seven million when he was only fifteen.
“Poison and Kitty are on their way to Detroit. I have a contact up in that area working on another contract when I stumbled upon a, uh, viewing room…of…sorts, and I’ve never been in this corner of the dark web before.
” As her sentence came to an end, her feminine lilt replaced the stilted, computer voice, making Keys’ eyebrows lift.
Her voice was smooth, soft, and sweet. Like someone he would have expected to bump into in the back of a library with her arms full of books, rather than a cryptic phone call discussing the underbelly of the internet.
“And I’ll be honest, I’m good with computers, but this is beyond me. ”
Depending on what seedy corner she’d stumbled into on the dark web, Keys wasn’t surprised.
Most are not prepared to learn that only five percent of the surface web was available to the Average Joe.
Many thought of the deep-dark web as something fantastical out of a Hollywood thriller spy movie or thought it was a place only for criminals, but they would be wrong on both counts.
They would also be surprised to learn that the “deep-dark web” wasn’t just a single space on the internet, but two separate, distinctive hidden networks.
And the biggest surprise of all: that the dark web had legitimate use.
Keys worked his fingers over the keyboard.
He didn’t know who Kitty was, but assumed her to be a new member Ivy had picked up for her club.
Scissors, a former member of the VDMC, had already been named as the Non Cras’ vice president, and Wendigo was a stray the VDMC had sent Ivy’s way.
It sounded like Ivy was finding members easier than she had thought she would.
Maybe someday, her nomadic motorcycle club would be as large as Keys’.
“Is your PGP key secure?”
“Of course!” Now that the computer wasn’t disguising her voice anymore, Keys could pick up on the emotion in it. She was worried—and why the hell did he find her getting offended by his question so amusing? “I’m no script kiddie, Mr. WiseWave620.”
Keys barked out a laugh as his eyes scanned the metadata appearing on his screens.
He might use AI as a tool, but there was nothing like a good, old-fashioned hack to break up the monotony of everyday life.
He leaned forward and took a sip of his orange-flavored energy drink through a very long bendy straw.
Coffee was overrated in his opinion, and a bit nasty.
The only way he was able to stomach it was by masking it with enough sugar that it was more cotton candy than coffee.
“Forgive me,” he said rather sarcastically.
“You roll with Ivy, so there’s no way for me to know what color your hat is.
” Clearly, she was doing a bit of digging on her own—although, thanks to his father, his original handle wasn’t the secret it used to be.
He still used it from time to time, like when he’d been sending encrypted messages to Scar, the club brother he thought was dead for two months.
There was a sound like a muffled giggle across the line. “Fair enough. And she goes by Poison now.”
Keys knew that, but he sucked at remembering. “She was introduced to me as Ivy, and has only been ‘Poison’ for a few weeks. I’ll call her ‘Poison’ when she’s within earshot so she doesn’t threaten to disembowel me.”
“Fair enough—” she started to say when Keys suddenly interrupted her.
“Holy fuck! What is that?” He was on his feet, pushing the glasses Steel had insisted he get up his nose as he stared at the monitors on his wall.
His apartment was the size of a small studio, but unlike his club brothers who upgraded their mattress size, Keys had replaced the queen bed the apartment had come with for a twin so he could fit his computer desk.
Honestly, his gaming chair was so comfortable that he slept there more than his bed.
On one of the two monitors above his desk was the darkened image of a woman strapped down on a silver operating table. A man in a full-body latex suit stood over her with a pair of pruning shears, like a gardener used.
Keys watched in horror as the man lifted the blades to the woman’s left ear, and sliced her entire shell off. “Oh God, I’m going to be sick!” Keys blurted out before he could stop himself. He wasn’t like his club brothers, and the sight of gore affected him more than them. “What the hell is this?”
His eyes landed on the chat box on the other screen, where instructions to take the other ear appeared.
The woman’s voice was hard, like she too was trying to stomach what they were watching.
“I wasn’t looking for it, I swear, but I got distracted and fell down a rabbit hole!
The code was so elegant, and I had to look at it.
But now I can’t leave. I didn’t know how to secure it or how to get back to it so I can help Poison find the bastard. ”
Jesus. Keys was disgusted beyond measure, but couldn’t take his eyes off the screens. There was no sound to the video, making the woman’s screams somehow even more horrifying.
He had no idea how he found his voice. “You’re sending Ivy after this fucker?
” Based on the chats he was seeing, there were many open bids for various body parts—and since this woman didn’t have more than two nipples, Keys could only assume that there was more than one victim being sliced and diced for others’ sick pleasure.
He did not want to know the specifics of that pleasure.
“If we can find him,” was the woman’s answer. He supposed, until he had time to do a bit more digging, he was going to have to get on board with calling her “MV”, too.