Chapter 5
* * *
Four Months Later
Happy Birthday to you…
Happy Birthday to you…
Happy Birthday, Oscar…
Happy Birthday to you…
Rose’s off-key singing rang through the kitchen of their latest rental home.
Her son, now three years old in the blink of an eye, sat impatiently as he waited for her to finish lighting the candles.
He’d been becoming more vocal over the past couple of months, making Rose wonder if she was a bad mom for missing the old days when he’d sit quietly for hours.
How was he three? Seemed like yesterday that Rose peed on a stick she’d shoplifted from a rundown convenience store. She’d barely been nineteen, a kid herself. And now look at her little boy. So full of life, that toothy smile and eyes as blue as her own.
Oscar took a breath far larger than he needed to before he half blew-half spit all over the candles and icing.
It was a good thing she’d thought ahead and bought a pint of butter pecan ice cream for her dessert.
Once the candles were out of the way, Oscar could go crazy with the cake.
Last year, the concept of a smash cake had failed on her prim and proper two-year-old son.
Rose was hoping this year he’d have some fun with it.
Shame gripped her heart as her son attacked his cake, making her eyes water and her chin tremble. Oscar was so happy, such an amazing little boy. But all he had in the world was her. No friends, no cousins, no siblings. There was no one else for him to share this moment with.
As a mother, Rose wanted to believe that she was enough. That she was all her son needed and would need in his life.
But as the cynical realist she was, Rose knew the truth. She was doing Oscar a disservice by hiding him away. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day he would need more than just her in his life.
Wiping her eyes, Rose tried to find the joy in the moment and the knowledge that they were both alive, safe, and healthy. She’d worry about tomorrow another day.
* * *
Gl!tch.OS: I’m having a rough day. I’m afraid I won’t be good company tonight. I’ll talk with you tomorrow. Hope you have a good night.
Keys started at his monitor. At Glitch’s message.
At Rose’s message. It had been nearly four months since he discovered her identity.
Rose Benson. The same Rose Benson he’d researched what felt like a lifetime ago when her older sister, Ivy, had come barging into the clubhouse with a bound rapist at her feet.
She was dead. Rose Benson was supposed to be dead. Why did dead people keep coming back to life? First Scar, now Rose. Who was next? Elvis? Leonard Nimoy?
He’d kept his mouth shut for four months, but he didn’t know how much longer he could keep doing it. Rose was Poison’s sister. But from everything he could find, Poison had no idea that she was still alive.
It made Keys dive into what he could discover, and from the surface, it looked like Rose was the sort of person the world would have been better without. But Keys knew firsthand how easily those looks could be deceiving.
From primary school all the way up until she was a sophomore in high school, Rose struggled. Low grades, endless teacher complaints, enough suspensions and detentions to fill her own file drawer… She was labeled a troublemaker, and the school gave up on her. Even worse, so did her parents.
Josephine and Zane Benson showed love to their oldest daughter, the one who excelled in physical fitness and grew up to be a decorated SWAT officer, and showed disdain to their youngest daughter, the one who failed numerous classes and ended up falling in with a bad crowd.
Actually, from what Keys could find, Rose was the bad crowd. At sixteen, she was caught smoking on school property and supplying alcohol to her classmates. Before the school could expel her, Rose’s parents transferred her to a reform school.
A place where a specific fingerprint started showing up in malware designed to infiltrate pharmacies.
Mimicking insurance companies to approve or deny pharmaceutical orders, at sixteen Rose had created a network of fraudulent prescriptions to gain access to restricted drugs.
It went on for months—until she landed in juvie.
Court records showed that the justice system had no idea that the teen they’d just incarcerated for grand theft of an Alienware Aurora R7 gaming system was responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars of illegal drug distribution in their area.
Rose served six months, getting out just before her eighteenth birthday.
On the way to pick their daughter up from the detention center, Josephine and Zane Benson’s car was involved in a multi-vehicle accident.
Zane was killed instantly, while Josephine passed on the operating table.
Footage Keys found from the hospital that fateful day showed a distraught Poison in her police uniform being told the devastating news by a doctor in scrubs.
Poison picked her sister up from juvie a day late and was forced to tell Rose the news of what happened to their parents. Rose packed up her things from her childhood home, and left. She was still several months shy of her eighteenth birthday.
Over the next eight months or so, Keys found traces of Rose’s code mixed in with several transactions involving the 3Ts gang.
Formed in Miami, the 3Ts were slowly expanding their way north, hitting several major cities like Atlanta.
Prior to juvie, Rose didn’t have a connection with them.
Her scam against the pharmaceutical and insurance companies did not involve the 3Ts from what Keys could find.
Then he discovered that the daughter of a 3Ts lieutenant had served a stint in the same juvenile detention center as Rose. It was a thin connection, but the only one that Keys could discover, so he followed it.
Then Keys found her name in a heavily redacted FBI file that was dated several weeks before Rose’s reported death by overdose.
It took some doing—including tapping into a federal database while Starbucks and Ranger were corrupting evidence that was planted to frame Steel for murder last October—but Keys was able to find the unredacted version.
Rose was an informant for the FBI. He did not believe she’d gone to the 3Ts with the intent to spy on them.
Based on what he could uncover, it looked like Rose discovered a political partner the 3Ts had, which helped them cross borders in exchange for funding his campaign.
A fucking United States Congressman was a fucking drug kingpin.
It was so clichéd that Keys wasn’t even surprised by it.
What Keys was unclear on was whether Rose’s overdose was intentional on the FBI’s part to protect her before she could testify or if she was attacked by the 3Ts, who wanted to make her murder look like an OD but Rose survived. Either way, Rose was declared dead and placed into WITSEC.
Rose was not an amateur hacker by any measure.
Most likely, after she entered WITSEC, she was not supposed to be on a computer again.
Keys didn’t know how she got herself back online, but within months of Rose’s death, she’d contacted Poison anonymously to give her sister the information needed to take down the 3Ts faction in Atlanta.
Rose was dead and “MV” was born. Why not tell her sister who she was?
Keys completely understood not getting along with a sibling.
There was only four years between him and Keller, but it might as well be four hundred.
Poison was ten years older than Rose, and Keys could find no evidence to indicate they’d ever been close.
But they were still sisters. Rose had reached out to Poison for a reason, even before Poison had become Poison and started her motorcycle club.
At the end of the day, Rose’s secrets weren’t Keys’ to tell. Rose was still in WITSEC, which also meant she was violating the rules by even being in contact with her sister. Keys didn’t want to get her into trouble, even if that meant carrying her secrets for her.
The scary truth about his world was that even one careless post from years ago could tie an anonymous hacker to a real identity, and he’d been working for months to wipe any trace of Rose Benson’s past from being discovered as he had done.
At the end of the day, regardless of what feelings he may or may not have for her, he was her friend, and he would do everything in his power to protect her.
WiseWave620: I’m sorry today was trying. I understand needing space, but I’m here if you want to talk.
Keys just barely sent the message when there was a rapid knock on his door before Ranger came barging inside his apartment. “Ollie and Aaron have been in a car accident. Grab what you need. We’re headed to the hospital.”
* * *
Gl!tch.OS: I’m so sorry for your loss.
* * *
Tears dotted the white porcelain of the bathroom sink.
He felt woozy, like he might pass out or throw up.
In truth, he’d take either right now. Anything to make the pain stop.
The agony swirling around in his chest was immeasurable; he couldn’t imagine what Jenna and Steel were feeling after burying their only daughter that afternoon.
He’d failed. Again and again… He kept failing.
His new code was supposed to keep his family safe, but he hadn’t seen this coming.
It didn’t matter that he didn’t know Melanie all that well.
She’d been the closest with Bree, Angel and Cage’s daughter, and Cassie, Bulldog and Abby’s oldest daughter.
It didn’t matter that Steel was no longer the club’s president.
Jenna and Steel were still club, which meant their children were, too.
It didn’t matter that Melanie was an adult and in college. She would always be a club kid.
And she’d been gunned down in the streets of her campus like her life hadn’t mattered.