Chapter 22
CLUTCH - POOF
A week after Razor went missing and we are still no closer to finding anyone.
When I left the clubhouse that afternoon, everyone walked away with instructions. The kind passed between men who know exactly what’s being asked without needing it spelled out. We were going to investigate our own. Without making it look like we were doing it.
Four couldn’t risk the DA seeing movement inside the club that looked like retaliation or obstruction. Angel couldn’t risk the club tearing itself apart before we knew if anyone outside of the rats in the shed were actually responsible for the shitstorm we were in.
So we would dig, but not where anyone could see us digging.
I felt like I was constantly searching and no closer to finding Bex.
Every day the pain in my gut, the tension in my chest got worse.
I was on my way back from a lead that didn’t pan out, but I couldn’t go back to the clubhouse…
Instead, I took the long way around the valley, riding the stretch of highway where we’d found Bex’s car.
I knew the spot, the road dips there, curves around a low stretch of bush and broken rock before climbing again toward the hills. The kind of place most people wouldn’t notice twice if they passed it during the day.
But I saw it.
The gravel pulled slightly off the shoulder, the faint impression where a vehicle had been dragged onto the low tow bed. I slowed my bike until I was right where her car would have been, then I killed the engine.
The silence after the motor cuts is always strange. Like the world suddenly remembers how to breathe without the sound of steel and gasoline.
I swung off the bike and stood there for a moment, watching the wind move across the desert grass in soft waves.
I walked toward the shoulder of the road slowly, trying to see it the way she would have. Trying to put myself where she stood.
Right here.
My boots crunched through gravel as I stepped into the spot where the tire tracks had dug into the dirt. I looked down the road one way and then the other. Nothing but empty highway stretching out in both directions.
I rubbed a hand down the back of my neck and exhaled slowly.
“Where’d you go, baby?”
The wind answered me, a soft rush through dry grass.
Bex didn’t have a lot of friends, not really. She had work, she had people she knew at the hospital and she had me.
As far as I knew.
That thought feels intrusive and yet… The truth is… I never really asked.
Bex always kept her world small and I think I liked that. I liked that I was her entire world.
She didn’t go to the bar nights unless I dragged her along. She didn’t chase attention or status inside the club.
She just wanted me, my time and attention.
She liked to lay low.
Back then I thought that was just her personality, but now I’m starting to realize it might have been something else entirely.
I walked another few steps along the road, scanning the ground like I expected to find some kind of sign we missed before. But there wasn’t anything, just dust, wind and the echo of the last place anyone knew my wife had been alive.
I stood there longer than I meant to. Long enough for the sun to dip a little lower and the wind to pick up across the open land. Then finally I turned back toward the bike.
Because standing there wasn’t going to bring her back and we had work to do.
Cypher had been buried in his computers since the night Bex disappeared.
The first thing he tried to pull was the compound camera feeds, at first he thought the system glitched, but the more he dug the worse it looked.
The entire night Bex left?
Gone.
Every camera angle covering the yard, the main entrance, the side drive. Just… blank space.
At first we thought whoever did it only wiped that night, but Cypher kept digging and he started noticing holes on other days. Random gaps. Moments missing, short clips that didn’t match the surrounding time stamps.
Someone hadn’t just erased that night, they had been inside our systems for a while now. Cypher didn’t say much when he realized that. Just leaned back in his chair and rubbed his jaw.
“Someone’s been watching us,” he said finally. “And covering their tracks.”
But we all knew it set him off, that he didn't like the fact that someone was messing around in his territory and he missed it. Since then he’d had multiple programs running in the background.
A code he had developed to try reverse engineer the erased data on the camera and track whoever did it.
Facial recognition searches, banking records, traffic cameras, hospital logs…
anytime he found a thread, he created a program to dig into it.
He had code crawling through every database he could reach, looking for anything tied to Mara or Bex.
Angel had cleaned out the club girls from the compound. After they were cleared and Four talked to Marisol, he wanted them gone.
Lacey, one of the younger club girls, had approached Cypher on the way out offering him one of her codes she’d developed in school.
Something about her being a computer whizz.
At first he refused her help, until he tested her code.
Now she sits beside him day and night running through the data breach of the club.
Every spare minute someone in the club wasn’t working… They were looking. We still had businesses to run. Legal ones and a few that rode closer to the line of… not. But compared to some clubs we kept our noses a lot cleaner.
That didn’t stop the pressure building around us, especially after Spike decided to escalate things. One of Preacher’s men ended up dead a few days after the night Bex worked the ER shift. Retaliation, Spike called it. Payback for the brother we lost.
All it really did was pour gasoline on a fire that was already burning too hot.
Tension inside the club climbed another notch after that.
Outside it too.
Because everyone knew what was coming.
War.
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But it was circling us like a storm building on the horizon And you never knew what someone as crazy as Preacher would do when he was pushed too far.
I’ve stayed away from the compound as much as possible since that night. Only going back to sleep, but I didn’t get much. My dreams… nightmares all about her. So I stay away and I look for my wife.
The DA still had their claws in Four.
We finally found out direct information, that someone from the club fed them information and an “informant” magically came forward at the same time backing up what the source's evidence claimed.
They moved on Four without enough cause and now the DA and his pet were scrambling to save face.
But Four still had to play by the terms of his release.
Which meant we had to dig into our own problems while half the county watched us.
Two missing women, traitors from within out free and a brewing MC war. And the sheriff and DA waiting for us to make one wrong move.
The tension hadn’t lifted from the club either, over a week of this feeling like one wrong move and the whole place would blow under the tension and concern.
Meg was still staying with Dani and Four, but Marisol had left and was staying with her sister, after a confrontation that I was told did not go well between her and Axel. They haven’t spoken since.
Axel, Torch and Ledger all took turns staying close to my side while I searched for any clue as to where Bex may be. Cypher barely left the club and we all knew that was causing tension with Meg, because she refused to go back.
It didn’t take long before some of the other women packed their bags too and every one of them leaving made the tension worse.
Something is going to give. It has to.
It’s like everyone had been happily living in ignorance, towing the line of ‘clubs are different than the rest of society’. But Bex tore down our principals, what we thought was loyalty and now everyone is deciding what kind of man they want to be or what kind of man they want to be with.
Some nights I sleep like the dead, others I wake up with the image of Bex standing in the middle of that room burned into my brain. Or I hear Angel telling the entire club about the trafficking ring, the one involving young girls disappearing across county lines.
That night keeps replaying in my head in a loop, a form of punishment I deserve.
So eventually I asked Cypher about it, he leaned back in his chair and shrugged.
“Angel asked me to dig into old rumors, said he heard something that triggered the memory,” he said. “I barely had surface information.”
He told Angel to hold off on using it until he knew more, but Angel thought it might push Bex into cracking.
The truth is… None of us even knew what we were accusing her of. Just that everything seemed to circle back to her somehow.
Cypher told me he’d dig deeper into the girls who were taken, see if anything lined up with what we knew about my wife.
That night I had stopped him on his way out to Four’s, because Meg had had enough of not seeing him.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
He raised an eyebrow. “About what?”
“Bex.”
He studied me for a moment and then nodded.
“Do… Do you think she was one of those girls?”
He didn’t answer right away, like he was weighing the merrit of the information he had. Finally he said, “Hard to tell, brother. But I can say this… her past is scrubbed.”
I frowned, asking, “What do you mean scrubbed?”
“Better than anything I’ve seen, even for witness protection.”
My stomach tightened, that same aching feeling I had been having. Like my body was kicking my own ass.
“So? Is she hiding something?” I asked.
Cypher shook his head slightly. “I think someone hid it for her. Someone good.”
I leaned against the wall, feeling older than I had in a long time, but he continued, “At first I thought maybe we were dealing with the same person, whoever was fucking with Four and the club… and Bex erased past, but the method is different.”
I waited, because I didn’t really have a clue about anything Cypher got into.
“Whoever erased Bex’s past did it clean,” he said finally. “Like the files never existed.”
He made a motion, like poof. Then tapped the side of his laptop.
“But whoever framed Four?” He grimaced, saying, “They used an eraser. It just took me a while to see the pattern. But once you do… you can follow the smudges.”
Something about that eased a knot in my chest, just a little, but there were still too many unanswered questions.
Later that evening I took another ride, I didn’t have a destination in mind. We didn’t have any new leads, or sightings… nothing.
I just felt like I needed the road, the wind and space to think.
About a mile from Four’s house I saw a stretch of land that made me slow the bike without realizing why. The parcel was wide and open, with rolling grass broken by clusters of trees on the edges. The kind of place where someone could build something real.
I parked the bike at the edge of the dirt road and started walking, I didn't know why. I just felt drawn to the place.
The air smelled like fresh earth and wild grass. Birds wheeled overhead and for a moment I could almost see it. A house sitting on the rise, with a garden and a wrap around porch.
A life that didn’t revolve around the clubhouse.
The thought hit me before I could stop it.
This is exactly the kind of place Bex would want to build our house.
I stood there a long time staring out over the land. Because for the first time since she disappeared…
I realize I might finally understand what she was asking me for all along.
Now all I had to do was find her and make it right.
I am watching the sun settle and my phone buzzes in my pocket. I reach for it and the breath stalls in my chest. A text from Angel, they found Kori and are bringing her into the compound.