Chapter 2 #2
"Start with the mean." She taps her screen, pointing to a formula. "Then standard deviation. Once you've got those, the distribution curve is straightforward."
I look at her notes, then at mine. Hers look like a textbook. Mine look like a ransom note.
"Straightforward for who?"
The almost-laugh. I've been chasing it since the first time I heard it during the regression problem last week. Quick, caught between her teeth, gone before it fully forms.
But I know what it sounds like now. And I know how to get close to it.
She walks me through the distribution curve, her finger tracing the formula on her screen while I copy it into my notebook.
Her notes are clean, color-coded, organized by someone who treats chaos like a personal enemy.
Mine look like a crime scene.
"You're staring at my screen like it owes you money." She doesn't look up when she says it, but there's a warmth underneath the flatness.
"I'm trying to figure out how your handwriting looks like a font and mine looks like I wrote it during an earthquake."
"Practice."
"Or talent."
She glances at me. Quick, then away. "It's not talent. It's controlled."
The word hangs in the air between us and I want to ask what she means by it.
What a woman who color-codes her statistics notes and sits in the same seat every class and never speaks unless spoken to means when she says the word control like it's keeping her alive.
We finish the problem with two minutes to spare. She checks my work without me asking, catches an error in my second calculation, and corrects it with a tap of her pen on my notebook.
"Sign's wrong. Negative, not positive."
I fix it. "What would I do without you?"
"Fail, probably." She says it deadpan, and the grin hits my face before I can stop it.
When Petrov calls time, she closes her laptop and starts packing up.
"Same time Thursday?" I click the pink pen closed.
She pulls her bag over her shoulder. "Bring a better pen and maybe I'll think about it."
"This pen is iconic."
"The pen is ridiculous."
"You smiled at it."
She stops moving. Looks at me for a second too long, and I watch her decide whether to deny it.
She doesn't deny it. She turns and walks out, and the back of her neck is flushed pink above her collar.
I sit in my chair for five extra seconds because my legs need a minute to remember they have a job.
I grab my notebook and the feathered pen, head for the door.
The walk across campus to the parking lot is cold.
A gust off the mountain ripping through the Mountainlair plaza hard enough to make my eyes water.
I zip my jacket over my cut, because wearing club colors on campus invites questions I don't want to answer.
I’m back at the compound by 11:40. The parking lot is full. Every officer's bike in its spot, plus a few full patches who don't usually come in on weekdays.
Something's happening.
I park, head inside, and take my place outside the chapel door.
Prospects don't sit in Church. We stand in the hallway and wait for instructions.
Shots is leaning against the wall across from me, rolling a cigarette between his fingers. Beats is on his phone.
The chapel door opens after forty minutes. Brothers file out, faces unreadable. Ruger last, jaw tight.
He sees me and stops. "Prospect. Anything unusual on the network this week?"
The question catches me off guard. Nobody asks me about the network. Nobody cares about the network.
I set up the encrypted communications system eight months ago when Ruger finally listened to me about the club's digital footprint, and since then, it's been background noise. Something I just handle.
"Not that I've flagged." I straighten. "Why?"
He holds my eyes for a second. "Keep an eye on it."
He walks away.
The rest of the afternoon is club business. Prospect errands.
A run to the auto parts store for Bloodhound. Cleaning the garage with Shots. Hauling trash.
Physical labor I've learned to appreciate because it's uncomplicated in a way most of my life isn't.
By ten at night, the compound is winding down.
Maddox is watching a movie in the common room. Daemon is in the garage.
Coin left hours ago to pick up the girls and hasn't come back, which means he's home on Hickory Hollow Road with Leah and the kids, living the life he earned.
I sit in my room. Small. Bed, desk, lamp, laptop.
A prospect's room is whatever the club gives you, and what the club gave me is four walls and a door that locks. It's enough for me, so I don’t complain.
Hell, if I did complain, Vulture would bust my ass anyway.
Vulture, the Prez of the Chicago charter, who also happens to be my older cousin.
The laptop opens. I log into the club's network dashboard, the one I built and maintain because nobody else knows how and nobody else wants to learn.
Ruger's question is still rattling around my head. Is anything unusual?
The access logs load. Lines of data, timestamps, IP addresses, login locations.
I scroll through the last seven days, looking at the normal traffic.
Ruger's login from the chapel. Coin's login from his phone. Porter's login from the bar. Bloodhound's login from the garage.
Nothing unusual.
Five days back. Seven days back. The entries are routine, predictable, the digital footprint of the brothers and what we’d normally look up.
Hell, I even found some freaky hucow shit Daemon looks up on Pornhub. Weird motherfucker.
Then I see it.
Eight days ago, around three in the morning.
A login from an IP address I don't recognize. Duration: four minutes, eleven seconds.
Accessed the financial directory. Logged out clean.
No trace, no flag, no alert triggered because whoever did this knew the system well enough to move without tripping a wire.
Someone was in the club's network at three in the morning from an unknown location, and they went straight for the money.
My pulse picks up. I pull the IP and run it through a geolocation tool.
The result comes back bounced through two proxies, which means whoever this is didn't want to be found. Not a glitch. Not a brother logging in from a new phone.
Deliberate access by someone who shouldn't have had it.
I check the financial directory itself. Nothing missing, nothing altered.
They looked, but they didn't take anything. Which in my opinion is worse, because taking is a crime of opportunity. Looking is reconnaissance.
Someone is mapping the club's digital layout the way you map a building before you rob it.
I screenshot the logs, save them to an encrypted file, close the laptop, lean back in my chair, and stare at the ceiling.
Ruger asked me to keep an eye on it. Which means someone else flagged something too, or he's hearing chatter, or his instincts are running ahead of the evidence the way they always do.
The kid who let the leak in. The prospect who handed the keys to a girl with a pretty smile and an agenda.
This time, if something's coming through the gate, I'm going to see it first.
I open the laptop again and start building a better tripwire.