Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rookie
Sleep doesn't come, so I stop pretending.
Two in the morning, sitting at my desk with the laptop casting blue light across the room and Saylor's lie sitting in my chest like a piece of glass I swallowed.
I don't know who he was.
She knows. She absolutely fucking knows.
I watched her collapse against her car in a dark parking lot after a man with a baseball cap said her father's name and smiled, and she told me she didn't know him.
People don't fall apart over strangers.
My phone is open to the photo I took from across the Backroads parking lot last week. Partial plate, four characters.
The truck's make is hard to pin in the dark, but it's older, domestic.
Ford or Chevy. The mud on the plate wasn't accidental—someone smeared it.
I run the partial through a public plate lookup site. Nothing useful. Too many matches without the full number.
I switch to the digital threat. The network dashboard loads, and I scroll through the last forty-eight hours of access logs.
The intruder probed again last night. While the whole club was at the reopening. While I was kissing Saylor goodnight and watching a truck follow her home.
Same pattern. Different IP. Bounced through proxies, clean entry, surgical access.
They pulled a directory listing of the club's financial records—dates, file names, folder structure. Mapping.
Whoever this is, they're building a blueprint. First the financials. Now the file structure, the folder names, the way everything connects.
Next they'll go for the content itself, and when they do, the club's entire operation will be sitting on a public forum for anyone with a badge or a grudge to pick apart.
I need help.
Not a sentence I say often. Not a sentence any prospect says without choking on it.
But the intruder is better than me at covering their tracks, and I know exactly one person in this club who might understand what I'm looking at.
* * *
Krypton's room is at the end of the north hallway, and the light under his door is still on at seven in the morning.
I knock twice. The door opens and Krypton is standing there in sweatpants and a Metallica shirt with solder burns on the sleeves, a cup of coffee in one grip, his room behind him looking like a RadioShack exploded.
Monitors stacked on monitors. Hard drives in a pile. A CB radio half-disassembled on his desk next to a police scanner running low static.
"Kid." He takes a sip of coffee and leans against the doorframe. "You look like shit."
"Didn't sleep." I hold up my laptop. "I need your eyes on something."
He steps aside and lets me in. I clear a space on his desk between a soldering iron and what looks like a dismantled security camera, and open the logs.
"Someone's been in our network." I pull up the access history, the IP traces, the proxy bounces. "Started eight days ago. Financial directory first. Now they're mapping file structures. Every entry is clean—no alerts triggered, no flags, no trace I can follow past the second proxy."
Krypton sets his coffee down and leans over the screen. His eyes move fast, scanning the data with the focus of a man who's been reading code since before I was born.
"These proxy chains." He taps the screen with a nicotine-stained finger. "Old school. TOR routing through residential IPs. I've seen this setup before."
I lean forward. "Where?"
He scratches his jaw. "Feds used to run their surveillance through similar chains back in the day. Doesn't mean it's a fed. Means whoever taught them learned from the same playbook."
He pulls up a chair and sits beside me. For the next two hours, we tear the intrusion apart layer by layer.
Krypton's knowledge is deep but dated. He knows hardware, radio frequencies, analog surveillance.
The bones of the old world. He can build a scanner from spare parts and tap a landline with his eyes closed.
But the digital landscape has shifted under his feet. Encrypted cloud storage, VPN tunneling, packet sniffing. This is all my territory.
Between his experience and my education, we start finding seams.
"Here." I point to a timestamp. "The intruder accessed the financial directory just after two in the morning, but the proxy chain shows a four-second lag between the first and second bounce. They're routing through a residential IP in Fairmont."
Krypton nods slowly. "Fairmont's close. Half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes if the roads are icy."
"If I can isolate the residential IP before it bounces, I can narrow the origin to a physical location."
He looks at me. Really looks, not the way brothers look at prospects, but the way one tech looks at another when the problem gets interesting.
"You're better at this than I figured." He picks up his coffee. "Daemon told me you were wasting time at school."
"Daemon thinks electricity is witchcraft."
Krypton snorts. It's the closest thing to a laugh I've heard from him in years.
We keep working. By noon, I've built a new monitoring system—a tripwire layered over Krypton's existing hardware alerts, designed to catch the intruder mid-session and trace them before the proxy chain completes.
"Next time they come in," I close the laptop, "we'll see them in real time."
Krypton nods, draining the last of his third coffee. "Bring this to Ruger. He needs to see what you've got."
Ruger is in the chapel with Bloodhound and Ounce when I knock on the open door.
Three officers. No other brothers. This isn't Church. This is a conversation they were already having when I showed up.
"Prospect." Ruger's tone is flat. Controlled. "Come in."
I step inside. The door stays open behind me.
I lay it out the way I laid it out for Krypton. The intrusion history, the proxy chains, the Fairmont residential IP, the tripwire Krypton and I built this morning. Calm, precise, no filler.
Ruger listens without interrupting. Bloodhound is motionless against the wall. Ounce has his arms crossed, chin down, taking it in.
When I finish, Ruger is silent for a long count.
"You and Krypton built this today." Not a question.
I straighten. "Yes, sir."
"And the tripwire will catch them next time they access the network."
"If they come back, I'll have a location within minutes."
Ruger looks at Bloodhound. Something passes between them without words.
"Handle it." Ruger turns back to me. "Whatever you need. Access, equipment, time. You and Krypton run this down."
I nod. Start to turn toward the door.
"One more thing." Ruger's voice stops me. He's leaning back in his chair, arms folded, wearing an expression I can't read. "Krypton ran a background check on your girl."
The air in the room changes.
"Standard check," Ounce adds from the wall. "Anyone new in the club's orbit gets a look. You know how it works."
I know how it works. I've seen it done on vendors, business contacts, women who hang around the clubhouse. Routine due diligence. Nothing personal.
Except my pulse is climbing and Ruger's face says it's personal.
"Saylor Bell." Ruger says the name like he's reading it off a file. "Born Saylor Halstead."
The name rings a bell, but I don’t know why.
"Her father is Dennis Halstead. Serving life without parole at Mount Olive for the murder of Christine Pelletier. Stabbed her thirty-two times in a parking lot in broad daylight."
I don't move.
"Pelletier was a second-grade teacher at Suncrest Elementary. Single mother. Had a five-year-old daughter." Ruger unfolds his arms. "Your girl changed her last name to her mother's maiden name after the trial. She's been going by Bell since she was a teenager."
The room is silent. All of their eyes are on me.
They're waiting for my reaction. Waiting to see if the prospect who got burned by a woman hiding her identity is about to learn he's sleeping with another one.
I think about Saylor sitting in the back row of a statistics class, making herself small. The way people look at her in Starbucks. The knob she checks twice every time she locks a door. The inheritance of fear.
The woman at the bar who changed her last name because a man she shares blood with did something unforgivable, and the world decided she should pay for it.
"I know what you're thinking." My voice comes out steady. Steadier than my pulse. "You're thinking this is Kinsey again."
Ruger doesn't confirm or deny.
"It's not." I hold his eyes. "Kinsey hid who she was to use me. Saylor hid who she was to survive. Those aren't the same."
Bloodhound shifts against the wall. Not disagreement. Consideration.
"Her father's crime isn't hers." I say it, and I mean it with every cell in my body, because I spent years carrying someone else's sin, and I know exactly what it feels like. "She didn't choose the name. She didn't choose what he did. She chose to change it and build something new."
Ruger is still for a long time. "The cellmate."
My stomach drops. "What?"
"Krypton flagged a name that came up connected to Halstead.
A former cellmate, released six months ago.
Dale Creedy. Did twelve years for aggravated assault—two counts, both women.
Creedy's been spotted in Morgantown." Ruger taps the table once.
"If he's circling your girl, that's a problem.
Not because of who her father is. Because a man who did twelve years for beating women is showing up where one of ours works. "
One of ours.
The words hit me somewhere behind my ribs.
"I'll handle the network threat." I straighten. "But I need to talk to Saylor first."
Ruger nods once. "Go."
* * *
She's at Backroads when I walk in. Behind the bar, restocking bottles, her hair pulled up, her sleeves rolled.
She sees my face and stops moving.
"Can we talk?" I lean against the bar, keeping my voice low enough to stay under the music. "Somewhere not here."
She sets the bottle down. Reads me the way she reads everything—fast, precise, and bracing for bad news.
We step out onto the back porch. March air biting through our clothes, the mountains dark against a darker sky.
She crosses her arms against the cold and waits.