Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Rookie
Coffee at the club tastes different when you haven't slept.
Five in the morning. Same routine. Same pot, same grounds, same industrial machine I've been using every day since I started prospecting.
Except my knuckles are scraped from hitting the wall in my room after Saylor fell asleep, and the image of Dale Creedy smiling in a dark parking lot is burned into my retinas.
The pot brews. I lean against the counter and replay the confrontation frame by frame.
His smile. His palms up. The way he said "kid" like he thought I was fucking irrelevant.
The way he looked past me at Saylor with an expression I've seen on men before.
Men who believe the world owes them access to women. Men who hear a boundary and treat it like a suggestion.
He's going to come back. Not because he wants Saylor. Because he's been told she's his to collect, and men like Creedy don't leave without what they came for.
The pot finishes. I pour the first mug and carry it to Ruger's office door.
Knock once and set it on the ledge.
The door opens before I make it three steps.
Ruger's voice is rough with sleep. "Kid." He picks up the mug and takes a long pull. "You look like you haven't slept."
I stop walking and turn. "I haven't."
He leans against the doorframe, studying me over the rim. Not casual. Assessing.
His chin lifts an inch. "Something happen?"
I run my tongue over my teeth. "Creedy showed up at Backroads last night. Parking lot. After close."
Ruger's expression doesn't change, but his knuckles whiten around the ceramic.
"He was there when Saylor came out." My jaw flexes. "Waiting for her in the dark. Beats was inside and didn't see him. I was twenty feet away, and he still got to her first."
Ruger takes another slow pull. Processing. Deciding how much of his reaction to show.
He sets the mug on the ledge. "She hurt?"
"No." The word scrapes on its way out. "He didn't touch her. He came out from between the dumpster and the building, where there was no light. Used her father's name like a goddamn password."
The hallway is empty. Dawn light filtering through the window at the far end, gray and thin.
Ruger pushes off the doorframe. "Meet me in the kitchen in ten minutes. I'll get Bloodhound."
When I get to the kitchen, no one is speaking.
Bloodhound is at the counter, leaning against the sink with the casual stillness of a man who's never in a hurry but never late.
Coin arrives next. Dark hair, blue-gray eyes, the scar through his eyebrow catching the overhead light.
He pours himself a cup, sits at the table, and waits without asking why he's here. Coin never asks why. He shows up, he listens, and he does what’s needed of him.
Ounce is last. Ducking through the doorway, a head taller than the frame, filling the kitchen with his presence the way a bass note fills a room.
He doesn't pour anything. Leans against the far wall with his arms crossed and nods once at Ruger.
Four officers at dawn. And me. The prospect. Standing by the pot because even now, even after everything, standing is what prospects do.
Ruger flattens both palms on the table. "Tell them."
I tell them everything about last night.
Creedy in the Backroads lot. The fake breakdown setup. The fact that he got within arm's reach of Saylor while we had a prospect on watch twenty feet away.
I keep my voice level. Facts first. Emotions somewhere else, locked in a room I'm not opening in front of these men.
They see through it anyway.
Bloodhound's gaze hasn't left my face since I started. His thumb runs slowly along the rim of his cup, which means he's thinking.
Coin is motionless. Not because he's unaffected.
Because he's calculating. I've watched Coin operate long enough to know his silence isn't absence—it's the sound of a man deciding what needs to happen next.
Ounce's arms uncross. "How many times has he made contact?"
I tick them off. "He showed up at her mother's door, then started circling—gas station, her street, the Kroger. He’s shown up at Backroads, in the lot waiting for Saylor after close."
Bloodhound's gravelly voice breaks in. "And Taylor? How's she handling it?"
My teeth clench before I can stop them.
"Her name is Saylor," I say it even though I know I shouldn't correct a patched member, even though prospect protocol says I take whatever they give me and swallow it. "She's scared, angry, and pretending she’s fine."
The kitchen goes still.
Four sets of eyes on me. I've shown my cards.
Every man in this room now knows exactly how I feel about Saylor Bell, and the protective fury bleeding through my voice isn't something I can stuff back down or explain away.
Ounce's lips press together against something close to a smirk. "Saylor. Not 'the girl.' Noted."
Ruger cuts through without raising his voice. "Enough." He looks at me. "Creedy did twelve years for putting women in hospitals. He's circling someone connected to this club. I don't care if she's your woman or a stranger—the code is the code."
No brother raises a hand to a woman. And nobody who does it walks away clean.
Coin speaks without looking up from his cup. "He's escalating. First the mother. Then the gas station. Now the bar."
He sets the cup down. "Each contact is bolder. He's testing how far he can push before someone pushes back."
Bloodhound's thumb stops. "Then we push back."
"Not yet." Ruger holds up a palm. "We do this smart. Prospect, what do we know about Creedy's movements? Where's he staying?"
I pull my phone out, showing the screenshot from the parking lot. "I got a partial plate last week. Four of six characters. Not enough for a full match. But if the brothers at Backroads can get a clean read next time his truck shows up, I can have an address in an hour."
Ruger looks at Ounce. "You hear that?"
Ounce nods, arms folding across his chest. "I'll make sure whoever's on rotation knows. Clean plate, no confrontation. We find where he sleeps before we decide how he wakes up."
The temperature in the kitchen drops, and nobody touched the thermostat.
Ruger nods once. "Prospect."
The word lands differently this morning. Not dismissive. Direct.
"You and Krypton keep working on the network threat. I want whoever's in our system found before they leak again." He pauses. "Creedy is a separate problem. I'll handle the operational side. You keep your woman safe and your head on the tech."
Your woman.
He said it without emphasis. The way you'd say your bike or your room. A statement of fact, already accepted, already woven into how the club sees the world.
Saylor is mine. The club knows. And the club protects what belongs to its brothers, even its prospects.
I grab my laptop from my room and knock on Krypton's door before the officers have finished their second cups.
I give him the rundown and soon enough, we've been at it for five hours. The tripwire system is logging every probe, every ping, every phantom access attempt. The data is stacking up.
"They're getting sloppy." Krypton taps his monitor with a nicotine-stained finger, pointing to a cluster of attempts from the last forty-eight hours. "Same entry point, four times in two days."
I pull up the proxy chain on my laptop. "Or they're testing to see if we patched the vulnerability."
He tilts his head, considering. "That's worse."
I crack my neck. "That's smarter."
We work through the afternoon. I trace proxy bounces while Krypton monitors the live feed, both of us running on fumes and the grim focus of men who know time is running out.
Somewhere around hour four, Krypton leans back in his chair and rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms.
"Kid." He says it differently than the officers do. His version sounds like an older mechanic talking to an apprentice who's finally stopped breaking things. "You've got a gift for this. Fifteen years I've been in this room, and I couldn't have built that tripwire."
I don't respond. Compliments from brothers aren't something you acknowledge. You absorb them and keep working.
"But you need sleep." He points at the circles under my eyes. "You can't run two operations on zero rest. Something's gonna slip."
"Nothing's gonna slip."
"That's what sleep-deprived people always say." He turns to his monitor. "Right before something slips."
He's not wrong. My thoughts are clear, my focus is sharp, but the margins are razor-thin.
One missed alert, one trace I don't follow fast enough, and the intruder disappears.
One night I'm not at Backroads and Creedy shows up, and Saylor is alone in a parking lot with a man who did twelve years for hurting women.
Both of those thoughts live in my skull full-time now. They take shifts.
My phone buzzes every forty minutes.
Saylor:
At class. Walked with a group.
At Mom's for lunch. Doors locked.
Heading to Backroads. Tildie's picking me up.
Home safe. Knob checked twice.
It's not romantic. It's roll call.
She checks in, I confirm, and we both pretend this is how couples are supposed to work.
Krypton glances at my phone after the fourth buzz. His eyebrow lifts.
I pocket the phone. "Don't start."
He holds both palms up, lips pressed tight against a grin. "Didn't say a word."
I don't look up from the screen. "You were about to."
"I was going to say your girl texts more than my ex-wife." He turns to his monitor. "And my ex-wife was relentless."
My jaw tightens. "She's not paranoid. She's being stalked."
Krypton's grin fades. He nods once, the humor draining, a man who's been in this club long enough to know where stalking leads.
"Then we finish this." He cracks his knuckles over the keyboard. "One problem at a time."
One problem at a time doesn't survive contact with reality.
By Thursday, I'm running on four hours of sleep, attendance in two of my classes is a memory, and my cybersecurity professor has emailed twice asking if I'm still enrolled.
The digital threat takes my nights. Saylor takes my days. Creedy takes whatever's left.
Statistics is the first casualty. I sit in Armstrong Hall on Tuesday, and the numbers swim on the board.