Chapter 10 #2
Saylor's empty seat beside me makes the room feel off-balance. She skipped class.
She's been skipping things—class, grocery runs, the walk to campus she used to take alone. Her world is shrinking because a man with a smile and a truck is making it smaller every day.
I text her during the lecture:
Missed you in class. You okay?
She takes about ten minutes to respond back:
Didn't feel like being looked at today.
Seven words. Each one a blade.
The woman who spent years making herself invisible is being forced into visibility by a true crime forum and a town with a long memory.
The one place she used to disappear—the back row of a statistics class—isn't safe anymore.
Dr. Hasan stops me after cybersecurity on Wednesday.
He's noticed the drop in my attendance, the assignments I've been turning in late, the shadows under my eyes.
"Everything all right?" He asks it the way professors do, concerned but boundaried.
I nod and give him the line. "Family stuff. I'll catch up."
He doesn't push. But his expression says he's keeping track, and a man who teaches cybersecurity for a living is very good at tracking patterns.
The irony isn't lost on me. My professor is watching me the way I watch networks.
Looking for anomalies, flagging deviations from normal behavior, wondering what the data means.
I'm the anomaly.
I'm at Backroads every evening she works, clearing tables or stocking shelves or handling whatever Ellie points at, but my attention is split between the room and Krypton's updates on my phone.
Ellie notices. She notices everything.
She doesn't say anything about the circles under my eyes or the way I check the lot through the window every ten minutes.
She sets a plate of food in front of me one night—brisket, beans, cornbread—and stands over me until I eat it.
"You can't protect anyone if you collapse behind my bar, Prospect." She takes the empty plate. "Eat when I feed you. That's not a request."
The brothers have started rotating through Backroads in the evenings.
Not officially. Not ordered. They drift in one or two at a time, sit at the counter, nurse their drinks, and watch the lot.
Maddox comes Tuesday.
He plants himself on a stool and eats four baskets of wings and talks to Saylor about barbecue for forty-five minutes.
When a man in a baseball cap walks through the door, Maddox turns on the stool and stares at him until the man turns around and leaves.
The man wasn't Creedy. But it didn't matter.
Bracken comes Wednesday with Lock. They play pool and don't look at the parking lot, except they do, between shots, every few minutes.
Coin shows up Thursday with Leah.
They sit in a booth and drink soda, and Leah talks to Saylor about school like it's a normal weeknight and not a coordinated surveillance operation disguised as date night.
Nobody tells Saylor the club is watching. Nobody has to.
She's too smart not to notice a rotating cast of men in cuts showing up every night she works.
She notices. She doesn't comment.
She pours their drinks and takes their money and when Maddox calls her "sweetheart", she gives him a look so flat he apologizes without being asked.
Coin told me once: the women in this club don't need saving. They need space to save themselves. And if the world won't give them space, the club makes it.
The club is making space for Saylor. And she's filling it without being asked.
* * *
It’s just past three-thirty in the morning on Friday.
Saylor is asleep in my room. She's been staying here since the parking lot confrontation—not every night, but most.
Truth be told, I don’t like it when she’s alone at her apartment. Not with Creedy lurking around.
Her Honda is in the compound lot. Her toothbrush is in my bathroom. Her shampoo sits on the shelf next to my soap, and neither of us has talked about what it means.
I'm at my desk. Laptop open. The monitoring system is running its nightly sweep, sorting through the day's access logs, flagging anomalies.
Normal traffic. Normal patterns. Ruger's login, Coin's login, Krypton's login from down the hall.
Then the tripwire fires.
A new access attempt. Right now, happening live while I'm watching.
Someone is in the network, and the tripwire is tracking them in real time.
My pulse spikes. I lean forward, watching the intruder move through the system.
They're in the financial directory again. Pulling files this time, not mapping. Downloading.
The proxy chain starts bouncing. First hop, second hop, the residential IP in Fairmont.
I'm ready for it. The trace program Krypton and I built is running underneath, peeling layers faster than the intruder can add them.
First layer stripped. VPN through Eastern Europe.
Second layer stripped. TOR node in Virginia—closer than the Fairmont bounce. Getting warm.
Third layer.
The residential IP resolves. Not Fairmont. Clarksburg. Twenty minutes south.
I run the IP through the geolocation database. It maps to a physical address. A house on Maple Street.
I cross-reference the address against public records.
The name comes back and my breathing stops.
I stare at the screen. Read it again. Read it a third time because my brain is rejecting what my eyes are telling me.
The address belongs to a woman I've never heard of. But the secondary resident listed on the utility records is a name every brother in this club knows.
I screenshot the results, save them to an encrypted file and close the laptop.
Fuck it.
I open it again and check the data one more time because information like this doesn't get delivered casually. It gets verified, confirmed, and then carried to the president with both fists clenched.
I'm sure.
Behind me, Saylor shifts in the bed. Her breathing catches, holds, then evens out. Dreaming.
I watch her for ten seconds. The line of her jaw. The way her fingers curl against the pillow.
The woman I'm falling for is being hunted by a predator. The club I've given years to is being gutted from the inside by someone who should have been untouchable.
Two threats running on parallel tracks, closing in from opposite directions, and I'm standing in the middle trying to hold both lines.
I close the laptop. Press my palms against the desk until my arms stop shaking.
In five hours, I'm going to walk into the kitchen, pour Ruger his morning cup, and tell him something he isn't going to want to hear.
The kid is about to break the club open.
And it's going to hurt.