Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 46098 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 230(@200wpm)___ 184(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46098 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 230(@200wpm)___ 184(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
“You look into the full drive?”
He finally turned, and his expression said I’d asked a fucking stupid question. “We did more than look, brother. Leek and I took the gloves off. That key you hauled out of his cave cracked the vault. Full drive decrypted in less than five minutes.” He gestured at two different screens. One was a spreadsheet that looked like a building collapsed into columns, and the other had a bank routing interface with more zeros than sense. “We burned her leverage. Dumped curated copies of The Ledger into six inboxes that still respect what laws are—DOJ, two IGs, two Senate staffers who haven’t been bought, and a reporter who actually fucking fact checks. We slipped in trip lines and fingerprints. When they go public, she’s done, and anyone who tries to suppress it will leave prints. We also walked her accounts into the desert and let the sun have ’em.”
I grinned. “You drained her.”
“Legally? No. Morally?” He rolled one shoulder, and his lips slanted into a lopsided smirk. “I just steered her money into a holding pattern inside institutions that suddenly care very much where Helix’s compliance leads got off to with a bag of other people’s secrets. Consider it ‘forensic retention.’ She can’t buy a plane ticket. Can’t pay a cleaner. Can’t even bribe a handler. She tried to purchase a new identity, and we pulled the teeth out of the sale mid-bite. Her buyers have evaporated. The Skulls and the mercs whose names surfaced with the dump are now furious they’ve been exposed without a paycheck. Helix is bleeding out contracts faster than they can draft internal memos. The empire is on fire, and the empress only has one plastic bucket.”
A slow heat slid down my spine. “She’s at the safe house now?”
Jax flicked to a live satellite pull. It was grainy and in gray scale, but clearly showed a rectangle of roof and two vehicles in the tree line—a black SUV and a van. He highlighted a grid. “Here. Heat signatures read six, maybe eight bodies. Two outside walking patterns, four inside, and one that’s either a server rack or a panic room AC unit.”
“Of course she has a panic room.”
“Rich sociopaths love boxes,” he said dryly. “She wrote a policy for them. Bellatrix’s ‘play dead’ box leads to a private outfit out of Miami whose contract we just canceled with a spoofed compliance dispute. They’ll spend three hours arguing about billable rates in a Slack channel while their client prays in a titanium coffin. She’s on her own.”
“Fucking perfect.” I felt the snarl break free in my chest like a dog off a leash. “Gonna call Prez.”
Kane and Edge were already two steps into the office before I could lift my phone. Nitro sauntered in behind them, and the door clicked shut again. The temperature of the room shifted in the way it always did when a decision was about to calcify into action.
Kane’s gaze cut to the map and then to me. “We in business?”
“We are,” I confirmed before sharing everything Jax had just laid out, short and sharp.
“Could let the others tear her apart,” Kane suggested, not because he wanted to, but because he was our prez and his job demanded he lay down every option on the table, even the ones that tasted like ash. “No tie back to us if they do it. No clean-up. Just another monster eaten by other monsters.”
Jax and Nitro watched me with steady focus, while Edge rolled his knife over his knuckles, somehow managing not to get sliced by the lethal blade.
Kane wasn’t asking me to fall back and let someone else dole out my retribution. If I chose to act, he’d back me with blood. It was no less than I would give him if the one wrapped up in this tangle had been Savannah.
I didn’t have to visualize Ashlynn to feel her, but I did it anyway. The way she’d looked this morning, hair a wild spill across my chest, my T-shirt hitched high on her hips, the flat of her palm resting unconsciously over her belly like her body already knew what we’d made. She was everything to me, and I needed to make sure this shit never touched her or our child. To make it happen with my own hands and see the cause of my woman’s pain bleed.
“We end it now,” I growled, my voice threaded with steel.
Edge’s grin was a flash of teeth—feral and pleased. Nitro pushed off the wall he’d been leaning against, coiled for action. Kane nodded once, and it felt like the air pressure in the room changed to something darker, thick, and sizzling with anticipation.
“Get your gear,” Kane ordered. “We roll before dawn.”
Ashlynn was on the bed when I walked in, sitting cross-legged near the headboard in only my T-shirt, which did absolutely nothing to hide how she filled it. Despite all the shit crowding my mind, my body reacted immediately. My cock swelled, and my hands itched to feel her silky skin beneath them. She looked small and gorgeous; soft and stubborn; mine in every way that mattered.