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)
I didn’t bother with hello.
“Drive. Need you to tell me what this is,” I said, tossing the package to Jax.
He caught it one-handed and raised a brow. “Let me guess. Came from the mystery woman who kamikazed your track?”
With a nod, I dropped onto the chair across from him.
Nitro grunted. “Saw the replay. Thought you were gonna rip that man’s head off the second he reached for her.”
“Man had no sense of self-preservation,” I muttered.
Jax flipped the drive in his hands, studying it closely. “Definitely not standard.”
“It’s not. It was buried under a mountain of cash in her duffel. Nothing to identify her, or the drive, though.”
Edge gave a low whistle as Jax spun in his chair to a separate rig: air-gapped, triple-cased, with more stickers than a NASCAR quarter panel—NO WAN, EYES ONLY. He popped the tamper seal with a plastic pick, plugged the drive into a hardware adapter, then into a bay on the side of the unit that looked like it used to belong to a lab. “Let’s see what Cinderella left at the ball.”
He tapped the screen. “Air-gapped encryption. Hardware enforced. And not the cheap kind some start-up CTO brags about on social media. We’re talking multifactor key escrow with geo binding and a kill switch that will brick the drive if I sneeze wrong. I couldn’t even peek at the contents without tripping three warning flags. If this is somebody’s Christmas list, it’s got a top secret code name and a clearance badge.”
Edge’s mouth curved. “Makes sense. Elves are shifty little fuckers.”
Jax ignored him. “Whoever gave this to your girl either trusts her a lot, or expects she’s going to get arrested and wants plausible deniability when the feds start pulling threads. Right now, I can see the device manufacturer, firmware build, checksum, and the fact that the last time this drive was plugged into anything was…sixteen hours ago. The rest of it’s a fucking vault. I can try a couple of nondestructive handshakes, but if this thing has an on-chip tamper counter, I’m not risking it without prep.”
“What’s inside?” Nitro asked.
Jax shot him a look. “If I knew, I would’ve started with that instead of the lap around the track. Give me a few minutes, and I’ll see if there’s anything else I can learn without destroying the information.”
While he worked, I grabbed the duffel from the corner of his office and carried it upstairs. After I tossed the bag in a small safe in my closet, I took a second to breathe.
She’d be safest here.
I didn’t know her. Not even her fucking name. But the idea of my angel being anywhere but under my roof made something primal and ugly crawl through me.
When I returned to Jax’s office, Edge had moved off the desk and was leaning against the far wall, arms crossed and eyes sharp. He lifted a brow. “You look like someone pissed in your fuel tank.”
I didn’t answer.
Jax didn’t look up as he spoke. “Traced the origin code. It belongs to Helix Core Systems.”
Edge pushed off the wall. “Helix? As in the government’s go-to data vault?”
“Yeah,” Jax said, tapping keys. “They do secure cloud infrastructure for DHS, FBI, and even military intelligence branches. This isn’t a tax return she stumbled across. Whatever’s on this thing? It’s not meant to see daylight.”
I clenched my jaw. “And she was carrying it around like it was nothing.”
Jax leaned back and whistled low. “What the hell is she doing with shit like that?”
I didn’t have an answer. Just the growing certainty that she hadn’t stolen it. Someone gave it to her. Or she intercepted it. Either way, she was now the target of whoever wanted it buried.
“She knew,” Nitro said. “She’s not stupid. It had to be a handoff, and she obviously didn’t count on it going to shit.”
“Maybe she didn’t know what she was delivering, and she’s being used as bait,” Jax suggested.
“Could be both or a combination of them,” Edge offered mildly, his knife flipping open and shut in his fingers without him looking at it. “Pretty girl with a hot potato and someone dangerous on her heels. That’s a recipe for a man to stop thinking straight.”
Edge had the looks of a damn movie star, but his eyes hinted that he was a bit psycho. “Since when did you start giving lectures about thinking straight?”
“Since this afternoon after you snarled at a track marshal for breathing near her,” he shot back, but his smile didn’t have any bite. “Relax. I trust your instincts. Kane will too. If you think she’s clean—”
I cut him off, my voice certain. “My gut says she’s scared, stubborn, and innocent enough to make me crazy. She’s carrying something somebody wants very badly.”
Jax’s chair squeaked as he pushed back and swiveled. “This Helix stamp isn’t a joke, Axle. It means we’re already in the blast radius. Whoever lost this drive is going to move heaven and earth to get it back, and they won’t give a shit who they have to trample. If I’m right, there’s federal awareness here, even if it’s not formal yet. Might be a rogue operator. Or a contractor. Could be someone with a badge and an ego. But they’ll have toys.”