Arizona had been operating independently.
Or worse, he had been working for someone else entirely.
I reached for my phone and pulled up the encrypted chat Sypher, Nav, and I used for intelligence sharing.
Nano:You seeing what I’m seeing in your sections?
The response from Sypher came back almost immediately.
Sypher:Depends. You seeing transactions that don’t fit Society patterns?
Nano:Yeah. Timing’s wrong. Amounts don’t match. Shell corps are different.
Nav:Same here. Been trying to reconcile it for days. Thought I was missing something.
Nano:You’re not. Arizona wasn’t working for the Society. Or if he was, he had a side operation they didn’t know about.
Sypher:Fuck. That’s worse.
Nav:Way worse. Means we’ve got another threat on the horizon.
I stared at the screen as my stomach twisted into knots. Another threat. Separate from theSociety. Potentially more dangerous because we didn’t know who they were, what they wanted, or how deep their infiltration went.
Fuck.
I saved my analysis, backed up the files to three separate encrypted drives, and stood. My leg still ached where Scythe had stabbed me in the basement. The wound had healed but left a dull, persistent throb that flared up when I sat for too long.
Morpheus’ office was at the end of the hall on the first floor, past the officers’ rooms and the storage closets filled with weapons and ammunition. His door was half-open, light spilling into the hallway, and I could hear the faint scratch of a pen on paper. I knocked twice and pushed the door open without waiting for permission to find Morpheus sitting behind his desk, a stack of club paperwork spread out in front of him. Invoices, supply orders, and maintenance records for the bikes. Themundane shit that kept the Brotherhood running even when we were in the middle of a war.
What caught my attention, though, was whatwasn’tthere.
Lollie.
The club whore who practically glued herself to Morpheus’ side every time he was in the clubhouse. The girl who would kneel under his desk and suck his cock while he read reports, who would follow him around like a loyal dog waiting for scraps of attention.
She wasn’t here.Odd.
Morpheus glanced up, his expression unreadable. “You look like shit.”
“Haven’t been sleeping much.”
“I can tell.” He set down his pen and leaned back in his chair, the leather creaking under his weight. “What do you need?”
I closed the door behind me and crossed to the chair in front of his desk. Sitting down, I pulled out my phone and opened the analysis I’d compiled. “I’ve been going through my section of the ledger,” I said, keeping my voice steady. Professional. “Cross-referencing transactions, tracing shell corporations, mapping the money flow.”
“And?”
“And it doesn’t match.”
Morpheus’ eyes narrowed slightly. “Doesn’t match what?”
“TheSocietypatterns Sypher and Nav identified in their sections.” I pulled up the comparison charts and turned my phone toward him. “The timing’s wrong. The amounts don’t correlate. The shell corporations Arizona used aren’t connected to knownSocietyfronts.”
Morpheus took the phone, his gaze scanning the data with the kind of focus that made him dangerous. He didn’t speak for a long moment, just scrolled through the charts, the spreadsheets, the transaction records.
Finally, he looked up. “You’re saying Arizona wasn’t working for theSociety.”
“I’m saying the shit in my portion of the ledge is separate,” I clarified. “Whether he was workingforthem or just operating in parallel, I don’t know. But that”—I gestured at the phone—“isn’tSocietymoney. That is something else.”
