Rock… hard place. Repeat.
I pull up again just as Nitro appears in the doorway. He doesn’t say anything immediately, which is how I know it’s serious. Nitro is not a man who uses silence as a preamble. He fills space. Takes up room with his voice the same way he takes up room with his body, automatically, without thinking about it. The fact that he is just standing in the doorway, arms crossed, waiting for me to come down from the bar, tells me everything and nothing all at once.
I drop, land clean, and grab the towel off the bench, swiping the sweat beading across my temple. “What’s up?”
“Sin needs you in his office…” He pauses. “Ghost found something.”
Letting out a huff, I don’t ask what. There’s no point asking when the answer is going to be given to me in a room with thedoor closed, and I’ve learned in two years prospecting with this club that the things handled behind closed doors are handled that way for a reason.
My boots thump with a heavy thud, my mood darker these days than it normally is. Having to be closer to Millie the past couple of days and having to fight every fucking urge inside me to stay away from her is a new kind of hell.
So, I am already frustrated.
Exercise was supposed to help.
It’snotfucking helping.
Sin’s office is quieter than the rest of the clubhouse, the kind of quiet that presses in around you when the door shuts, and the ambient noise of the main room disappears. Ghost is already sitting at the table with a laptop open in front of him, wearing that same dead-eyed focus he gets whenever he’s figured out something ugly and is seconds away from dropping it in someone else’s lap.
That person clearly is me in this shitty scenario.
Sin stands behind his desk with his arms folded and his poker chip moving between his fingers at a pace that tells me his mind is going faster than the room currently reflects.
I pull up my position at the wall, and I look at each of them in turn.
Waiting.
“I ran the routine security audit on the mine’s financial records last night,” Ghost begins, his voice steady and methodical, the way it always is when he’s laying something out brick by brick. “I do it quarterly. Looking for anything that might indicate our extraction arrangement has been flagged, cross-referenced, anything that could put the club’s operation at risk.” He turns the laptop so the screen faces me. “What I found wasn’t about us.”
I step forward and look at the spreadsheet pulled up on the screen. Numbers, dates, a column of figures that repeat at consistent intervals across what appears to be several years’ worth of records.
“There’s a secondary extraction stream,” Ghost continues. “Gold leaving the mine above the club’s agreed monthly quota. It’s not a lot in any single month, but it’s consistent, deliberate, and it leaves no record in Jonas’ official books.”
I study the screen. “So someone’s taking extra?”
“Someone has been taking extra foryears,”Ghost says, and he lets that land before he keeps going. “I traced the payments it generates to a shell account. Three companies deep in the ownership structure, which is about average for someone trying to make sure nothing comes back to them.” He reaches over and clicks through to another window on the screen, this one showing a web of company names and account numbers that branch out like roots. “But the architecture of how it’s built, the way the shell companies are layered and connected, I’ve seen this pattern before. When we were tracking the Alliance’s casino money after the Strip incident.”
The room goes very still.
I lean back against the wall. My eyes move from the screen to Ghost, and then to Sin, who has stopped moving the poker chip entirely.
“You’re saying this is definitely the Hidden Hand Alliance?” I say slowly.
“I’m saying the fingerprints are consistent with their front organization structure,” Ghost replies, because Ghost doesn’t overstate. He gives you exactly what the evidence supports, not a syllable more. “But yes. Someone has been routing payments from the mine’s unrecorded gold directly into an account that traces back to the Alliance.”
There is a beat of silence that sits heavy in the room, the kind that arrives when everyone present is individually processing the same conclusion from their own angle.
Sin unfolds his arms and leans forward with his hands flat on the desk. “Jonas wasn’t in business with them,” he says, his voice measured and precise, reading the situation the way Sin always reads situations, from the inside out and the bottom up. “He was buying freedom.”
Ghost nods. “The amounts support that. A partner gets a percentage. These are fixed figures. Regular intervals. The kind of number someone pays to keep a problem from escalating rather than the kind of number that represents a profit share.”
I look at Sin. “Extortion.”
“Consistent with it, yes,” Ghost says.
I press my thumb against my bottom lip and sit with that for a moment. The numbers on the screen are just numbers until they aren’t, until you understand what they represent, which is a man paying, month after month, year after year, in deliberate silence, for something he never intended to be part of, to keep an arrangement that threatened his family from becoming something worse.
Jonas McClane has been paying the Hidden Hand Alliance, without a word to the club, without a word to anyone, for long enough that the payments have their own tidy column in the mine’s hidden financial record. He has been running his business and his end of the arrangement with the club, shaking Sin’s hand at events with that polished composure and those exhausted eyes, arranging the monthly extraction that funds the club’s operations, and simultaneously cutting payments to the same organization that once kidnapped his daughter and threatened to take her again, reducing her to something unspeakable.
