Page 19 of Cipher

She gave me a knowing look before wrapping me in a tight hug. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” I murmured, squeezing her back.

When she pulled away, her gaze darted to Cipher’s hand still resting at my lower back, then to my face. The corner of her mouth tipped up, but she didn’t call me out in front of him.

Linking her arm through mine, she urged, “Come on. You look like you need food.”

“I’ll be close.” Cipher’s hand fell away from my back. “But you’re safe here.”

The quiet promise followed me as Jacqueline steered me across the main room and through the swinging door into the kitchen. Mara and Dot were already there, Black Crowns old ladies who had welcomed Jacqueline with open arms.

Mara was scrambling eggs, and Dot was pulling plates down from a cabinet. As soon as they saw me, both women stopped what they were doing.

Dot crossed the room to pull me in for a quick hug. “We heard what happened with the tracker.”

“Sit.” Mara pointed at a chair. “You’re eating before anyone asks you another question.”

My stomach growled, and I suddenly realized how hungry I was. Which was a good thing, since a plate piled with eggs, toast, and fresh fruit quickly appeared in front of me, along with a glass of orange juice.

Jacqueline took the chair beside me while Mara and Dot hovered, peppering me with soft questions about whether I’d slept and if I needed anything from the store. I hadn’t been fussed after like this since my mom passed, and I appreciated their genuine concern.

I was still in danger, but at least I wasn’t facing it alone.

7

CIPHER

Leaving Bex in the clubhouse kitchen required more discipline than it should have, even with Jacqueline beside her, Mara and Dot determined to feed her into a coma, and several of my brothers and prospects lounging in the common room where they could see both the kitchen and front entrances.

She was inside the most heavily protected property in Sable Canyon, surrounded by men who already understood that anything threatening her would face the full weight of the Black Crowns, but every instinct I possessed still objected when the swinging door closed between us.

I forced myself to walk away. My office sat behind a biometric lock and steel-lined walls on the quieter side of the clubhouse. There was also a central operations room that held encrypted radios, surveillance controls, hardened servers, and the equipment we used when club business needed to disappear from networks nobody trusted. Two smaller offices offered enough privacy for work that didn’t belong on the main screens.

I retrieved a sealed handset, an authentication token, and a compact emergency beacon from the equipment vault, then locked myself in my office before opening the evidence pouch containing Bex’s old phone. If someone took this small window to trace her location, they’d be real fucking disappointed.

I had already created a read-only image of the device before sealing it, allowing me to rebuild the personal parts of her life without dragging any hidden access into the replacement. The shit she needed moved through separate scans before reaching the clean phone, while every active session tied to her accounts was terminated. Each vulnerable password was replaced with something no one would guess or force from recycled data. I removed location sharing she didn’t know was active, killed advertising identifiers that followed her between applications, and routed the new handset through a protected number that wouldn’t appear in any record.

Her old number remained active, but Bex would never use it again. I transferred it into an isolated virtual receiver that couldn’t reach the club network, Black Castle systems, or anything connected to her replacement phone. Shutting the line down would tell the people hunting her that we’d recognized the threat, but leaving it open gave them a place to expose themselves without ever reaching my woman. Anyone calling or messaging the number would believe it still belonged to her, while every attempt would be captured.

A knock sounded before Bishop entered, carrying a prospect application. He set the file beside my keyboard and pointed to military-service dates that overlapped with a county jail record the applicant had omitted. It took less than a minute to confirm that the man had used his dead brother’s discharge papers to manufacture a Special Forces history he’d never earned, and the hardening in Bishop’s face told me the prospect would not make it beyond the outer gate again.

“Anything else?” I asked, closing the falsified record and sliding the file back to him.

“Not unless you want to explain to the motherfucker why lying about a dead Green Beret was a bad fucking idea.”

“No.”

Bishop tucked the file under one arm. “Thought so.”

Nomad arrived before the door shut behind him, needing six encrypted radios and tracking modules for the teams watching Stowe’s vehicles and the county employees with privileged access. I loaded the current keys, assigned the units to the operation, and passed them over with instructions to rotate frequencies before every shift. Club work continued around me without waiting for Bex’s crisis to become convenient, which was how it always was. Men still needed vetting, routes still needed securing, and every brother relying on our communications expected me to make certain nobody else was listening.

Ghost came to collect the equipment from Nomad while I was fitting Bex’s new phone into a protective case. His dark eyes moved from the sealed device to my face, and the slow shift at one corner of his mouth warned me he’d found something entertaining in the middle of a situation that wasn’t. “That hands-off plan didn’t live long.”

“It was based on flawed assumptions.” I inserted the encrypted authentication key and waited for the device to recognize it.

Ghost took the radio case from the desk. “That’s a lot of syllables for saying you were full of shit.”

“Fuck off.”