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Chapter 1
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— Glitch —
The screens never lied. People did. My father taught me that early, with his wandering eye and righteous denials, my mother crying in the kitchen while he swore she was imagining things.
Screens showed what was there. Data didn’t gaslight you. Footage didn’t ask you to doubt your own perception. The truth sat in the pixels, waiting to be found.
I ran a hand through my hair, pushing the longer strands back from my face. The silver was more noticeable now, streaking through the dark at my temples. My mother would have laughed, said it was karma for all the stress I’d caused her as a teenager, sneaking out at night to hit hacker meetups and nearly getting arrested twice before I was eighteen.
She wasn’t around to laugh anymore. Heart attack. Quick, the doctors said. Painless. Bullshit. Everything was painful. Especially the things that happened too fast to process.
I focused on the feeds in front of me. Six screens, twelve angles, covering the clubhouse and the property around it. Motion sensors, heat signatures, plate recognition on the main gate. The same wall carried Venom Virtues, the panic button I’d wired straight back to this room, Austen’s bar across town and every contract that had turned the club’s security work into a real business. All of it routed home. To me. I’d built the system piece by piece from the day I prospected.
Until nothing could get past me.
The ops room was my domain. Built out properly once the gun money turned clean—towers humming under the desk, a whiteboard, a chair I spent more hours in than my own bed. The brothers joked that I lived in here, and they weren’t entirely wrong.
The clock in the corner of my main monitor read 5:47 PM. Thirteen minutes until family dinner, and Wren wasn’t back yet. She’d popped into town to shop hours ago, and I hadn’t heard the door go or her voice calling out that she was home. Not even a text to say she was back in the clubhouse.
We’d never bothered with a house out on club land like the others. I liked being close to work—ten seconds from this chair—and Wren had never minded. So we’d taken the room next to the ops room and made it ours: one big open space, a huge bed, an ensuite, and a connecting door to the ops room that never got locked. It worked.
She was the only person who could pull me out of that chair without asking twice. The only one I’d given every code to. I knew her step in the hall, the sound she made when she was trying not to laugh, how she’d reach for me in her sleep and settle the second her hand found me.
Two and a half years, and I still couldn’t believe it. Wren was shy. Careful. She’d spent her whole life deciding who got to see the real her, and the answer was almost nobody. Then she took one look at a paranoid hacker with silver in his hair and decided I was hers.
I glanced at the whiteboard, at the one line in the corner. Wren’s handwriting, tighter and rounder than mine, two hearts drawn underneath: Tonight…IWYTFMUIS My reply sat under it in my own scrawl: LMEYP.
Wren had started it two months in, with a filthy note left on my whiteboard. Nobody in the clubhouse clocked it. Right up until Colt read one of my texts to Wren out loud at family dinner and asked her what it meant. Wren told him exactly what it meant. I’d never seen a man drop a fork that fast. Handful had clocked the shorthand on my whiteboard for what it was then—and none of my brothers had been able to look at that corner of the room since.
Grown men. Men who’ve done things that would put them away for life. Terrified of a whiteboard.
A notification pinged on my encrypted channel. The one I used for sensitive intel, open only to contacts I’d vetted personally.
Nothing reached my screen unscanned. A dozen passes before I laid eyes on it, sorted three ways—safe, suspect, burn it. This one came back safe. No executable payload. No malware. Safe to open did not mean true. I knew the difference.
The message was simple: Thought you should see this. Sorry, brother.
An MP4 was attached: forglitch.mp4. Not a hash or a string of numbers. My name. Routed through a stack of proxies.
No name on it either. Nothing good came down that channel unsigned. I opened it anyway, because seeing it first was my job.
It loaded.
Wren.
My Wren.
Naked on a bed beneath another man.
The sound of her voice filled the room, breathy and desperate in a way I knew intimately. The way she sounded when I touched her. When she trusted me completely.
But those sounds weren’t for me.
They were for him. The man in the video, his hands running over her body like he owned it. Like he had every right to touch her, to taste her, to make her cry out.
Four minutes. The video was four minutes long, and I watched every second of it.
