I walked toward the shoulder of the road slowly, trying to see it the way she would have. Trying to put myself where she stood.
Right here.
My boots crunched through gravel as I stepped into the spot where the tire tracks had dug into the dirt. I looked down the road one way and then the other. Nothing but empty highway stretching out in both directions.
I rubbed a hand down the back of my neck and exhaled slowly.
“Where’d you go, baby?”
The wind answered me, a soft rush through dry grass.
Bex didn’t have a lot of friends, not really. She had work, she had people she knew at the hospital and she had me.
As far as I knew.
That thought feels intrusive and yet… The truth is… I never really asked.
Bex always kept her world small and I think I liked that. I liked that I was her entire world.
She didn’t go to the bar nights unless I dragged her along. She didn’t chase attention or status inside the club.
She just wanted me, my time and attention.
She liked to lay low.
Back then I thought that was just her personality, but now I’m starting to realize it might have been something else entirely.
I walked another few steps along the road, scanning the ground like I expected to find some kind of sign we missed before. But there wasn’t anything, just dust, wind and the echo of the last place anyone knew my wife had been alive.
I stood there longer than I meant to. Long enough for the sun to dip a little lower and the wind to pick up across the open land. Then finally I turned back toward the bike.
Because standing there wasn’t going to bring her back and we had work to do.
Cypher had been buried in his computers since the night Bex disappeared.
The first thing he tried to pull was the compound camera feeds, at first he thought the system glitched, but the more he dug the worse it looked.
The entire night Bex left?
Gone.
Every camera angle covering the yard, the main entrance, the side drive. Just… blank space.
At first we thought whoever did it only wiped that night, but Cypher kept digging and he started noticing holes on other days. Random gaps. Moments missing, short clips that didn’t match the surrounding time stamps.
Someone hadn’t just erased that night, they had been inside our systems for a while now. Cypher didn’t say much when he realized that. Just leaned back in his chair and rubbed his jaw.
“Someone’s been watching us,” he said finally. “And covering their tracks.”
But we all knew it set him off, that he didn't like the fact that someone was messing around in his territory and he missed it. Since then he’d had multiple programs running in the background. A code he had developed to try reverse engineer the erased data on the camera and track whoever did it. Facial recognition searches, banking records, traffic cameras, hospital logs… anytime he found a thread, he created a program to dig into it. He had code crawling through every database he could reach, looking for anything tied to Mara or Bex.
Angel had cleaned out the club girls from the compound. After they were cleared and Four talked to Marisol, he wanted them gone.
Lacey, one of the younger club girls, had approached Cypher on the way out offering him one of her codes she’d developed in school. Something about her being a computer whizz. At first he refused her help, until he tested her code. Now she sits beside him day and night running through the data breach of the club.
Every spare minute someone in the club wasn’t working… They were looking. We still had businesses to run. Legal ones and a few that rode closer to the line of… not. But compared to some clubs we kept our noses a lot cleaner.
That didn’t stop the pressure building around us, especially after Spike decided to escalate things. One of Preacher’s men ended up dead a few days after the night Bex worked the ER shift. Retaliation, Spike called it.Payback for the brother we lost.