Accessed the financial directory. Logged out clean.
No trace, no flag, no alert triggered because whoever did this knew the system well enough to move without tripping a wire.
Someone was in the club's network at three in the morning from an unknown location, and they went straight for the money.
My pulse picks up. I pull the IP and run it through a geolocation tool.
The result comes back bounced through two proxies, which means whoever this is didn't want to be found. Not a glitch. Not a brother logging in from a new phone.
Deliberate access by someone who shouldn't have had it.
I check the financial directory itself. Nothing missing, nothing altered.
They looked, but they didn't take anything. Which in my opinion is worse, because taking is a crime of opportunity. Looking is reconnaissance.
Someone is mapping the club's digital layout the way you map a building before you rob it.
I screenshot the logs, save them to an encrypted file, close the laptop, lean back in my chair, and stare at the ceiling.
Ruger asked me to keep an eye on it. Which means someone else flagged something too, or he's hearing chatter, or his instincts are running ahead of the evidence the way they always do.
The kid who let the leak in. The prospect who handed the keys to a girl with a pretty smile and an agenda.
This time, if something's coming through the gate, I'm going to see it first.
I open the laptop again and start building a better tripwire.
CHAPTER THREE
Saylor
The letter has been in the drawer for over a week now.
Over a week of making coffee, standing at the counter, and not opening the drawer.
Nights of lying in bed knowing it's ten feet away, folded inside an envelope with no return address, sitting between a stack of takeout menus and a rubber band ball I've been growing since sophomore year.
I feel like it breathes in there.
Logically, I know it doesn't. Paper doesn't breathe, but the presence of it fills the apartment the way a sound does.
Low and constant, the hum of a refrigerator you stop hearing until someone turns it off.
Finally, I open the drawer.
The envelope is where I left it. Blocky capital letters. Blue ballpoint.
My name in his handwriting, which used to be on birthday cards and permission slips, and the note he left in my lunchbox in third grade that said ‘Have a good day, Sailor’ with the wrong spelling because he never could keep the a and the i straight.
I slide my finger under the flap and pull out two pages.
Lined paper, torn carefully from a legal pad. Both sides filled.
My hands are steady. I'm proud of them for it.
His writing is smaller than I remember. Cramped.
The letters lean to the right like they're in a hurry to get somewhere, and I wonder if handwriting changes in prison the way everything else does.