Ounce nods, arms folding across his chest. "I'll make sure whoever's on rotation knows. Clean plate, no confrontation. We find where he sleeps before we decide how he wakes up."
The temperature in the kitchen drops, and nobody touched the thermostat.
Ruger nods once. "Prospect."
The word lands differently this morning. Not dismissive. Direct.
"You and Krypton keep working on the network threat. I want whoever's in our system found before they leak again." He pauses. "Creedy is a separate problem. I'll handle the operational side. You keep your woman safe and your head on the tech."
Your woman.
He said it without emphasis. The way you'd say your bike or your room. A statement of fact, already accepted, already woven into how the club sees the world.
Saylor is mine. The club knows. And the club protects what belongs to its brothers, even its prospects.
I grab my laptop from my room and knock on Krypton's door before the officers have finished their second cups.
I give him the rundown and soon enough, we've been at it for five hours. The tripwire system is logging every probe, every ping, every phantom access attempt. The data is stacking up.
"They're getting sloppy." Krypton taps his monitor with a nicotine-stained finger, pointing to a cluster of attempts from the last forty-eight hours. "Same entry point, four times in two days."
I pull up the proxy chain on my laptop. "Or they're testing to see if we patched the vulnerability."
He tilts his head, considering. "That's worse."
I crack my neck. "That's smarter."
We work through the afternoon. I trace proxy bounces while Krypton monitors the live feed, both of us running on fumes and the grim focus of men who know time is running out.
Somewhere around hour four, Krypton leans back in his chair and rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms.
"Kid." He says it differently than the officers do. His version sounds like an older mechanic talking to an apprentice who's finally stopped breaking things. "You've got a gift for this. Fifteen years I've been in this room, and I couldn't have built that tripwire."
I don't respond. Compliments from brothers aren't something you acknowledge. You absorb them and keep working.
"But you need sleep." He points at the circles under my eyes. "You can't run two operations on zero rest. Something's gonna slip."
"Nothing's gonna slip."
"That's what sleep-deprived people always say." He turns to his monitor. "Right before something slips."
He's not wrong. My thoughts are clear, my focus is sharp, but the margins are razor-thin.
One missed alert, one trace I don't follow fast enough, and the intruder disappears.
One night I'm not at Backroads and Creedy shows up, and Saylor is alone in a parking lot with a man who did twelve years for hurting women.
Both of those thoughts live in my skull full-time now. They take shifts.
My phone buzzes every forty minutes.
Saylor:
At class. Walked with a group.
At Mom's for lunch. Doors locked.
Heading to Backroads. Tildie's picking me up.