Biker’s Temptation

Forty-Seven Files

Jasper had not slept.

I could tell by the particular quality of his stillness when I walked into the situation room at seven in the morning. There is the stillness of a rested person and the stillness of a person who has moved so far past tired that their body has simply stopped registering it as a complaint worth making. Jasper was the second kind. He had three empty mugs lined up beside the laptop like a small ceramic monument to the night he had just put behind him.

He looked up when I came in. “Coffee is fresh. Kane made it an hour ago.”

I poured a cup and sat beside him. “Did you crack it?”

“An hour after you went to bed,” He turned the laptop screen toward me. “You should probably see this before the others get here.”

I looked at the screen.

The files were organized into four folders. The first was labeled OPERATIONS and contained what appeared to be years of Meridian’s internal logistics: routes, contacts, dates, quantities, the unglamorous administrative backbone of a criminal network rendered in spreadsheets and encrypted memos. Evidence enough to put Eleanor Hale and a significant number of other people away for a very long time.

The second folder was labeled CALLUM and I understood immediately why Mercer wanted the drive badly enough to send a man in a charcoal suit to a biker compound. Every instruction Eleanor had ever sent Vera Callum was in there, documented in Eleanor’s own words, routed through an intermediary that Callum had clearly believed was a legitimate legal referral service. Vera Callum had not known. The paper trail made that plain. But the paper trail also made plain that the results of her work had benefited Meridian specifically and catastrophically for four years and that proving her ignorance in a courtroom was going to require considerably more than good intentions.

The third folder was labeled WEBB and contained Marcus Webb’s full operational history, including three events that were not logistics and not legal and that I did not read past the first paragraph of before I looked away from the screen.

I put my coffee down.

“I know,” Jasper said quietly.

“How many people,” I said.

“Seven that are documented. Ryker thinks there are more.”

I looked at the window instead of the screen for a moment. Outside, the yard was grey and still and a bird was doing something uncomplicated in the tree by the fence and I focused on that for three deliberate breaths before I looked back.

“What’s in the fourth folder,” I said.

Jasper’s expression shifted in a way I had not seen from him before. Not the dry containment of the previous days. Something more careful.

“The fourth folder is labeled SUTTON,” he said.

The room was very quiet.

“My family,” I said.

“Your father,” he said. “Specifically.”

I turned the laptop back toward me and opened the folder myself because I needed to be the one to do it and Jasper understood that without being told, he simply moved his hands from the keyboard and let me take it.

There were nine files. I opened the oldest one first.

My father’s name was Daniel Sutton and he had been a freight coordinator for a logistics company in Columbus for eleven years and I had known that. What I had not known was that the logistics company had been a Meridian front since its third year of operation and that my father had figured that out in year seven and had spent the following four years quietly, carefully, and at enormous personal risk, copying records.

He had been building a file.

He had been building the same file I was now carrying.

“He didn’t disappear,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected it to. “Eleanor had him removed because he was going to go to the authorities.”

“Yes,” Jasper said.

“How long have you known?”

“Since approximately four thirty this morning.”

I closed the folder. I did not close it because I was finished with it. I closed it because there was a specific amount of information a person could absorb before the body started requesting more time and I had reached that amount.

Jasper did not say anything. He did not tell me he was sorry or that it was going to be alright or reach for me in any way. He simply remained exactly where he was, present and quiet and close enough that his shoulder was almost touching mine, and the almost was its own kind of comfort, the kind that doesn’t ask anything of you while it’s being offered.

After a while, the door opened and Kane walked in, followed by Ryker and then Asher, and behind Asher, Donovan, who stopped when he saw my face and left very still.

“You know,” Donovan said. It was not a question.

“About my father. Yes.”

Donovan sat down heavily in the nearest chair. He looked like a man setting down something he had been carrying for longer than was good for him. “I found out six months ago. I was going to tell you when you arrived but then the timing and the situation and I kept.” He stopped. “There is no justification that doesn’t sound like an excuse.”

“No,” I said. “There isn’t.”

Kane looked at the laptop screen and then at me. His eyes stayed on me for a moment with that particular quality of attention he had, the kind that made you feel seen without feeling exposed.

“What do you want to do,” he said.

It was the right question. Not what should we do or what is the plan but what do you want, directed at me, because whatever was on those forty-seven files, the decision about what happened next belonged first to the person who had paid the highest price for them.

I looked at Kane.

“I want to finish what my father started,” I said.

Nobody in the room argued with that.