Biker’s Temptation

The Plan

Kane drew it out on paper.

Not a whiteboard, not a shared screen, actual paper with an actual pen, and watching him do it told me something about how he thought. He worked in straight lines with clear labels and no decorative detail, the kind of map a person makes when they have been making maps their whole life and have long since stopped needing them to be anything other than functional.

Four columns. Four targets.

WEBB. CALLUM. MERIDIAN OPERATIONS. THE COMPOUND LEAK.

“We move on all fours simultaneously,” Kane said. “Sequentially, it gives Eleanor time to respond between each move. If she finds out we’ve touched one, she burns the others. We take everything off the board at once or we don’t take it at all.”

“That requires splitting into four teams,” Ryker said.

“Yes.”

“We’re thin about people we’re certain about right now.”

“I know.” Kane’s pen moved to the COMPOUND LEAK column. “Which is why this one gets resolved today. Before we move on to anything else.”

“How,” Asher said.

“The burner phone Ryker pulled last night. We send a message from it. Something that looks like an update from whoever planted it. Something that requires a response.” Kane looked at Ryker. “Can you make it look like it came from the original source.”

“Already spoofed,” Ryker said. “I’ve been sitting on it since six this morning waiting for someone to say exactly that.”

Jasper leaned forward. “What do we send?”

“Something that requires physical movement,” Kane said. “Whoever the leak is, they’ve been careful. They haven’t moved overtly because they haven’t needed to. We give them a reason to move, and we watch where they go.”

The room was quiet for a moment while everyone turned it over.

“It works,” Donovan said, with the tone of someone who recognized the method from the other side of it.

Kane looked at him. “It should. Your mother invented it.”

Donovan absorbed that without expression. “She’ll be proud.”

I looked at the four columns and thought about my father sitting in an office in Columbus turning over the same kind of information that was now sitting on Jasper’s laptop, building the same case brick by careful brick, and I made myself use that image as fuel rather than weight.

“Vera Callum,” I said. “Who approaches her.”

“Someone she has no reason to associate with the Saints or with Meridian,” Kane said. His pen tapped the CALLUM column once. “Someone who can present the evidence of her unwitting involvement in a way that reads as an opportunity rather than a threat.”

“You’re still thinking about sending me,” I said.

“I think you are the most qualified person in this room for that specific conversation,” Kane said. “You are not a Saint. You have no criminal record. You are a woman whose father was killed by the network Callum unknowingly protected. That is not a threat. That is a testimony.”

I looked at the table. He wasn’t wrong. That was the thing about Kane Voss, he was rarely wrong about the tactical shape of a situation, which made it very difficult to argue with him even when the argument had personal merit.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “But I want someone with me.”

“You’ll have someone with you,” he said, in a tone that suggested someone was already decided and was probably himself.

Asher took the WEBB column. He said it flatly and without elaboration and nobody in the room disputed it. Webb had seven documented victims and at least one of them had a connection to Asher that I didn’t know the full shape of yet but that I understood was the reason his jaw had done what it did when the number seven was said aloud.

Ryker took the MERIDIAN OPERATIONS column with two Saints he vouched for personally, men he had known for a decade whose names had never appeared anywhere near the compound leak.

Jasper would stay behind with the drive and the laptop and coordinate across all four teams in real time.

“And Griff,” I said.

Everyone looked at Kane.

“Griff works with Jasper,” Kane said. “Inside the compound. Supervised.” He said it without cruelty and without softness, the way he said everything, like a man who has learned that clarity is its own form of respect. “He has information we need and he has six years of demonstrated loyalty that counts for something even now. What he does with the next forty-eight hours will tell us what the six years after that look like.”

Griff, who had been standing near the back wall silent for the entire meeting, nodded once.

The meeting broke into motion and I found myself in the corridor again, this time with Kane falling into step beside me rather than in front of or behind me. It was a small thing but I noticed it.

“You’re worried about Callum,” he said.

“I’m worried about saying the wrong thing and losing her before she decides to cooperate.”

“You won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you held this room together yesterday without raising your voice once,” he said. “I know you asked Asher directly whether he sent that message and I know he answered you honestly when he might not have answered me the same way. And I know you read Donovan correctly twice on the same day when he was actively trying not to be read.” He stopped walking and turned to look at me. “You know how to talk to people, Wren. You know how to make them feel like the truth is safe with you. That is not a skill you can teach. Either you have it or you don’t.”

I looked up at him. Kane was not a tall man in the way that announces itself immediately, but he was solid in a way that the space around him seemed to register, like the air arranged itself slightly differently in his vicinity.

“Is that your version of a pep talk,” I said.

“It’s my version of accurate information,” he said.

“It was also kind.”

He looked at me for a moment. “Don’t tell anyone.”

I almost smiled. “Your secret is safe with me.”

He held my gaze for one beat longer than strictly necessary and then turned and walked back toward the situation room and I stood in the corridor for a moment with the warmth of that extra beat sitting in my chest like a coal that had no intention of going out.

Forty-eight hours.

Four columns.

One chance to finish what my father started.

I went to get ready