Page 15 of Keys

“Earth to Quickshot!” Sweet barked out as he plucked me in the forehead.

“What the fuck, man?”

“I asked you if you’re going to see Keys tonight?”

“Don’t know. It’s not like we schedule dates and shit.”

“They just fuck when it’s convenient.” Spike really wanted my fist down his throat. I turned to see his eyes vibrant and shiny – the way they got when he was up to no good. “I’m thinking if someone else gets there first, they’ll stand a better chance than he will. Might just have to go-” I didn’t let him get another word out before my fist connected with his jaw.

“Stay away from her.”

“Damn, you pussy-whipped idiot,” Sweet yelled. “He was fucking joking to get a rise out of you.”

“Then he got what he asked for.”

“I always get what I ask for because I picked the right woman.” Spike told me as he stood, grinning at me even as he rubbed his jaw to ease the ache my punch had left behind. It took a minute for his words to sink in though.

“What woman?”

“Who?” Sweet asked at the same time. Spike shrugged his shoulders and sauntered off toward the bar instead of answering. “It’s like a fucking soap opera around here.” Sweet growled the words out before he knocked me in the shoulder with a solid punch. “We have work to do.”

I jumped up and followed him down the hall to the room we had converted into our war room. It wasn’t the same as church, this one was for officers only whereas the place we used for church was larger to accommodate full members as well.

“What’s going on?” I asked while taking the seat I’d claimed for myself. My laptop was already in the bag I carried on my shoulder, and it wasn’t your run of the mill piece of computer equipment. The damn thing could work miracles, even on the bullshit mountain internet we had in this area.

Sweet closed the door to the office, locked it, and then took the seat next to me instead of his usual position at the head of the table. “What have you found out?”

It took me a moment to figure out what he was asking. My eyes narrowed on my long-time friend. “Told you that I wasn’t going to fuck her for information.”

“Doesn’t mean you didn’t do a deep dive into her background anyway.”

He wasn’t wrong about that, and I had a duty to my club to report what I’d found, whether I was fucking her or not. “I don’t think she’s a security risk, but I can’t be too sure.”

“Why not?”

“Well, she’s done a pretty damn good job of making sure that her history remained just that.”

“You can uncover anything.”

I shook my head. “Short of her telling us what it is she’s hiding; I don’t think so. Honestly, I don’t think it was totally her doing either. It’s almost like she’s a fucking ghost. “Sarah Keys only has a paper trail going back nine years and it’s scattered at best. Her name was officially changed at that point, but I can’t even find what it was changed from. If I had to guess, she was a part of WITSEC or someone in the program had a hand in scrubbing her new identity from the old.”

“What else was there, besides a name change?”

“She was an emancipated minor.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means she went to the courts and had herself declared legally capable of taking care of herself so that she didn’t have to continue to live with her parents, legal guardian, or whoever’s care she had been in.”

“Maybe she was a ward of the state?”

I shook my head. “Thought of that too. There’s no record that she was ever in the system.”

“Well, there wouldn’t be if you can’t find her real name, right?”

I smirked. “If there was a record of her being there, I’d know her original last name. Keys is real and legal, despite having been changed around the same time she managed to get emancipated.”

“What kind of family did she come from that she not only separated herself legally from them, but took on another name?”

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