Page 44 of Axle
His palm slid from my back to my stomach, covering it completely. “Our kid’s making sure you remember who you both belong to. Me.”
“Sounds a lot like someone else I know,” I muttered.
He brushed his lips against my damp temple. “’Cause he takes after me.”
That fierce note in his voice did something ridiculous to my pulse. I managed a weak eye roll. “Pretty sure it’s not a badass biker. Yet.”
His mouth curved slightly, but the heat in his gaze didn’t fade. He stood, hauling me up with him like I weighed nothing, and carried me straight into the shower.
The steam was warm, but his hands were even hotter, gliding over me in slow, thorough sweeps—part comfort, part claim. Every now and then, his thumb would stroke across my hip, and I couldn’t tell if it was meant to soothe me or remind me I was his. Probably both.
By the time we stepped out, my stomach had settled. He wrapped me in a towel, then did the same for himself before pressing a kiss to my temple.
“Get dressed while I grab you some herbal tea, angel. Headed to Jax’s office, and I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
With the help of the warm drink I’d sipped while Mason watched, the nausea was still at bay when we got to Jax’s office. Judging by the look of the room, he’d been busy while I slept. All of the screens were lit up, half-empty coffee mugs sat in random clusters, and wires snaked over the floor like a maze.
Mason steered me inside with his hand on my lower back, making me ultra-aware of his presence. Jax barely looked up from his main monitor before dragging a file window across one screen and expanding a grainy video feed.
“Thought you’d want to see this for yourself.”
His tone was clipped, and I mentally braced myself for what he was about to show us.
The angle was security-cam high, looking down on a sleek glass office, focused on a perfectly coiffed woman in a tailored suit, leaning across her desk toward a man I didn’t know. Her voice carried even through the tinny audio. “Take care of him. I don’t want any loose ends.”
Then she slid a folder across the desk and signed a document with a flourish, her penmanship so distinct I could see the loops and angles even on the pixelated screen. My stomach knotted.
“That’s Bellatrix Creed, in her own words, tying herself to the hit,” Jax said. “And that signature matches her contracts.”
“At least it doesn’t look like it’s the paperwork for the one she put out on me,” I mumbled, clenching my fists since I couldn’t climb through the screen and strangle her like I wanted. “What about Elias Leek? Did he confess to everything last night, and that’s how you found this?”
Mason led me over to a chair and lowered me onto it. “Turns out, he’s a whistleblower, just like we thought.”
After he gave me a quick run of what had gone down while I was sleeping, Jax flicked to another screen with spreadsheets, bank routing codes, and offshore account numbers scrolling past. “She’s prepping to disappear. Scrubbing her identity, consolidating her assets offshore. The second she sells The Ledger, she’s gone.”
Gone, with her empire intact. While everyone she’d burned was left with the wreckage—the ones who were lucky enough to survive, anyway.
I clenched my jaw so hard my teeth ached. “We can’t let that happen.”
“She’s going down,” Mason confirmed, deadly determination shining from his hazel orbs.
Before I could respond, Jax’s phone lit up. He accepted the call in speaker mode, and Deviant’s voice came through.
“Got something. That drop Ashlynn was supposed to make? You know the instructions were tampered with before they ever reached her. But it turns out, Bellatrix didn’t squeeze the broker. She found a mole in his network and blackmailed them into giving up the info on Axle’s girl.”
As much as I enjoyed how he so easily referred to me as Mason’s, that skin still went cold. “So I was never…?”
“You were bait,” Deviant finished. “She wanted the drive and used the drop to smoke out who had it. But she never wanteda public failure. Skulls were there for the same reason because Bellatrix put out the bounty on you to all the mercenaries she had contact with, figuring one of them would come through and probably kill the others in the process. Only the suits got there first.”
I wasn’t just a loose end. Or in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’d marked me from the get-go. Designed the whole damn thing so I’d walk straight into her sights.
“It was also a private show.”
“A show?” Mason growled.
Jax exhaled harshly and ripped the ball cap off his head, slamming it down onto the desk.
“For the buyers,” he guessed.
