Page 7 of Duchess (Royal Harlots MC: National New York Chapter #1)

Duchess

O bsidian’s place was the kind of chaos that made sense only to her.

Every cord, every wire, every neon-lit gadget looked like it had been salvaged from a cyberpunk apocalypse.

The scent of coffee grinds, burnt plastic, and something sweet…

maybe patchouli, maybe just her perfume, but it clung to the air like static.

The low hum from the dozens of machines filled the space, vibrating through my boots and into every one of my nerves.

Her apartment was one floor above a boarded-up pawn shop in East Hollywood, and it looked like a bunker mated with a nightclub and gave birth to a war room.

“So do you think you can help me?"

"You brought me a hot laptop, probably with a tracker on it, into my home, and now you ask for help!"

"Come on, Obsidian, help me out here."

"You don't fuck with shit like this, Stephanie. This is how people like us get killed."

"Yeah, well, this is how I see us surviving."

Black Obsidian's real name was Elizabeth Pemberton. She was a hacker by trade. The woman knew the ins and outs of a computer like she knew the palm of her hand. She could open back doors to banks, create new identities, and had access to any surveillance camera in the world.

The Turks liked to use women to handle their most private affairs.

Why?

Because we were considered expendable and easy to kill.

We also scared easy, in their eyes. So both Elizabeth and I were used as pawns with a target on our heads when things went wrong.

The only problem with that, was that they didn't know who they had hired.

I was rebellious as fuck and grew up knowing how to work my way around men like Caleb Killic and the Turks.

When I first met Elizabeth, she had been afraid to speak to me.

I couldn't blame her. They'd been tracking and molding her since she was sixteen.

But as time passed by, we grew closer, until we both realized we were in the same boat with no escape.

We were both under the watchful eye of the Turks and there was no way out.

At least that's what they made us believe.

But Elizabeth was smart. Smarter than any Turkish mobster, and she had all sorts of tricks up her sleeve that helped to make sure our conversations always remained confidential.

Her apartment was a fortress of surveillance cameras and noise canceling equipment.

She was the only one of us who could actually become invisible, yet she was too afraid to.

The Turks had her little brother threatened and she would do anything to keep him alive.

If we were gonna do this, then I needed to convince her that he'd be safe.

"You're fucking insane!"

I nodded. "Yeah, well, it comes with the job. And it also comes with dating a douchebag who left me with nothing. Everything is right here in this damn laptop, Obsidian, and you're the only one who can help me. Are you in or out?"

"I'm not like you, Stephanie. I don't have a family who has the firepower to watch my back. I've got a little boy who's counting on me."

"And he'll be safe. I promise I will keep him safe.

But I need your help right now. You're the only one with the access.

This can't wait. Right now, Killic is trying to figure out what the hell Alan was hiding.

All we need to know is hidden in here. We have twenty-four hours tops before he catches up with me. "

“How can we trust that he hasn't already found you?”

“Because he let me run,” I said quietly. “He likes the chase.”

“What he likes is your curvy ass. If you're not careful he may just catch you one of these days.”

“Over my dead body.”

She shrugged. “He may just enjoy that.”

She gave out a nervous laugh before s he placed a hand on her forehead and plopped down in her chair behind her desk.

LED lights coiled across the ceiling in shifting violet and red tones, casting her leather-strewn desk in a surreal glow.

A pair of old-school speakers flanked her triple-screen monitor setup, low techno beats thrummed through them like a steady pulse.

Obsidian curled herself into her purple game chair, dark hair piled up in a messy twist, glasses sliding down her nose as she cracked her knuckles and cracked her neck like she was about to dive into a cage fight.

Sighing, she turned to me. "My brother's life depends on you."

I nodded. "You can trust me.”

“I hope so,” she whispered.

I placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezing it reassuringly. “Do it."

The moment she plugged in, a cascade of encrypted prompts lit up the screen.

She muttered something about dead-man switches and foolproof firewalls, but none of it stopped her.

She was a codebreaker. And Alan’s so-called secure files never stood a fucking chance.

I watched as she worked her magic. Her manicured fingernails danced across the keys as each stroke brought us closer to finding out his secret.

Hours passed.

Her muttering turned into a slew of curses in not just one language.

I was pretty sure I heard Russian and Spanish there as well.

She shouted at one point, flipped the bird at the screen, then downed a shot of something clear from a flask she kept in a lit up skull-shaped cup.

I sat across from her on a battered leather couch, picking at a tear in my jeans, watching every tic in her body.

I could tell she didn’t like what she was finding. Her jaw was tight, her back stiff.

“What is it?” I asked nervously.

Slowly, she leaned back, shoving her glasses up and pinching the bridge of her nose. Her dark eyes found mine and they looked sharper than the knife I kept strapped to my thigh.

“I’ve secured it,” she said, voice raspy from too much caffeine and not enough air. “Now what do you want to know?”

I stood, stretching the tension out of my shoulders, and walked to the screen. “Those surveillance stills. The ones Alan had hidden. Can you tell me where they came from?”

Obsidian cracked her knuckles again and began hammering the keys. The glow of the screen flared brighter, lines of code racing faster than I could read. Her fingers paused, clicked, and a new window opened. The screen flickered once… twice… and then a satellite image popped up.

It was a birds-eye view of a shipping yard. Crates lined up with shadows of figures moving between them. Time-stamped and geo-tagged, the images were fresh. Less than forty-eight hours old.

"It's an abandoned shipyard in East Los Angeles."

"Can you get access to those cameras?"

She smirked smugly and I rolled my eyes at her but leaned in as she clicked on the screen. "Already on it."

The video footage came up and we both watched as crates were being brought up to the garage doors. One after the other.

"Are those motorcycles?"

"Holy shit," my eyes went wide as I realized millions of dollars in assets were locked up in that garage. “He was watching the drop.”

She turned in her chair, eyes wide now. “No, babe. He wasn’t just watching it… he was planning to intercept it. He logged everything. Crate numbers, routes, shipping manifests. Alan was about to rip the Turks off big time.”

My stomach turned to stone.

And the worst part? He almost pulled it off.

Obsidian tapped another few keys. “Looks like a lot of money, babe. But there’s more in here. You want it all?”

I nodded slowly. “I need to find out how Alan was moving this product and exactly how much is in the account. Can you dig in deeper?”

“I can try to retrace his steps, but it may take a few hours.”

“We don’t have a few hours.”

“You gotta gimme some time, Steph. This isn’t easy.”

I sighed. I had very little patience but right now, my life depended on her.

She went to work as I paced her apartment nervously.

Caleb could barge in at any second, asking questions and threatening us for answers.

He wouldn't kill us, not right away. But he would torture until he got what he wanted. He’d already cornered me, and I was glad I didn't have any information to give him. I had to admit he wasn’t a good liar, and now I knew more than I should.

My thoughts were interrupted by Obsidian’s yelp. “I found it!”

“Whatcha got?”

“Motherfucker stole twenty-million dollars!” She twirled in her seat to look at me, her eyes wide.

I nodded. “Yeah. Can you get into the account?”

“Easy enough but it looks like Alan was in on it with another source,” she began to type in code again as I slowly stepped away. “I can’t pinpoint who though. All I can see are outgoing messages, not incoming. Whoever he was talking with knows how to hack the system and become invisible.”

Alan had betrayed their trust and Caleb had been onto him. I would bet those fucking twenty million dollars that Caleb was the one who put that bullet in Alan’s head. If not Caleb then someone in that family did. Someone found out and wasn’t saying anything. Or they were keeping it under wraps.

“Shit!” I slammed my hand on the desk and stared out the window.

From Obsidian’s apartment I could see the bare rooftops of the Los Angeles clubs and restaurants in the distance. The city landscape glimmered.

I had a shipment of motorcycles that belonged to the Turks, and I had no idea how to get rid of it. On top of that we were dealing with some heavy hitters if they were able to move that type of product.

“Oh fuck,” Obsidian murmured.

I leaned in over her shoulder just as the screen flickered, a black chat box suddenly appeared. The cursor blinked back at us, steady and taunting.

One question appeared.

Going dark?

The cursor simply blinked as both Obsidian and I glared at the screen.

"Type something," I nudged her.

"Fuck that, it’s your show, you do it."

Our attention went back to the screen as yet another message came through.

Are you willing to play a game, Duchess?

Duchess was how I signed off on transactions in the black market. No one really knew that name unless you were doing business with the Turks.