Page 8 of Fang (Underground Vengeance MC, NOLA Chapter #3)

The office swims into focus around me. Emergency lights paint everything the color of fresh blood.

Six monitors line the desk before me, each black and lifeless.

My vision blurs at the edges, my body a hollowed-out shell after hours, or maybe days, without proper food or water.

I still don ’ t know how long I was unconscious, but my mind remains razor-sharp, cataloging every detail of Fang’s technological sanctuary as I step inside.

The room smells of electronics—that distinct scent of warm plastic and solder that always feels like home to people like me.

Cables snake across the floor in organized chaos, connecting towers of custom-built hardware that would make most tech companies drool with envy.

This is a hacker’s paradise, built by someone who understands both power and paranoia.

I stride toward the workstation with purpose despite the weakness in my knees.

Each step requires concentration, my body fighting the effects of dehydration and hunger that gnaw at my insides like feral animals.

The concrete floor seems to tilt beneath my feet, but I refuse to stumble.

I won’t give Fang the satisfaction of seeing me falter.

“ Wait.” Fang pulls open a mini fridge tucked next to the desk. He pulls out an electrolyte drink and thrusts it at me. “ Here.”

Grateful for the drink, I grab it. I suck it down, nearly choking on it in the process. I reach for a chair and grip its leather back, steadying myself.

“Everything’s shut down,” he says behind me, his voice tight with controlled anger. “Emergency protocols. I had to kill the power to stop the data exfiltration.”

“Smart move,” I admit, “but we need to turn the computers back on to assess the damage.” Without waiting for permission, I drop into the seat, my fingers already reaching for the keyboard. “Boot sequence?”

A pause, heavy with suspicion, then: “Alt-F7, then the master password.”

I glance over my shoulder, one eyebrow raised. “Which you’re not going to give me.”

His face remains impassive behind those thick-rimmed glasses, but I catch the slightest twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Move.”

I slide over as he reaches around me, his body uncomfortably close as he types a complex string of characters, shielding the keyboard with his massive forearm.

The scent of him—clean sweat, coffee, and something faintly metallic—envelops me for a moment before he straightens and steps back, the Glock still visible in his cut.

The monitors flicker to life one by one, status reports flooding the screens in cascading windows of text.

I scan them quickly, my fingers already moving across the keyboard in a familiar dance.

The cartel’s digital fingerprints are all over these systems—I’d recognize their work anywhere, considering I designed half their attack protocols.

“They’ve breached your primary firewall and established multiple backdoors,” I mutter, opening terminal windows and launching diagnostic programs. “Classic distributed attack pattern—hit from multiple vectors simultaneously, overwhelm the defenses, then slip in through the chaos.”

Fang moves to stand beside me, close enough that I can feel the heat radiating from his body but far enough that he can monitor everything I type. “How bad?”

My fingers never pause as I answer, “Bad. They’ve got hooks in your database servers, your authentication systems, your communications protocols.

” I isolate a particularly nasty piece of code and display it on the center monitor.

“See this? It’s a dormant wiper. Once activated, it would have deleted everything—backups included. ”

I feel rather than see his posture stiffen. “Can you remove it?”

“I’m already on it.” My hands fly across the keyboard, lines of code scrolling past faster than most people could read.

My body may be failing me, but my mind is in its element, processing information and executing commands with machine-like efficiency.

This is where I live—in the space between intention and execution, where thought becomes electric impulse becomes action.

Sweat beads on my forehead despite the cool air. My fingers tremble slightly, not from fear, but from the physical toll of sustained concentration. I blink away the blurriness that threatens my vision, forcing myself to focus.

“They’re using a modified Trojan I helped design,” I say tersely, a bitter smile twisting my lips. “Ironic that I’m now fighting my own code.” The admission costs me nothing—it’s obvious enough from how quickly I’m navigating through the attack infrastructure.

Fang says nothing, but his eyes never leave the screens, watching as I systematically identify and neutralize one malicious process after another.

I can feel his assessment shifting, the weight of his gaze changing from suspicion to something closer to professional respect.

He recognizes skill when he sees it, even if it belongs to someone he considers an enemy.

“There,” I mutter, hitting Enter. “Primary breach contained.” I wipe sweat from my brow with the back of my hand. “Now for the secondary payloads.”

The minutes blur together as I work, each successful countermeasure followed by two more challenges.

It’s like dismantling a bomb with multiple failsafes, each one designed to trigger if the previous is disturbed.

But I know this work intimately—know the minds that created it, know their habits and shortcuts, and know where to look for the hidden traps.

“Almost…” I whisper, more to myself than to Fang, as I track down the final piece of malicious code. My vision doubles momentarily, my body reminding me of its limitations, but I force the weakness away. “Got it.”

The last warning message disappears from the screens, replaced by a system status report showing all services restored and secure. Under normal circumstances, I’d allow myself a moment of satisfaction, maybe even a smile. But these aren’t normal circumstances, and time is running out.

Without pausing, I pivot from defense to offense, my fingers launching new commands before Fang can react.

“What are you doing?” Fang’s voice sharpens as he reaches for the Glock, shifting it into his hand.

“Getting what we both need,” I reply, not looking away from the screens as I navigate through the cartel’s internal-facing servers. Hospital databases appear on one monitor, shipping manifests on another. “You want intel on their operations. I want to find my brother. This is our chance for both.”

I feel Fang move closer, his shadow falling across the keyboard. “I didn’t authorize this.”

My fingers continue typing, racing against invisible clocks. “You didn’t have to.”

For a moment, I think he might pull me bodily from the chair, might decide I’m too dangerous to allow near his systems. But curiosity wins out over caution.

The cartel’s data—their shipping routes, their personnel records, their financial transactions—scrolls across his screens in real-time, a treasure trove of intelligence.

And somewhere in that digital ocean of information swims my brother’s location.

The cartel kept this information hidden from me so they could continue to use me.

They let me visit him, but I was always blindfolded so I didn’t know where we were.

I had never tried to search for him before because I had no way of rescuing him.

Now I do. I just have to locate and rescue him before Fang decides I’ve outlived my usefulness.

Or before the cartel realizes I’ve survived and sends someone to finish what the warehouse explosion couldn’t.

My hands hover over the keyboard, each finger trembling not with fear but with the raw determination that’s kept me alive all these years. The cartel’s databases spread before me on Fang’s monitors—a digital labyrinth I helped build, now potentially my brother’s salvation.

Two devastating facts hang in the air between keystrokes: the cartel is about to realize that I survived the explosion, and worse, they’ll know I’m working with Underground Vengeance. The clock that’s been counting down my brother’s safety has just accelerated to a dangerous speed.

“You realize what you’ve done,” Fang says, his voice low and steady beside me. Not a question—an accusation wrapped in observation.

“I know exactly what I’ve done,” I respond, fingers already flying across the keyboard again. “I’ve bought us maybe five minutes before they lock me out completely. Less if they’re smart about it.”

I navigate through the hospital databases first, searching for my brother’s unique identifier in their system.

The cartel doesn’t use real names for their leverage points—too easy to track.

Instead, they assign codes: mine is Python-379.

My brother’s is Cobra-380. Finding him means finding that designation in their medical records.

The screen flickers as another firewall falls under my assault.

Sweat trickles down my spine, my shirt sticking to my back despite the air conditioning that hums steadily in Fang’s office.

My mouth tastes like cotton. My tongue sticks to the roof of it with each swallow.

The drink helped, but not enough. My dehydration is becoming dangerous.

The edges of my vision occasionally darken, but I push through it.

“ Here.” Fang shoves another bottle of water in front of me.

“No time. Patient logs,” I mumble, more to myself than to Fang. “Transfer records. Payment trails.”

He shifts behind me, moving to where he can see both the screens and my face. His gaze presses on me like a physical weight—assessing, calculating, still suspicious, even though I just saved his entire digital infrastructure from collapse.

“How do you know they haven’t moved him already?” he asks.

A fair question, one that’s been clawing at the back of my mind since I first sat down.