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HAWK

When we arrive back at the penthouse, I head straight for Sadie’s office and shake the mouse on the desk to fire up the computer screen. She has multiple tabs open. The first is an email from Avery with a photo of Skyler’s baby announcement. A small pang of regret fills me at missing the birth of my brother’s first baby, but I stuff the feeling down for now.

I move her shit to the side and start hacking into Matteo’s security feeds. I’m sure I could ask for the footage, but his guys don’t know what to look for. There are additional cameras I’ve seen planted around the place. My Sapphire wasn’t as stupid or na?ve as they think. She knew about the extra cameras and, if I’m right, would have set up a few of her own.

It takes a few minutes to maneuver but I get in and sure enough, not only can I see their camera footage, but she also has multiple cameras of her own watching the security room, Matteo’s office, her office, and every entry and exit. She can see what their cameras can’t. She widened the view without them knowing.

Smart girl.

But why? Did she have reason not to trust the Parisi’s? Or was she covering her own ass in the event she needed to get out? Those are questions I’ll have to ask her once I find her.

I watch the camera footage from the time she left me at the table. She went to her room, her office, then to the gym. I skim through the footage and stop when I see a woman enter the gym with her. They seem familiar with one another, communicating easily. Sadie’s body language is relaxed, her guard down.

They spar with one another, nothing too aggressive compared to what I’ve seen Sadie do at Knock Outs. When Sadie goes to get a drink, the other woman catches her off guard from behind. Sadie should’ve been able to maneuver out of the hold with ease. She’s practiced those same moves for years. But her legs suddenly buckle and her weight drops. I watch as the woman pulls a needle from Sadie’s neck, letting it hang free in her hand at her side.

“ Fuck .”

Seconds later, a man wearing a suit walks into the home gym and tosses Sadie over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. I follow their movement through the cameras. Matteo’s security feed loses track of them. Someone made a loop of footage, a gap in time that plays on repeat over the camera feed, allowing them access to escape through the service elevators. Whoever made the loop didn’t account for Sapphire’s inability to trust anyone .

I push a few buttons and find the small camera she hid in the center of a golden rose in the corner of a picture frame that adorns the wall at the end of the hall near the elevator door. It makes me wonder how many of these fucking cameras she has in the clubhouse, the little shit. It would explain how she knows so much about club business. That shit will earn her ass a good tanning. A punishment that’ll have to wait.

I follow the cameras to the garage, but again, Matteo’s cameras have been fooled. Unfortunately, Sadie didn’t have any in the garage. The only thing I have to go on is the empty parking space between two of Matteo’s SUVs. I go through previous days of footage of the same area in the garage and check the vehicles. Two days ago, there was a third SUV parked in that space. I check the plates and it is, in fact, one of Matteo’s vehicles.

With the make, model, and plate, I can search street cameras for the missing vehicle and figure out which way they went, but it would go a shit ton faster with help. I grab my phone out of my pocket and place a call to Ghost and have him patch Wyatt from Garrison into the call.

“What do you got?” Ghost asks.

“Sadie’s missing. I need you to help me find the fucker who took her.” Both men respond with curses and grunts.

“Send me what you have,” Ghost demands. “I’m calling Pres.”

As much as I don’t want to involve Pres, I know we need to. The club takes care of its own, and with Parisi having a rat in his ranks, Pres will only trust my brothers to do the job right. Problem is, they’re too far away. It’ll take them half a day to get here, and Sadie doesn’t have that kind of time.

With the guys running the street cameras, I decide to take a deeper dive into Sadie’s computer. She said she had a plan, something just for me, and I’m willing to bet it’s here on her laptop.

I scroll through emails, business proposals, FBI records, Trident photos, including photos of me and Agent Galina found on the internet. I wonder if she thought I was really with Galina or if she was in on Parisi’s plans all along. They said she didn’t know about me being there, but Sapphire is smart. With all the cameras she had in this house, I wonder how much they could actually keep hidden from her.

Sadie’s words from before come flooding to the front of my mind. “I have a plan. But I can’t do it without your help. If you help me, I will be safe. I can’t trust anyone else to do this. It has to be you.”

Add in the fact Matteo pointed out she planned for my involvement all along, and there has to be something here that would lead me to her.

“Come on, baby. Talk to me. Tell me something,” I say to the empty room. I run search after search on keywords and possible file names. I’m about to call Ghost to switch tasks when something catches my eye on her desktop. A file labeled Ms. Pac-Man .

It looks like any other file. When I open it, at first, there’re pages and pages of cheat codes.

The little witch! That’s how she’s been beating my high score.

It makes me smile knowing she’s bested me yet again, but in a way that is all Sadie. As I continue to scroll through, the codes change. I’m no longer looking at game codes and cheats. I’m looking at a tracking program. It’s not like the GPS trackers we use. It’s something more advanced. Minute in size, but the tracking capabilities are amazing, and practically undetectable to the untrained eye.

I spend the next two hours doing what I do, cracking Sadie’s code. It’s dangerous to leave her on her own for this long. My insides are twisted up at the thought of what could happen to her, but I have to trust a few things.

One, she told me she needed me and only I could keep her safe, which means I can’t give up. I have to follow the breadcrumbs she left behind for me. Two, the club is working tirelessly, as are Parisi’s men, to find the fucker who took her. And three, Sadie won’t give up without one hell of a fight. She knows we’re coming, and she will do whatever she must to stay alive.

A knock on the door interrupts my search. Matteo saunters into the room as if he owns the place—which I guess he does.

“Find anything?” Matteo asks.

“Yeah, but I don’t know what she wants me to do with it,” I admit. “I found her schematics for the tracking device she’s been working on, but it’s nothing like what she gave Avery. It’s not something that goes into a piece of jewelry or gets sown into clothing. It looks like it gets embedded into the skin. That said, I can’t find where she’s tested it or if it’s even what I’m meant to be looking at.” I rub my eyes. I’m tired and stressed and getting angrier by the minute.

“Show me.” Matteo leans over and I show him what I’ve found. He grunts, then pulls out his phone.

“Doc,” Matteo greets. “I need you to come to the penthouse. I have something that needs your attention, and I need it done in a timely fashion.” I can’t hear the other side of the conversation, but imagine Doc agreed since Matteo has already hung up.

“What is it? What’s going on?”

“I’m pretty sure Doc implanted that little capsule looking thing there—” He points to the screen. “into Sadie’s shoulder a few weeks ago. She made him do an ultrasound to make sure it was far enough under the skin to not be noticed.”

“And you didn’t question what the fuck he was putting into her body?” I yell.

Matteo smirks. “She told me it was an implantable birth control. She was concerned that if she got caught, and someone was able to take advantage of her, she would get pregnant. If I remember correctly, her words were, “I’m not going to go mad like my own mother and attempt to smother a child that reminds me of all the bad shit in my life. It wouldn’t be fair to the kid. They didn’t ask to be born a mistake.”

“ Fuuuuck ,” I grumble. “All I need to know is if this tracking device was implanted, was it activated, and how do I access the control panel?”

“I can answer your questions, Mr. Hawkins,” Vincenzo says, forcing his way into the room and the conversation per usual.

“And?”

“Yes, it’s been implanted. As per our contract, Miss Jenkins made you her next of kin, so to speak, though I’m not sure why,” he says, looking down his nose at me.

“What does that even mean?”

“It means, Mr. Hawkins, that you don’t deserve her, yet she trusts you above all others with this.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a thumb drive, handing it to me. “This will tell you everything you need to know and grant you access to the Snitch program. Use it wisely and only for this purpose. This project will not be made public until all the fail-safes can be put in place and the wrong people can’t make it into a weapon instead of a safety precaution.”

I snatch the drive, drop my ass back in the seat, and plug it into the laptop. When the files open, I know exactly which one to click on.

Sapphire’s Secret Don’t

She did mean for me to help all along, or at least she knew she could count on me to help her if she got into trouble.

“I’m coming for you, Sapphire. Just hang on for me.”