Page 24 of Victorious, Part 2 (The LA Defiance MC #6)

LOKI

The blue glow from my monitors is starting to burn my fucking retinas.

But I can’t stop.

Not when every piece of data I’m pulling up is painting a picture that makes my skin crawl. Multiple screens display Cartel connection maps, financial trails, communication intercepts, and a web of corruption so extensive it makes my head spin.

I lean back in my chair, rubbing my eyes with the heels of my palms. Three days of nonstop digging since Phoenix and Clover left for Vegas, and every breadcrumb I follow leads to the same terrifying conclusion— this thing is bigger than any of us imagined.

My fingers fly across the keyboard, cross-referencing prison guard payroll records with suspicious bank deposits. The patterns are there if you know how to look, and unfortunately for these Cartel fucks, I know exactly how to look.

“Come on, you pieces of shit,” I mutter, pulling up another database. “Give me something I can use.”

The door to my tech den suddenly slams open, rattling every piece of equipment in here.

I spin around, ready to unleash hell on whoever disturbed my concentration, but the words die in my throat when I see Rip’s face.

He’s pale as a fucking sheet, sweat beading on his forehead, chest heaving as though he has run a marathon.

His usually laid-back surfer demeanor is nowhere to be found.

“Dude!” he gasps, bracing himself against the doorframe. “Loki, bro, we got ourselves a gnarly situation brewing.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Define ‘ gnarly situation.’ Because unless the building is on fire or someone is bleeding out, I’m kinda busy here trying to—”

“Doughnut’s gone!”

The words hit me like a confusing punch to the gut. I stare at him for a beat, processing. “Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

Rip pushes into the room, running both hands through his shaggy hair. “I mean like, totally vanished, dude! One minute he’s chilling in his pen, doing his whole goat thing, next minute, poof! It’s as if he just caught a wave and rode it into another dimension.”

I stand up slowly, my mind already racing through the implications. Doughnut doesn’t just disappear. That goat is stubborn as hell and never strays far from his food source.

If he’s missing…

“When did you notice?” I ask, already moving toward my surveillance monitors.

“Like, twenty minutes ago? I went to toss him some of those radical carrot treats Haven got him, and his pen was totally empty. Gate was still locked though, which is like, super weird, man.”

My fingers fly across the keyboard before he finishes talking, pulling up the exterior security feeds. “If someone took him, they would’ve had to get past our perimeter cameras.”

“That’s totally what I’m saying. It’s like he just evaporated or something. Unless…” Rip’s voice trails off, and when I glance at him, his face turns paler. “Unless someone knew exactly how to get in without being spotted. Whoa, that just blew my mind. Am I high right now?”

A chill runs down my spine. I’ve been so focused on the digital trail, I haven’t been paying enough attention to our physical security.

Big fucking rookie mistake.

“Show me the pen,” I say, ignoring his usual antics, already grabbing my tablet and a portable scanner.

We head outside, and the moment I see Doughnut’s enclosure, every alarm bell in my head starts ringing.

The gate is locked, just like Rip said, but there are subtle signs of a disturbance.

The dirt near the fence line has been smoothed over too damn perfectly.

A few tufts of goat hair caught on the chain link, but in the wrong spots.

“This wasn’t random,” I mutter, crouching down to examine the ground more closely. “Someone planned this.”

“But why would anyone want to jack our goat?” Rip asks, confusion clear in his voice. “I mean, Doughnut’s totally radical and all, but he’s not like, valuable or anything? Fuck, they’re not gonna make, like, Goat curry… are they?”

I stand up, my mind spinning through possibilities. “It’s not about the goat, Rip. It’s about sending a message. About showing us they can get to whatever or whoever they want on our property.”

The blood drains from Rip’s face. “Dude… that’s like maaajorly uncool.”

Pulling up the security footage on my tablet, I scroll through the last twenty-four hours of exterior feeds. “I need to get back to my den. Run a full perimeter sweep, check for any other signs of—”

I freeze, staring at the tablet screen. “What the fuck?”

“Yo, what is it, bro?”

I rewind the footage, watching it again. “There’s a motherfucking gap. A thirty-seven-minute break in the surveillance footage between two and three this morning.”

Rip leans over my shoulder. “That’s not good, right?”

“No, Rip. That’s very not good.” Spinning on my heel, I head back toward the clubhouse, my pulse hammering in my chest. “Someone with serious tech skills was here. They knew exactly which cameras to disable and how to loop the footage to cover their tracks.”

By the time we reach my tech den, I’m in full paranoia mode. I start running diagnostics on every system, checking for signs of infiltration, digital footprints, and any trace of how they pulled this off.

“So, what’s the game plan, dude?” Rip asks, hovering nervously behind my chair.

“First, I’m upgrading every piece of security equipment we have. Motion sensors, thermal imaging, backup systems for the backup systems. Then…” I pause as my prison database search finally loads, and what I see makes my blood run cold.

“Holy shit.”

“What now?” Rip drones like he can’t possibly handle anything else.

I lean forward, studying the records that just populated on my screen. “Rip, remember when I was doing that system upgrade for the state corrections department last month?”

“Yeah, you were like, totally stoked about getting paid by the government for once.”

“I found something. Two corrections officers, Luke and Logan Martinez. Twin brothers. They filed report after report about suspicious activities, corruption, and patterns that didn’t add up.

Look at the dates…” I point to the screen.

“Every single report was buried. Ignored. And then they were forced to resign.”

Rip squints at the monitor. “That sounds sketchy as hell, man.”

“More than sketchy. According to their personnel files, they have military backgrounds. Specialized training in surveillance and security protocols. And look at this.” I pull up their resignation letters. “They didn’t just quit. They were pressured out after they got too close to something.”

I type as fast as I can, cross-referencing their reports with the patterns I’ve been tracking. Payment schedules that align with prison staff rotations. Communication logs that show coordination between facilities. Guard schedules that create convenient blind spots.

“Dude, your brain is like, totally firing on all cylinders right now,” Rip observes, but he’s also not wrong.

“The Martinez brothers saw it. They saw the same patterns I’m seeing now, but from the inside. They know how this system works, how it’s been compromised.” I turn to face him. “We need to find them. Now .”

“Okay, but like, how do we find two dudes who probably don’t want to be found and our goat at the same time?”

Ignoring him, I search for property records, credit reports, anything that might give us a lead.

“They’re corrections officers with military training who got burned by the system.

They’re not going to be hiding in plain sight, but they’re also not going to disappear completely.

They’ll be somewhere they feel safe, somewhere they can lay low but still keep an eye on things. ”

“Yeah, yeah, and Doughnut?” Rip asks.

Spinning in my chair, I huff and look at him.

“We will find the damn goat, but honestly, Rip, the club is about to go to war. You have to prepare yourself for the fact we’re going to lose people, and probably goats in this fucking fight,” I snap, instantly regretting my temper when I see his face fall.

He steadies his shoulders, giving me a simple nod. “Got it.”

Fuck.

I roll my shoulders. “It’s a tense time, I know Doughnut means a lot to you, brother. I swear, we will try to find him. But right now, we have to focus on the Cartel, the breach, and the shitstorm raining down on us from every angle.”

Rip grips my shoulder. “I’m with you, bro. Let’s check these Martinez dudes out. Get all the hype we can on them, and we can take it to Alpha once we have the 411. Put me in coach… I wanna help.”

I weakly smile and roll out my spare chair. He takes a seat, and I tell him what he can search for on my spare computer.

It takes us forty-three minutes of digging through databases, but between the two of us, we finally find them. Well, let’s be honest, it was all me, but I let Rip think he helped.

The Martinez twins are in a small apartment complex about twenty miles out, registered under an LLC that traces back to their mother’s maiden name.

Smart, but not smart enough to hide from someone with my skills.

I print out the address and also send it to my smart watch, then turn to Rip. “Rip, go get Alpha, fill him in, and tell him we need to take a ride.”

“What about Doughnut?”

I look at him seriously this time. “Whoever took Doughnut wanted us to know they were here. They wanted us paranoid and distracted. But they made one mistake… they gave us the motivation to dig deeper. And now we’re about to find some people who might have the answers we need.”

Rip takes off to find Alpha, and I grab my supplies, heading out of my Den to find Bea. She’s sitting at a table having lunch with Rhyan and Ellie as I approach. She glances up at me with her trademark gorgeous smile, and I lean down behind her and press a gentle kiss to her cheek.

She reaches out, gripping my wrist before I pull away, shaking her head. “Oh no, you don’t, you have that look on your face. What’s wrong?”

Snorting out a laugh, I slide into the seat beside her. “It’s scary how well you can read me.”