Page 10 of Cold Bastard
“Wrong answer,” Firestride said.
Another thud. The sound of something breaking. Bone or furniture, it was hard to tell.
I found the office behind a door marked “Private” in peeling gold letters. It was barely bigger than a closet, crammed with a cheap desk, a filing cabinet, and the detritus of a man who’d lost control of his life. Fast-food wrappers. Empty beer bottles. A mirror with white residue and a rolled-up twenty sitting next to it.
And there, on the desk, was a laptop.
Bingo.
I sat down in the chair as it creaked ominously under my weight and flipped open the laptop. It powered on immediately. No password on the login screen. That should have been my first warning. Nobody in the digital age left their shit unlocked, especially not someone who was stealing from a motorcycle club.
The desktop loaded. Clean. Too clean.
My gut clenched.
From the main room, Cade was screaming now, the words incoherent, punctuated by the rhythmic sounds of violence. Firestride and Scythe were working him over with the kind of methodical brutality that came from years of practice.
They would break him eventually.
They always did.
But something was wrong here.
I opened the file explorer, navigating through the directory structure with practiced ease. Documents folder: empty. Downloads: empty. Desktop: nothing but the default wallpaper. I checked the browser history—wiped. Email client—no accounts configured. I pulled up the system information, checking the hard drive.
My blood went cold.
The drive had been erased. Recently. Within the last twenty-four hours, if the timestamps were accurate. This wasn’t just deleting files. This was a full wipe, the kind of scorched-earth approach that someone used when they knew they were fucked and wanted to destroy evidence.
“Motherfucker,” I muttered.
I pulled a USB drive from my pocket. I always carried one, force of habit, and booted into a recovery environment. Maybe there was something I could salvage, some fragment of data that hadn’t been overwritten yet. The recovery software loaded, scanning the drive for any recoverable files.
Nothing.
Whoever had wiped this had done it right. Multiple passes, probably military-grade erasure. This wasn’t the work of some coked-out strip club owner. This was professional.
From the main room, Cade’s screaming had turned to sobbing.
“Where’s the fucking money, Cade?” Cerberus’ voice, still calm, still controlled. “You’re making this harder than it needs to be.”
“I don’t know. I swear!”
The sound of a chair breaking. More screaming.
I stared at the laptop screen, my mind racing. If Cade had wiped the drive himself, he would have done a shit job. Hewould have just deleted files, maybe emptied the recycle bin, and called it good. He wouldn’t have known how to do a proper wipe. Which meant someone else had done it. Someone who knew what they were doing. Someone who knew we were coming.
I checked the filing cabinet, rifling through papers with increasing urgency. Bank statements—all showing legitimate transactions, nothing suspicious. Tax documents. Liquor licenses. Nothing that would lead us to the missing money.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I ignored it.
Think, Nano. Think.
If the laptop had been wiped, what else would Cade have used? Phone. Had to be a phone. Everyone kept their life on their phone these days, especially the kind of idiot who thought he could steal from the Brotherhood.
I moved back into the main room.
The scene was exactly as I had expected. Cade was on the floor now, his face a mess of blood and cuts. One eye was already swollen shut. His nose sat at an angle that nature never intended. Firestride stood over him, knuckles bloody, breathing hard. Scythe leaned against the bar, cleaning his knife with a bar towel. The blade unstained. A promise of what could come if Cade didn’t start talking.
