1. Cyber
The cacophony of the Broken Halos clubhouse was a physical weight, a wall of sound that usually bounced off my noise-canceling headphones like waves against a cliff. Today, the cliff was eroding.
I sat at the center of the table, my “command center” spread out in a semi-circle of glowing screens. Three tablets, one hardened laptop, and my customized mechanical keyboard. To my left, Stone and Bear were arguing over a shipment. To my right, the next generation of the Halos was currently waging a small-scale war.
Lex’s youngest was shrieking—a high-pitched, glass-shattering sound—while two other toddlers chased each other through the legs of the brothers.
The clubhouse used to smell like stale beer, gun oil, and bad decisions. Now? It was a heady mix of those things plus baby powder and spilled juice boxes. Everyone was domesticating. Everyone was settling.
I leaned back, my neck popping, and watched the chaos for a fraction of a second. Most of these guys—Stone, Bruiser, Riot—they lived for this. They found their “Old Ladies,” they planted seeds, and now they had a reason to go home.
Me? I’m twenty-eight. I like my bed empty and my hard drives encrypted. I watched Ghost across the room, leaning against the doorframe, his eyes tracking everything. He and Bear were the only ones left in my boat—unattached, unburdened, and sane. I wasn’t ready for the “happily ever after” shit. I had too much data to crunch and a life I’d fought too hard to keep private.
I turned back to my screens. The brothers didn’t say it—maybe they didn’t even realize it—but this club would be a pile of smoking rubble without me. In the modern world, you don’t win wars with just leather and lead; you win them with zero-day exploits and offshore routing. I handled the payroll, scrubbed the digital footprints of our activities, and kept the feds chasing ghosts in a hall of mirrors.
If I could throw a punch as well as I could write a script, I’d probably be sitting in the President’s chair. But I lacked the social grace. I was a ghost in the machine, and I liked it that way. This club gave me a home when I ran from my own blood with nothing but a Harley and a laptop. I owed them my life.
I was currently running a routine sweep of our auxiliary shells. We kept the money moving—little drops here, little drops there—so the IRS wouldn’t see a giant mountain of cash sitting in one spot. It was a beautiful, rhythmic system.
Then, my phone buzzed.
It wasn’t a standard notification. It was a Tier-1 alarm. A custom tone I’d programmed to sound like a dying modem—a sound I hadn’t actually heard before.
The air in the room chilled.
I stopped typing. My heart, usually a steady 60 BPM, hammered against my ribs. I stared at the small screen.
Access Granted. Transaction Confirmed. ID: “NoobSlayer14.”
The blood drained from my face so fast I felt lightheaded. My vision tunneled until there was nothing but that phone. The noise of the clubhouse—the kids, the laughter, Stone’s booming voice—faded into a dull hum.
I stared at the name, a fresh wave of irritation washing over my rage. NoobSlayer14. Really? I internally rolled my eyes so hard it hurt. Who the fuck calls themselves that? It sounded like a handle from a 2005 Call of Duty lobby or a basement-dwelling edge-lord in middle school. What was this, kindergarten? It was a name designed to insult, a childish slap in the face from someone who clearly thought they were being clever.
The fact that someone with such a pathetic, bottom-tier alias had just ghosted through my state-of-the-art encryption made the bile rise in my throat. It was humiliating.
A vein in my temple began to throb, the pressure building until I thought my skull might split. The auxiliary payroll account—a shell we used for the club’s daily overhead—was being gutted in real-time.
“Motherfucker!!!”
The word tore out of my throat, raw and jagged. I didn’t recognize my own voice.
I slammed the phone onto the table. The screen shattered into a spiderweb of glass, the sound cracking through the room like a gunshot.
The clubhouse went deathly silent. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kasia move instinctively, herding the children toward the back hallway.
I didn’t care. I grabbed my laptop, dragging it toward me with an aggressive jerk that nearly sent a tablet flying. My fingers weren’t dancing now; they were stabbing. I was typing with a frantic, desperate speed, trying to trace the hop-points, trying to kill the connection before they jumped the firewall into the main accounts.
“Cyber, what the hell is going on?” Stone asked, his voice low and dangerous.
I looked up, my eyes bloodshot. My hands were shaking—a sensation I hated.
“Someone just breached the club’s auxiliary payroll account,” I said, my voice tight. “It’s one of our smaller offshore shells, but they didn’t just hack it.”
I turned the laptop around so the whole table could see the carnage. The balance was zero. A thick red line ran through the transaction history, a digital scar across our books.
“They didn’t touch the main accounts,” I whispered, my voice cracking with a fury I couldn’t contain. “But they emptied this one completely.”
I stared at the red line. It wasn’t just a theft. It was a message. They had bypassed my rolling ciphers like they weren’t even there.
