Chapter 13 - Blood Oaths
The massive airboat drifted quietly through the thick morning fog of the marsh, its engine idling at a low, vibrating hum. Silas wiped swamp water and soot from his face, looking across the metal decking at Jax.
""You can’t go back there, Jax,"" Silas said, his voice grim. ""Deacon and the club sold you out. They put a target on you and the child. Why would you trade your neck for dogs that bit you?""
Jax sat beside Lily, who was fast asleep from pure exhaustion, her head resting against Sarah’s duffel bag. In her small hands, the flash drive and the silver locket lay side by side. Jax picked up the encrypted drive, turning the titanium casing between his scarred knuckles.
""Deacon sold me out,"" Jax said softly, his voice low and dangerous. ""Not the young prospects. Not the brothers who didn't get a vote. Gabriel Vance is wiping the board clean, Silas. He used the club to flush me out, and now he’s going to butcher them all so there are no witnesses to his daughter's existence.""
""And if you go back?"" Silas asked. ""It’s an execution trap.""
""Vance wants two things: this flash drive, and his daughter,"" Jax said, looking down at Lily's peaceful face. ""He thinks I’m a savage with a leather vest. He doesn't know what I took from his compound eight years ago along with that drive.""
Silas leaned forward, his mechanical hand clenching into a fist. ""What did you take?""
""The master decryption key,"" Jax said, pulling open the silver locket. With the tip of his knife, he popped open the inner backing of the crest. Inside rested a microscopic microchip, thinner than a postage stamp. ""This decrypts Vance's entire money-laundering network. Every politician he bought, every hit he ordered, every offshore account. Sarah knew that having the drive was useless without the key.""
Jax plugged the microchip into the drive, then inserted it into Silas's satellite terminal. The screen flashed bright green, cascading thousands of encrypted files across the monitor, transmitting instantly to federal task force servers across five states.
May you like
""In two hours, Vance’s empire will be legally seized,"" Jax said, standing tall on the deck. ""Which means Gabriel Vance only has two hours left to die.""
Silas stared at the screen, a vicious, wolfish grin slowly spreading across his scarred face. ""Then we don't go back to negotiate. We go back for war.""
