Page 33 of Rev
I leaned down and brushed my mouth softly across her temple before carefully untangling myself from her body. Delaney stirred faintly but didn’t wake as I slid out of bed and dragged on jeans, boots, a black T-shirt, and my cut.
I paused long enough to look at her one more time before leaving the room. The clubhouse was quieter this early. Most of the compound was still asleep except for the brothers rotating security shifts. The smell of coffee drifted from the kitchen as I headed upstairs toward Jax’s office. By the time I pushed through the door, Kane and Edge were already there. Apex stood near the wall with a tablet in one hand, his expression focused.
“You look like shit,” Edge drawled casually as I stepped farther inside.
I dropped onto the empty chair beside him. “You should see the other guy.”
Edge snorted softly. “I assume by ‘other guy’ you mean your self-control.”
“Fuck off.”
Kane’s mouth twitched faintly before his attention shifted back to Apex. “Tell him.”
Apex nodded and turned the tablet toward me. “I traced an undeclared preservation property through shell payments, storage fees, and some grant-adjacent laundering Magnus buried under restoration expenses.”
That got my full attention. “What kind of property?”
“Old archive building outside city limits,” Apex answered. “Technically registered to a preservation trust that only exists on paper. No public ties to Magnus directly, but the money flow is clean enough that it’s obviously his. Utilities are active. Property taxes paid regularly. And there’ve been deliveries made there under fake vendor names tied to the museum.”
Jax tapped a few keys, and one of the monitors switched to satellite images of an isolated structure surrounded by trees and overgrown fencing.
“There’s more,” Apex continued. “Storage payments spiked recently. Same with supply purchases. Cleaning chemicals, preservation materials, and climate-control maintenance.”
“Private, controlled, and isolated,” I muttered, already feeling the pieces clicking together in my head. “Fits his psychology.”
My jaw tightened as I stared at the images on the screen. Magnus needed environments he could control completely. Places hidden from oversight where he could build and preserve his rituals without interruption. Somewhere quiet enough for obsession to grow unchecked.
“Looks like a fucking tomb,” Edge muttered.
“Basically is,” I replied flatly.
Jax zoomed further into the property. “No cameras on the outside that I can see from satellite pulls. But if Magnus uses this place actively, assume internal security.”
“Any signs he’s there now?” I asked.
“Nothing definitive,” Jax answered. “But utilities are currently drawing power.”
Silence settled heavily across the room for a second while we all stared at the property.
Then Kane straightened away from the desk. “You, Shifter, Century, and Axle hit it tonight.”
My pulse spiked. Finally, we were gonna see some action.
Edge leaned back in his chair. “Bastard really picked the wrong club to piss off.”
I stood, already mentally preparing for the operation ahead. Every instinct I had screamed that this was the right place. Magnus was careful, disciplined, and organized…but obsessive men always left pieces of themselves behind eventually.
And tonight, we were going hunting. Hopefully, we’d find the motherfucker in his lair. The tomb that would become his own.
Night had fully settledby the time we rolled up near the property.
We killed the engines a quarter mile out and approached the rest of the way on foot through thick brush and low marsh grass, the dark outline of the building rising through the trees ahead like something dragged straight out of a nightmare. The structure itself was old brick and stone, originally built sometime in the early 1900s, if I had to guess. Most of the narrow and reinforced windows were blacked out fromthe inside. A rusted iron fence surrounded the property, half swallowed by vines and neglect.
But the first thing I noticed was that the neglect was fake.
The grounds looked abandoned at a glance, but the pathways through the weeds had been maintained just enough. Security lights sat tucked carefully beneath the eaves where they wouldn’t be visible from the road. One corner of the building had newer mortar work too, subtle but obvious once you knew how to look for it. Magnus hid behind decay because it made people look away.
Shifter crouched beside me near the fence line, pulling a small flashlight from his vest and covering the lens with his palm. “No cameras on this side.”
