Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
GHOST
Ivy & Piper’s Guide to Life Rule Number Twenty-Four:
Don’t take criticism from people you wouldn’t take advice from.
I stood outside the rental car company, watching planes take off in the distance. One after another, they disappeared into the darkness until they became indistinguishable from the faint stars in the night sky.
The ground beneath my boots vibrated with the low-frequency rumble of engines, creating a subtle thrumming sensation I felt in my bones. Then again, it might have been the aftermath of the rough sex still reverberating through my body. I shifted uncomfortably, wincing at the twinge in my ass.
Fuck, I definitely pulled something.
I took a slow lap around the building, trying to walk off the ache. Christ, I felt old, and I was only thirty-eight. Still, the memory of her thick ass rippling beneath my hands as she begged for more made every second of discomfort worth it. Despite the protest from my muscles, my cock revived at the image in my head, leaving me eager to get back home. I raked a hand over my face, desperately in need of a cold shower .
A gravelly voice cut through the noise from the planes. “You look like hammered shit.”
“Still better than looking old as shit,” I drawled as the club’s former president and one of my old man’s closest friends stepped out of the shadows like the motherfucking ghost of biker’s past.
Grey snorted and tapped a cigarette from his pack before passing it and his gold lighter to me. “Last I checked, I ain’t the one limpin’ around the parking lot. The fuck did you do?”
I lit up and took a long drag before admitting, “Might have pulled a muscle.”
“Pulled a muscle? Shit, son,” he said with a chuckle, smoke lazily drifting out from between his lips. The ember on his cigarette glowed bright in the darkness, illuminating the lines etched deep in his weathered face. “Maybe you need to hit the gym more so you can keep up with your Ol’ Lady.”
I flipped him off, but there was no real heat behind it.
We stood in silence for a few moments, the only sound the distant roar of jet engines and the soft crackle of burning tobacco. I could feel his eyes on me, studying me like I was some kind of puzzle he couldn’t quite figure out and knew what was coming next.
“So,” he finally said, flicking ash onto the pavement. “You talk to your brother lately?”
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to,” I ground out with a stream of smoke before letting my head fall back against the building.
Grey grunted before taking another drag. “There’s a sayin’ about assumptions and the assholes who make ‘em, kid.”
“There’s also one about minding your own damn business.”
He turned to face me, his blue eyes hard in the dim light. “Quit bein’ so goddamn hard-headed and sit down with Crow. Between you, me, and the fencepost, Wolverine ain’t no spring chicken, and this shit between y’all ain’t doin’ him any good.”
I exhaled slowly, watching the smoke curl into the night air. “Old man, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
Grey wasn’t the first to confront me over the shit with my family. It seemed everyone had an opinion on me keeping my distance and felt the need to try to bring me back into the fold .
“I know everything, kid. And as your godfather?—”
“You’re not my godfather,” I interjected before taking another drag off the cigarette, reveling in the familiar, almost comfortable burn in my lungs.
He let out a rough bark of laughter that held no humor and waved his hand dismissively. “Semantics. Point is, you’ve been runnin’ from this shit for too long.”
His voice softened a fraction. “I’ve watched you self-destruct for two goddamn years, and I’m sick of it. As a good friend of mine once told me when I was standing where you are, ‘At some point, you gotta man the fuck up.’”
Man the fuck up?
What did he think I’d been doing for the past two years?
A vein pulsed in my neck. “And say what? Sorry I drove your kid to suicide and destroyed your marriage.”
“Jesus fuck. You must be more powerful than the fuckin’ Wizard of Oz if you’re singlehandedly responsible for all that,” Grey said dryly. “You don’t know shit about fuck when it comes to your own family, son. If you did, you’d know it didn’t have a damn thing to do with you. Surprised you didn’t bail on your girl after the robbery because you ‘failed.’”
I saw red. In an instant, I was in Grey’s face, snarling, “Watch your fucking mouth.”
Using the sides of my kutte as handles, he shoved me up against the side of the building with a surprising amount of strength for a man pushing sixty. “The fuck you gonna do about it, huh?” He exhaled a stream of smoke into my face because, unlike me, he’d managed to hold onto his cigarette during our scuffle.
“Now you listen to me, you stubborn little shit,” he hissed. “You think you’re the only one who’s ever fucked up? Who’s ever lost someone? Pull your head out of your ass.”
I struggled against his grip, but he didn’t budge.
“I’ve been in your shoes,” he said, shaking me. “I know about the nightmares and the drinkin’ you have to do to try to forget. I know how it feels to wake up every morning hatin’ yourself. But take it from an old man with a mile-long list of regrets, pushin’ everyone away ain’t gonna bring that boy back or make your Ol’ Lady safe. You wanna throw yourself a goddamn pity party? Fine. But at least get all the goddamned facts first. ‘Cause what went down with Levi ain’t on you.”
“Yeah? Tell that to Crow,” I said, remembering the things Teddy had said to me when we were at the funeral home.
And I’d deserved every bit of it.
“The fuck you expect him to do, huh? That was his baby. Whatever he said or didn’t say, ain’t a chance in hell it had anything to do with you. You just happened to be the closest target. You think you know grief? Boy, that is a whole other ballgame.”
Grey mashed the cigarette between his quivering lips and worked his jaw back and forth several times before continuing, “Parents ain’t supposed to—” His nostrils flared. “They ain’t supposed to bury their kids. It’s a hell I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”
The fight drained out of me at the anguish reflected in his eyes, leaving me slumped against the wall. It was the attack on his Ol’ Lady that had led to the war with the Sons and caused her to lose their baby.
He took a deep breath before continuing. “I’ve known you since you came into this world. I’ve watched you grow into a man I’m proud to call family. But this chip on your shoulder is going to eat you alive if you don’t deal with it.”
The door to the rental office swung open, cutting off whatever bullshit was about to spew from my mouth. Carnage and Bear stepped out, their eyes narrowing when they saw us.
“We interrupting something?” Carnage asked dryly.
Grey released me and stepped back, smoothing down his kutte. “Just havin’ a heart-to-heart with our boy here.”
Bear snorted. “Funny, from where I’m standin’, it looked more like you were about to rip his heart out.”
“If I wanted details on what it looked like, I’d have asked for ‘em, Pres,” he replied with a shit-eating grin.
Already feeling the familiar itch for another cigarette and needing some good news, I approached Carnage. “Tell me this guy didn’t use a fake ID to rent the van.”
He held up his phone to reveal a screenshot of a driver’s license. “Dumbass rented the van using his real name. Isaac Scott. Twenty-one years old, no priors. ”
Finally, a fucking lead.
“The fucking delivery guy?” I asked when the name clicked. “No shit?”
Carnage nodded grimly. “One and the same. Explains why he didn’t flag when we ran background checks on the drivers. Squeaky clean record.”
“Until now,” Bear added.
“Why the fuck would a kid with no priors knock off a bakery?” Grey asked, voicing the question on everyone’s mind, mine included. “Why not choose a more obvious location if he was looking for cash? Like a convenience store or a laundromat.”
Carnage ran his knuckles over the bristles of his beard before shaking his head. “Maybe it’s not his first run, and he’s just damn good at covering his tracks?”
“That, or someone else is pullin’ the strings,” Grey finished, pinching his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger, a tell I’d seen at least a thousand times.
“Only one way to find out,” Bear said, cracking his knuckles with a grin. “Got an address in South Dallas…about twenty minutes from here.”
“What the fuck are we waiting for?” I growled, already stripping off my kutte and heading for Carnage’s truck. “Let’s go pay the little shit a visit. He wanted to start a war. We’ll bring it to his motherfucking doorstep.”
Twenty minutes later, we arrived in a neighborhood that had seen better days. It was the kind of place where no one saw shit, and even if they did, they weren’t calling it in.
Carnage killed the engine, and we sat in the darkness, surveying the dilapidated house. Paint hung off the siding in long strips, exposing rotted wood underneath. The yard was overgrown, littered with rusted car parts and broken bottles.
“Nice curb appeal,” Bear muttered dryly from the back seat.
My fingers twitched against my thigh, itching to wrap around someone’s throat. “You sure this is the right place?” I side-eyed the decrepit structure. The windows were dark, with no signs of life inside.
Carnage double-checked the address on his phone. “This is it.”
“Don’t think I need to remind anyone here how this is gonna go down. In and out through the back door without a trace,” Bear said, giving us the green light.
After slipping on our gloves, we moved stealthily through the shadows, with Carnage leading us in a tight military formation. His Army Ranger background was evident in every calculated step.
He knelt to pick the lock before silently easing the door open. The house was deathly silent, but we kept our weapons raised as we entered. Despite our best efforts to mask our presence, the floorboards creaked beneath our weight.
The stale air reeked of mold and neglect, but as we crept farther into the house, another smell hit me—one that was all too familiar.
“Got a body somewhere in here,” Grey said unnecessarily.
The sickly, sweet stench of death clung to the inside of my nostrils and the back of my throat. My stomach roiled, and I fought the urge to gag as we moved through the darkened house, systematically clearing each room.
We followed the putrid odor to the hallway. With his flashlight and sidearm raised, Carnage nodded. Bear pushed it open, and the full force of decay assaulted us like a physical blow.
My eyes watered, and I swallowed hard against the bile rising in my throat. A body lay on the bed, partially covered.
I approached cautiously, keeping my M17 trained on the ratty comforter as I slowly eased it down with a gloved hand. If the rotting odor hadn’t given it away, the bloated, mottled gray-green skin and vacant eyes staring at nothing would have. Bloody foam leaked from his nose and mouth onto the sheets below.
“Jesus. Fucker’s ripe,” Bear muttered, covering his nose and mouth with his bandana. “How long’s he been here?”
Carnage leaned down to examine the corpse, seemingly the only one of us not affected by the stench. “Based on decomp, I’d say anywhere from three to five days,” he guessed before peering at Isaac’s hands and arms.
“There are no obvious signs of a struggle or defensive wounds. Given the drug paraphernalia on the nightstand and the track marks on his arms, I’m leaning toward overdose for cause of death, but there’s no way to know for sure without an autopsy.”
“So, it’s him?” I asked, my voice muffled behind the crook of my arm.
He nodded grimly. “Matches the photo from his license.”
“Shit,” I growled, resisting the urge to drive my fist through the already crumbling drywall. Our one lead, dead before we could get any solid answers as to whether there was anyone else involved. “There’s got to be something here that’ll tell us if these guys were working alone or not.”
We spread out, meticulously combing through the rest of the house. I took the kitchen, rifling through drawers and cabinets, but nothing jumped out at me. Just overdue bills, dirty dishes, and takeout menus.
I moved on to the living room, methodically searching every nook and cranny for anything that might give us a clue. My frustration mounted with each passing second. This kid had to have left something behind.
“Get Ghost out of the fucking house,” Carnage directed Bear and Grey in a low voice that sent the hairs on the back of my neck up. There was only one reason he’d use that tone.
He’d found something.
“Let’s grab a cigarette,” Grey said, holding his hands out like I was some skittish animal he was trying to calm.
I pushed past him, trying to get to the room at the end of the hall, when Bear stepped into my path and latched onto my upper body, trying to haul me back.
“Dane, don’t,” he warned, shaking his head. The last time he’d called me by my real name, I was still a kid.
Their faces were ashen, and I knew—I fucking knew that whatever I was about to see was going to wreck me. But my feet continued moving as if on autopilot. The moment I stepped inside, my world tilted on its axis, horror washing over me in icy waves.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of photos of Piper littered every square inch of wall space. Some had clearly been taken from a distance—at work, the grocery store, while she was at the park with Avery .
But it was the ones taken inside our home that made my blood run cold.
There were shots of her in the shower and sleeping in our bed, her face peaceful and unaware. In some, she was visibly pregnant, her swollen belly on full display. One section of the wall appeared to be devoted solely to images of Piper nursing Avery.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I choked out, feeling as if I was going to puke. I reached out to touch one of the photos with shaking hands, half-convinced this was some fucked up nightmare.
“Don’t touch anything,” Carnage warned, pulling on a fresh pair of gloves before moving to the desk in the corner where a laptop sat. With a few keystrokes, he’d hacked into the system, revealing an entire folder of videos.
“Wait,” I said, but he’d already clicked on one.
The screen flickered to life, showing Piper naked and masturbating in our bed, her belly swollen with Avery. The camera angle suggested the person filming was somewhere in our bedroom, yet she seemed oblivious to their presence.
“Shut it the fuck off,” I snarled, my hands clenched at my sides.
Carnage quickly closed the video and opened another file. I steeled myself, expecting more footage of Piper, but what I saw made my blood run cold.
The camera was in Avery’s bedroom, focused on my baby girl huddled in the corner of her crib. Her little face was red and tear-stained, her lower lip quivering.
“Nuh-no, owie,” she whimpered, her little voice quietly pleading with the person holding the camera.
Ice flooded my veins as I recalled Avery using that phrase at the bakery. What if it hadn’t been random babbling but her trying to tell her daddy the delivery guy was the monster who had been hurting her?
Jesus.
The person filming chuckled cruelly before holding a pillow over her face, and I dropped to my fucking knees with a pained howl that didn’t sound human. Carnage shut it off, but not before I saw her tiny arms and legs flailing as she struggled to take a breath, her muffled cries barely audible .
“Fuckin’ Christ,” Grey said, his voice catching.
She’d been so fucking quiet, almost like that fucking monster had trained her not to cry out for Piper.
“I’ll fucking kill him!” I roared, tears streaming down my face as I lunged for the laptop. Carnage caught me around the chest, restraining me as I thrashed against his grip. “Let me go! My baby—he fucking touched my little girl! I’m going to tear that motherfucker apart!”
“Hey, hey. He’s already dead,” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “It’s over.”
I shoved him off me, my chest heaving as I fought to catch my breath. The walls seemed to close in around me, the evidence of my failure to protect Piper mocking me from every angle. My failure to protect my daughter.
“Jesus, how the fuck did he get these? How the fuck did he get that close to them?” I drove my fist into the doorframe, splintering the wood. But the physical pain was nothing compared to the anguish ripping me apart from the inside. “I’ll bring him back from the dead just to kill him all over again.”
“There are detailed floor plans for both Piper’s house and her mother’s place on here, as well as notes on entry points and how to bypass the security system remotely,” Carnage said before slamming the laptop shut.
“Son of a bitch.” My hands shook as I raked them through my hair, tugging at the roots. “He was trying to find a way back in after we upgraded the system. To disable it?—”
I couldn’t finish the thought. The image of that monster’s hands on my girls sent my stomach lurching. I barely made it to the trash can in the corner before emptying the liquor from my stomach.
Carnage tucked the laptop under his arm and stood, jaw ticking as he surveyed the walls. “I want to get back and do a full sweep on both houses. There are obviously hidden cameras, and we need to make sure Isaac was the only one with access to them. But first, we need to pack all this up.”
While they stripped the pictures off the wall, I knelt by the trash can, paralyzed by a toxic cocktail of rage and guilt. If I’d left my number at the hotel that night for Piper, none of this would have happened. My daughter wouldn’t have come face to face with a monster.
“Hey,” Grey’s gruff voice cut into my self-flagellation. “Reached out to Nails and had him check on your girls. He laid eyes on ‘em, and they’re both safe.”
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and rocked back on my heels, still trembling with rage and nausea. “Safe? Did any of that look fucking safe to you?”
Isaac hadn’t been some kid with a crush. He was a sick fuck who had gone to great lengths to get close to Piper, methodically stalking her for years.
He knelt beside me. “They’re safe now because they’ve got you. We’ll figure out the rest, but right now, we gotta move before someone notices we’re here.”
I nodded numbly and got to my feet, forcing myself to focus on the task at hand. We took every shred of evidence that could potentially link back to Piper or Avery.
We did one final sweep of the house to ensure we hadn’t missed anything. As we headed for the door, I paused, my gaze drawn back to the bedroom where Isaac’s body lay. Something didn’t sit right. The entire thing felt too neat, too convenient.
“You coming?” Carnage called from the doorway.
I shook my head, unable to shake the nagging feeling. “Give me a minute.”
Ignoring the stench, I entered and began methodically searching every inch. Under the mattress, behind picture frames, inside drawers. My fingers probed along the baseboards, looking for any loose sections.
Nothing.
There was no smoking gun. No closure. No sense of relief. Instead of suffering the way he’d made my girls suffer, Isaac had taken the easy way out and OD’d, robbing me of the opportunity to send him to the Reaper myself.
Maybe that was why it didn’t feel like it was over.