Chapter Thirty-Eight
Ghost
As soon as the door closed, Sypher shook his head. “That’s why I don’t want a fucking wife!”
Everyone laughed, including me. I loved that fucking woman and her snarky ass attitude.
“Alright, everyone, shut the fuck up!” King barked as he stood, pulling his phone from his back pocket and dialing a number. Holding a finger to his lips, directed at Sypher, he hit the button for the speaker and laid it on the table. King placed his hands on the table as we all waited for Steele to answer.
“I don’t have time for bullshit right now, King.”
“You forget to tell me something, asshole?”
“I don’t have to tell you shit. You fucking left. You wanted out, so you packed up and moved to the fucking prairie.”
“You couldn’t give me a fucking heads-up my sister was coming,” Gunner growled into the phone.
“Shit.” Steele sighed. “Ok, in my defense she was only here for a few minutes. Nothing happened to her or the kid. Congrats on the niece by the way, she’s cute. Looks nothing like your giant ass, thank God.”
“Fucking focus,” King snarled.
“Watch your fucking tone. I’m still your goddamn president.”
Something wasn’t right. Steele and Stone had just been here nine months ago. Everything seemed fine then. Aside from Angel, Steel’s enforcer, trying to take Beck upstairs against her will.
But when King knocked him out, Steele claimed it was all good and Angel deserved it. But clearly there was no more joy in Mudville.
“Mellie showed up with the kid, looking for you. Only you never fucking told her you’d moved. So, you tell me who’s the asshole?”
“Steele, please, for the love of God,” Jingles groaned.
With a frustrated breath, he continued, “I offered to send a couple of guys to escort her north. She declined and slipped out in the chaos when my guys came back from a run.”
“What happened on the run?” Cash asked.
Silence greeted us before Steele spoke directly to Cash.
“Hey, brother, sorry to hear about your old lady.”
Cash’s jaw tensed, and I knew he was grinding his teeth. He wouldn’t let us talk about Rachel. Any time someone brought her up, he left the room.
The room was silent as we waited to see how he would react. We all knew there was no love lost between Cash and Steele. We just didn’t know why.
“Thanks,” he replied through gritted teeth.
“What happened on the run? Mellie said your guys came back injured,” King asked, changing the subject and directing it back to the topic he wanted.
“They got ambushed. The sale was fucking bogus.”
“Any losses?”
“Yea, lost eight men. The rest came home shot to hell.”
“Any idea what they were after?” Nav asked.
Our eyes were glued to the phone as though we expected the answers to physically step out from the speaker as sentient beings, rather than words.
“No fucking clue. Something about a woman they were looking for. Beat the shit out of Zombie, looking for her. Only reason they didn’t kill him was they wanted him to give me a message.”
“What was the message?” King asked, his eyes on Sypher.
“No one was safe until they found her.”
King and Sypher both dropped their heads, and immediately we all knew this had to do with Amber. But we still didn’t know why.
“Zombie give them anything?” Colt asked.
“Nothing to fucking give. He told the bitch all we had here were club whores.”
“She give you a name? Description? Anything to clue you into who she was looking for?”
“Why are you asking?”
Steele wasn’t stupid. You didn’t become the president of a 1% MC by being dumb as a bag of rocks. But then again, with the shit you had to deal with being a president of any MC, maybe stupidity was a requirement.
I held a hand over my mouth, trying to hide the grin that spread across my face as I thought about what King would do to me if I ever called him stupid.
Though he was fucking stupid when it came to Grace.
“She give you anything or not?” King asked, letting his exasperation show. Sometimes it was the only way to get through to Steele. He hated fucking drama and did everything he could to avoid it.
Hence the reason Freeway was sent up here.
“No description, just a woman named Bethany.”
I sat up in my chair; the smile gone from my face and all traces of amusement fled my body. This had to be about Amber. She had confessed to me one night that her name wasn’t really Amber. I thought nothing of it.
I was pretty sure Tiffany and Crystal were the only two who used their real names. Crystal graduated with Lily, so we knew who she was. And Tiffany, well, it wasn’t a common name strippers chose.
Not like Brandy and Jade. And well, Amber.
None of the club girls who lived here were strippers that we knew of. But it wasn’t uncommon for a club girl to go by a fake name with the guys.
King dropped into his chair, while Sypher held his head in his hands. Cash glared at King. It had become a common look between the two. If King would just share his fucking secrets, maybe the animosity between the two of them would end.
They put on a good show in front of the club. But here in this room, all pretense was dropped outside.
“You know who the bitch is looking for?” Steele asked.
“Nah, brother. No Bethany here,” King lied.
“What do you know, King? The underworld has gone tits up. There’re rumors flying around. Sypher is missing.”
Sypher’s head popped up and he glared at Nav. King once again put his finger over his lips, telling him to keep his mouth shut.
“What do you mean, he’s missing?”
“I don’t fucking know. No one has talked to the kid in months.”
“Doesn’t he do surveillance for you?”
“Yea, that’s the fucked-up thing. When Omen contacted him, he fucking answered.”
King looked at Sypher, who shook his head.
“So, Omen talked to him?”
“No. All communication has been digital. That’s not like him. He’s always been hands-on. You haven’t heard anything?”
“No. We don’t use Sypher. We’ve got Nav.” King sat up and I swear I saw a literal fucking light bulb go on over his head. You know, like the cartoons we all watched as kids.
Everyone but Sypher turned to look at Nav, who sat a little lower in his chair.
“I gotta go, Steele. I’ll have Nav look into things with Sypher and let you know if we hear anything.”
“Alright, brother.”
The line went silent, and King picked his cell phone up. Walking over to the church doors, he opened one, looked around, and then threw it across the main room until it shattered against the wall.
Closing the doors, he walked back to his seat. No one uttered a word. He closed his eyes and steepled his hands in front of him.
We had seen this before. King was counting. I began to silently count, wondering how high he would get before he spoke. That was our meter. How we measured his anger.
When I hit fifty and he finally opened his eyes, I knew we were fucked. He looked at Nav and with a deceptive calm even tone, he said, “Something you need to tell me, brother?”
“Uh, um,” Nav stuttered over his words, looking to Sypher for help.
“It was my idea.” Sypher said quietly.
“Enough with this shit. What the fuck is going on?” Cash demanded.
“It’s time to come clean, Sypher.”
King sat back in his chair, and Sypher took a deep breath.
“What I am going to tell you stays in this room. Dante knows some of this. But he doesn’t know all of it. He can’t. Not yet.”
Sypher told us about contacting Nav and asking him to keep tabs on the underworld. Pretending to be him for all his clients so they wouldn’t know anything was going on.
He told us what happened in New York. How he ended up chained to a pipe in a building he owned that was blown to pieces by a sadistic fucking bitch whose only motivation was to torture and maim as many people as she could. As I watched him tell his story, I knew he was leaving some of the more gruesome details out.
When he was done, Gunner was, let’s just say, less than pleased. He sat quietly in his seat, listening to Sypher’s story until he got to the part where he said he had been seeing Haizley prior to coming to the clubhouse.
“Let me get this fucking straight,” Gunner said in a low voice. “First you pull my sister into this bullshit, then my old lady?”
“In my defense, I didn’t hire Haizley, and she wasn’t actually your old lady when I started meeting with her.”
“I had fucking claimed her!” he bellowed.
“Did she know that? Because the first day I met her she was adamant that she was not your old lady.”
I had quickly learned something about Sypher in the limited interactions I’d had with him. He was an antagonistic son of a bitch.
“And my fucking sister?” Gunner snarled.
Sypher sat up in his seat and looked Gunner in the eye. “She was the best. And my daughter deserved the best.”
Sypher wasn’t wrong. I had spent some time looking up Melissa the first night she showed up here, when Amber wouldn’t let me talk to her. She was one of the leading child psychologists in the country.
My woman was fucking smart.
“What about Amber?” Cash asked.
The secrets surrounding Amber had been a sore spot between Cash and King since we heard about the explosion in New York when King put Amber on lockdown in the club.
“Amber’s real name is...”
We all sat there stunned as Sypher shared the secret King had been keeping from us.
“They have to be told,” Blade said.
“Not yet. Not until she’s safe,” Sypher insisted.
“Will she ever really be safe?” Colt asked. “Because once word gets out about who she is and who she’s related to, the whole fucking underworld will want her,” Jingles asserted.
“Which is why no one can know she’s here. Not yet. Not even them,” Sypher pressed.
“This is gonna blow up in your fucking face. Ask me how I know,” Blade said.
He was right. When Amber found out who she was and who her family was, and that King and Sypher kept that information from her, well, let’s just say, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be here when that happened.
“It’s a risk, yes. But one I have no choice but to take.”
“My old lady knows this shit?”
“She does. She knows everything,” Sypher confirmed.
“Fucking hell.” Gunner rubbed his hand over his face, and we all felt for him. “She carries the weight of every fucking patient.”
“She’s good at what she does,” Cash added.
King had ordered him to talk with Haizley to deal with his grief over losing Rachel. We weren’t sure how well it was working, but at least he wasn’t drunk 24/7 anymore.
“Haizley is very good. Gunner, you should be proud to call her yours.”
“Best thing I ever fucking did,” he agreed.
“And leaving your sister was the worst,” I mumbled.
“Fuck you, Ghost.”
“This is not the time, you two. You both got your shots in; let it fucking go before I order you both to talk to Haizley together and work this shit out.”
“I would like to remind you I suggested we all have sessions with her almost two fucking months ago.”
“Yea, because you wanted to fuck her.” Jack snickered.
“And I fucking got her. Meanwhile, you all are still dealing with your shit. Who fucking won, asshole?”
“Alright, fuckers, enough.” King rubbed the back of his neck. “You all now know what I know. Nothing Sypher shared leaves this room. When you walk out there, leave this shit at the door.”
We nodded, and King slammed the gavel on the table, saying, “Get the fuck out.”