Chapter Four
Ghost
Before I joined the Steel Sinners, I was certain I would never want to work for another morally grey organization.
I was done with the dark life and I wanted to just…
die. Still hurting from a bullet wound and aching from several injuries all over my body, I left New York with every intention of drinking myself into a coma, and if that didn’t work, I planned on picking a fight with a man brave enough to kill me.
And that was when I met Pope. He and a group of other guys wearing matching jackets with clear motorcycle club insignia all over them were drinking in a bar at a different casino.
They had the intensity of a group that had done dark, potentially life-ending things before. They were just the guys I needed. .
So, I approached them.
Pope was clearly the leader of the group so I tried to bait him into fighting me.
It was my last fight so I figured why not go with someone my own size.
At least I would die by the hands of a man who matched me in strength.
I had nothing else to live for. I’d burned the bridges back home, got myself rightfully disowned by my own family, and sent into exile.
My only companion was alcohol, it didn’t matter what kind as long as it gave me a good buzz.
As long as it made me forget the fact that I’d lost my damn mind and kidnapped the wife of Matteo Rossi, the don of the most powerful Italian mob in New York, who was also my step-brother.
I was never meant to be don, and if I hadn’t lost myself in the bottle, I would have seen that.
But I was blind to the truth so I kidnapped Matteo’s wife as revenge.
I had no intention of harming Sophia as I had never hurt any woman before, but taking her was a betrayal to the family.
I should have been killed. Almost was.
But they let me live. My real brother, Nico, who was Matteo’s consigliere, couldn’t bring himself to kill me when the decision was left in his hands. Instead, he let me leave New York with just a gunshot wound and a few other injuries. My real punishment was exile.
And still, even with the mercy afforded to me, I wanted to die.
Pope wouldn’t let me. He fought me when I baited him into a fight, letting me wear myself down until I was too weak to argue.
He took me back to the clubhouse, and I’ve been loyal to him ever since.
That day, two years ago, bleeding from my old and new injuries, Bruno Benito died, and Ghost was born.
The man who had left New York, a hopeless alcoholic in self-destruct mode was gone and, in his place, emerged a man who wouldn’t touch the bottle with a ten-foot pole. One whose family wore leather jackets and rode together. Lived and died together.
As I stare at Pope’s office door, I can’t help but be transported to that day when I challenged the man to a fight. No questions. No judgment. Just acceptance.
I knock on the door once before letting myself in. I find the man in question seated behind a large mahogany desk, flipping through the files littered on his desk with a look of frustration written all over his face.
“Busy?” I ask when he looks up.
“No, come in. I could use a fucking break,” Pope responds, tossing a look of disgust over what I imagine are the club books.
“Have you considered hiring an assistant or someone to help with some of the bookkeeping?”
“We have a fucking accountant,” he rages, pushing up from his chair and stalking to the minibar.
He tosses me a bottle of water then I watch as he pours himself a drink and downs it in one gulp.
He pours another and walks back to his desk, pushing back the files to make space for his whiskey.
“I don’t know how my old man did it alone.
He used to lock himself up in the office for days working and I honestly thought he was doing it to avoid Bishop and me.
I guess now I know that was only part of the reason. ”
The man’s been dead for five months and all his business was left to Pope to manage, a man who spent most of his life working in the field and rarely locked away in an office trying to keep up with bookkeeping.
“Is this a bad time to talk about Iris Turner and the fucking Víboras Gemelas?”
“Right,” he says, taking a sip of his whiskey before turning to me. “How is she doing?”
“Better than most would,” I tell him, which worries me.
Most people would be freaking out, scared to leave their apartment, but Iris has been pushing to go to work.
Sometimes I sense her restlessness to leave the casino, which is only fair, she can’t live without leaving the casino forever.
I also selfishly need to know if she’s with me because she wants to be and not because she has no choice.
The sooner we solve this cartel issue, the better it will be for everyone.
Still…
There is a voice at the back of my head that dreads the end.
I’m not completely certain that Iris will choose to stay with me once she is free to leave.
It’s been so fucking easy for people in my past to write me off.
When I fell into the bottle, no one cared to ask why it happened.
Why someone whose life, until then, had always been on the straight and narrow.
Why the fuck the oldest son raised to run his family’s empire was suddenly spiraling.
No, they just watched me lose fucking control until I was beyond saving.
Will Iris see the same thing once the blinds fall? And when everything has been taken care of and she starts asking questions, peeling into my past, will what she sees scare her off. Leave me for dead like my own fucking family did?
“Have you told her?” Pope asks, sensing the darkness setting in. I’ve always been accused of carrying a dark cloud over my head, but I feel it darkening. I uncap the water and force myself to take a sip to quench my dry throat.
“Tell her what?”
“Don’t fuck with me, Ghost.”
“There is nothing to tell,” I say, walking to the window and looking out. “I am not the man I was before I joined the Sinners. My past doesn’t matter.”
“Would you say the same about hers?”
Fuck!
“We make ourselves, Pope. Once in a while, the past might come back for a bite, nibble away pieces of your sanity, but essentially, we make ourselves.” The past doesn’t matter.
It shouldn’t. I won’t let it. I’ve worked too fucking hard to become Ghost to let the pathetic Bruno Benito ruin it. He’s dead. Buried. Forgotten, damnit!
A long beat of silence follows and I pray that Pope drops it. He knows damn well how much I despise talking about my past. Even thinking about it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
“I reached out to my cousin, Priest, who is the president of the Steel Order MC in Austin,” Pope says, and I let out a silent sigh of relief at the topic change. “I called him to ask about the cartel that is targeting Iris.”
I turn away from the window and the view of the Vegas strip. “What did he say?”
“That they’re fucking bad news,” he says, leaning back in his seat. “Priest warned me that we’re in for war if we engage with this group, but he pledged his club’s support if we decide to take them on.”
A war.
Fuck. Those are never fun. I’ve been in a couple of them myself. Blood is shed, lives are lost, and there is never truly a clear winner when lives are lost on the battlefield.
“I could take her away,” I muse, leaning against the wall. It’s not the first time I’ve contemplated this course of action. “We could leave Vegas, the whole state. Hell, I could take her out of the country and get her away from here.”
“Would she want to leave? Would you?”
“No,” I say as the memory of Iris sobbing in the bathroom about not wanting to start her life elsewhere comes back. “Fuck!”
“I spoke to leadership about this. Perhaps it should worry me that as the president, some of my men are so fucking blood thirsty,” he says, taking another sip of the whiskey. “The guys are not exactly happy to have the cartel think they can just stroll into Elysium and dish out threats.”
“You’re not really saying you’ll go to war with Víboras Gemelas, are you?”
“That is exactly what I am saying,” he says, tossing back the rest of the whiskey. “If they show up to our club, then there will be war. Don’t worry, it’s not our first. And Ghost, we take care of our own.”
The “This is not New York” part is left out, but I hear it loud and clear.
And how ironic is it that I would feel a stronger kinship with people I am not related to than with my own flesh and blood?
Words fail me and I’m uncertain how the fuck I could ever show my gratitude to my MC family for the support they give me in all the ways my real family never did.
“Thank you,” I manage.
“We’re not doing this just for you,” Pope says.
He’s right about that, but I figure he says it so I don’t feel indebted to the club.
It’s too late for that. I already owe them everything.
“I sent some of the boys out to the city to dig around and find out where the cartel members are staying in Vegas. I’ll have the report in a few days.
In the meantime, we have to wait for Priest to arrive with reinforcements and once everything is in place, we will strike. ”
And then everything will be over.
Iris will finally be free to live as herself, or the version of her past. I can’t help but wonder which identity she’ll choose to live as. Or, once the dust clears and the danger has passed, whether she’ll choose me or go back to a life where I will be nothing but a ghost of her past.