Chapter Five
GHOST
One Week Later
By seven thirty every morning, Church is running exactly as expected. Conversation ebbs around the table, coffee gets poured, and someone tells Deek to shut up, which he inevitably ignores.
Normal has a sound.
I have learned to listen for it.
Sin is already in his chair. A new dad with four hours’ sleep if he’s lucky.
Doesn’t change a damn thing.
He still owns the room before he opens his mouth.
Most people only see the president, but I catch the half second before he becomes him.
“He’s rocking a quality sleep deficit,” Deek observes, entirely without invitation, gesturing toward Sin with his coffee mug. “Classic new dad. I give it sixty more days before he loses the ability to form full sentences.”
“You know he can hear you?” Koa states.
“I know.” Deek doesn’t adjust his volume. “I want him to hear me. It’s a public service announcement. He should be aware of what’s coming for him.”
Sin lays both hands flat on the table, the movement slow enough that everyone in the room knows he’s choosing patience over violence.
“Moving on.” His eyes make one steady pass around the table. Sin flips the page on the folder in front of him. “Security?”
Bear glances down at his own notes. “North perimeter’s been quiet since we upgraded the cameras, but the east fence still needs another sensor. Motion picked up two coyotes this week.”
“Get it done.”
Bear nods once and makes a note.
Sin looks across the table. “Prospects?”
Anchor straightens almost automatically. “Kyle’s improving. Liam still needs work on the bikes.”
Deek snorts. “Liam needs work on everything.”
A few quiet laughs circle the table.
Sin doesn’t smile. “He’ll get there.” Nobody argues before he turns another page. “Supply run?”
Koa scratches the side of his jaw. “Steel supplier’s trying to bump prices again.”
“How much?”
“Eight percent.”
Sin scoffs out a laugh. “Find somebody who wants the business more.”
Koa nods. “I’ll start making calls.”
The meeting rolls on. There is nothing dramatic, nothing urgent, just the steady rhythm of the club taking care of the thousand little jobs nobody outside these walls ever thinks about.
Bear looks up from his notes. “The upstairs rotation stays in place?”
It isn’t really a question.
Marcus is a week old.
Nobody is taking chances.
“Until I say otherwise,” Sin says.
Bear nods once. “Done.”
Deek loses a fight with a yawn he’d been trying to hide for the last minute. He rubs a hand over his mouth afterward and scans the room, waiting for the inevitable smart remark.
It never comes.
Bear is sitting two seats away.
That’s usually enough to improve Deek’s odds of making better decisions.
Somewhere around the forty-minute mark, Sin wraps it up, with his gavel on the table. Meeting closed.
The brothers push back from their chairs, the room filling with the usual noise of a Church that’s done its job and is now releasing everyone back to the day. Koa says something to Mace as they head for the door, both of them already halfway into another conversation.
Bear catches Anchor with a hand on his shoulder before he gets that far. Not to stop him, just enough to let him know they need a word.
Nitro catches my eye on the way past. He looks tired in a different way than Sin, not depleted but full, carrying something too large for his chest to contain. He gives me the nod, which with Nitro means he’s satisfied, and I give it back, which with me means the same.
Then the room empties and I stay, pouring the last of the old coffee into my mug and don’t drink it. I set it on the table and look at the screen still running the mine figures, and then I close it and pull up my own.
I have a system for the mornings after Church.
It’s not a ritual—I don’t have rituals—it’s a process.
The first pass is always the news cycle, the political pages, the financial reporting that runs alongside the Vegas landscape.
Not for intelligence, I am listening for the change.
The point where everything still looks normal, but my instincts stop buying it.
Vegas has a way of looking calm on the surface while the current underneath runs hard, fast, and invisible to everyone who isn’t looking at the right layer.
I’m always looking at the right layer.
I work my way through the usual feeds—nothing.
Campaign season is winding up, which means politicians are busy shaking hands, making promises, and finding creative ways to explain where the money came from.
Same game.
Different week.
I pull up Unsilenced, where Sage works. The organization has three pending grant applications.
I pulled the submission history two days ago out of routine, because Sage mentioned the funding pressure in a conversation she wasn’t quite directing at me.
But when it comes to Sage, I retain things whether they were intended for me or not.
Three applications in fourteen months.
Three rejections.
The pattern is there if you know what you’re looking for, and I always know what to look for.
The first rejection came from a state arts and culture fund.
Standard language, competitive pool, limited resources.
Plausible. The second from a private foundation with documented ties to several Nevada political offices.
Less plausible. The third, rejected last month, from a community development grant that has funded organizations with significantly weaker applications than Unsilenced’s documented record.
Three rejections. Not a coincidence. Coincidence doesn’t repeat with this kind of structural consistency.
I pull up the third foundation’s board membership. Cross-reference, then cross-reference again.
The name comes up on the third pass.
Senator Edward Calloway - Advisory Board.
Not front and center, but buried a few layers down where most people wouldn’t bother looking. That’s usually where the people with the real pull like to sit.
I study it for another second, trying not to jump to conclusions. But three applications, three denials, and the same name showing up every time?
That’s not luck.
I open a new file and label it with today’s date.
That’s enough for now.
Whatever this is, it’ll either grow into something or it won’t. Chasing answers before the evidence catches up is how people end up seeing things that aren’t there.
I close the tab.
The American Sign Language module is still open from last night.
I’d left it halfway through the conversational lessons. Less about learning individual signs now. More about learning how to hold a conversation without making someone feel like they’re being spoken at instead of spoken to.
Sage’s sister, Piper, arrives in just over a month. I need to get better at this before she gets here.
I wake the monitor and continue where I left off.
Today’s lesson focuses on pacing and timing. The little mistakes that turn a natural conversation into something stiff and awkward. I mirror the signs in front of the screen, adjusting the hand angle when the software flags it, repeating the sequence until the corrections stop.
Again.
Again.
Again.
The timer in the corner rolls past another twenty minutes before I notice.
A few weeks I have been learning.
Long enough that the movements don’t feel as foreign anymore.
Long enough that I don’t have to think about every individual sign before my hands catch up.
Not good.
Not yet.
But better than I was yesterday.
I learned this because Piper is deaf, Piper is coming here, and communicating through someone else is not an option I’m prepared to accept.
That’s the full reasoning.
At least that is what I am telling myself.
I run the section twice, because the second pass tells me what’s become instinct and what I am still thinking my way through. Then, I close the module.
The workstation hums quietly in the corner of the room. Two screens are running, the third one dark, waiting.
I pull up the hospital parking lot footage. A week ago now, and I’ve been back to it three times.
I watch her reaction when the text comes through. Instead of paying attention to the message itself, her eyes slip to her jacket pocket, then back to me.
It’s barely a beat—a clean recovery.
Enough to fool almost anyone.
Almost.
The file I opened on Calloway is three lines long. I add a fourth.
Sage. Unsilenced. Grant rejections 2023 to present.
The thread between them is thin, and I don’t have the other end of it yet.
I close the laptop and sit in the quiet for a moment.
Sage has been different for the last few weeks. Not enough for anyone else to notice, but enough for me.
In the middle of all the celebrating, while Marcus was passed from one set of arms to another and the clubhouse finally remembered how to be normal again, she kept drifting half a step outside the moment.
Always smiling.
Always there.
Never quite letting herself settle into it.
I’ve seen the pattern before.
She carries the heavy stuff quietly, like keeping it to herself somehow stops it from spilling onto everyone else.
I know what I saw.
Her hand going to her pocket. The smile one layer thinner than it should have been. The delay before she answered me that lasted long enough to mean something and short enough to seem like nothing.
She said she was ‘fine.’
I opened the laptop once I got home, and I’ve had the Calloway thread open since.
So I flick to it again now.
Something is off.
I don’t have enough to call it yet. I don’t put names to things until the evidence holds up. But I’ve seen enough to know there’s a pattern. I am just waiting to find the piece that explains it.
Something is being hidden.
And I am going to find out what it is.
Not because I can’t let things go. I can let most things go—I do it constantly—the clubhouse generates more noise than anyone needs to process, and I process what matters and release what doesn’t. But Sage’s face in that parking lot at eleven o’clock at night, that I can’t release.
I pull the thread. Add another note. Set a monitor on Calloway’s public filings, his committee activity, the grant networks he sits inside.
Passive intelligence. Background process.
The kind of watching that runs quietly and tells me if anything moves.
Then I close everything down, stand up from my workstation, find the cold coffee on the table, and take a sip.
I curl up my lip, but take another sip anyway.
Piper arrives soon, and weeks of sign language should be enough to hold a conversation.
The Calloway problem stays on the desk.
But Sage?
Sage is always with me.