Chapter Fifteen #3
The brothers instinctively make room for him, stepping aside without anyone asking them to. Even Sin steps aside, simply watching Ghost walk past, reading something in him the same way I’d been trying to only seconds earlier.
The two men from the SUV watch him approach.
The driver shifts his weight, trying to square his shoulders despite the blood running down the side of his face. Whatever confidence he’d been holding onto evaporates the second Ghost stops in front of him.
I see it happen, the realization—this isn’t an interrogation anymore.
Ghost reaches behind his back, his movements smooth and unhurried, drawing his pistol with the same ease he’d shown a hundred other times handling a keyboard, a camera, or a lockpick. There isn’t a trace of hesitation in him.
No anger.
No satisfaction.
Only purpose.
A cold rush sweeps through my body.
“Ethan…” His name leaves my mouth quickly.
He doesn’t look back.
The first shot tears through the silence.
The sound punches the air from my lungs, and my body jerks with the shock.
The driver’s head explodes, blood ricocheting and splashing in a wave of crimson across the SUV as his body collapses into the dirt before my brain has caught up with what my eyes have just witnessed.
“What the fuc—” the passenger yells just as the second recoil of the Glock follows so quickly it almost overlaps the first. Blood blooms across the SUV, brain matter dripping off the number plate as the passenger drops beside him.
Just… gone.
My heart slams against my ribs so hard it hurts as I dry-retch.
I can’t move.
I can’t breathe.
I stare at the two bodies lying in the dirt, my mind desperately trying to make sense of the impossible jump between the man who kissed me goodnight outside my apartment and the man standing twenty feet away with a pistol still smoking in his hand.
A strange ache spreads through my chest.
Not fear.
Not of him.
The realization catches me completely off guard.
I should be horrified, and part of me is.
But a louder, deeper part understands without needing the explanation.
Whatever was on that photograph, those men had signed their own death warrants long before Ghost pulled the trigger.
The desert falls silent again.
Ghost lowers the Glock with the same steady control he’d raised it, holsters it without so much as glancing at the two men on the ground, and finally turns back toward me.
Our eyes meet.
For a heartbeat, neither of us moves.
Then I see it.
Not regret, or guilt, but a promise. One so fierce it settles somewhere deep inside me before a single word is spoken.
Nothing is ever going to touch me again while Ethan Garrity is still breathing.
Nobody moves for a long moment. Not a single brother who’s ever sat through Church with Ghost or watched him disappear behind three computer screens for twelve hours chasing a thread nobody else could see says a word.
Ghost is the one who builds the picture.
Ghost is the one who finds the angle everyone else misses.
Ghost is the one who quietly dismantles problems until there’s nothing left standing except the truth.
Ghost is not the one who settles things with bullets.
Except, he just did.
Silence follows as every set of eyes settles on Ghost.
Sin watches him for several long seconds before Ghost reaches into the inside pocket of his cut and carefully pulls out the folded photograph. His fingers pause against it for the briefest moment, almost as if he’s giving himself one last chance to believe it says something different.
It doesn’t.
He hands it to Sin.
Sin unfolds it slowly, his eyes moving over whatever’s printed there before lifting back to Ghost. Nothing changes in his expression.
No surprise or anger, just understanding.
The kind that only comes from knowing the man standing in front of you well enough to recognize exactly why he made the choice he did.
After another long moment, Sin folds the photograph again and hands it back. “Clubhouse,” he says quietly.
Nobody moves.
Ghost turns instead. His eyes find mine immediately, and something inside me shifts before he’s even taken a step.
He starts walking toward me, the brothers instinctively making room as he crosses the space between us, and when he finally stops in front of me, I can still smell burned gunpowder clinging to the leather of his cut.
He doesn’t say a word. He just unfolds the photograph and places it gently into my hands. For a second, I stare at the paper without really seeing it, my pulse still somewhere in my throat from everything that’s happened over the last ten minutes. Then my eyes finally focus.
It’s me… in the photograph.
Walking toward my car outside Unsilenced.
Coffee in hand.
Smiling.
Not because anything remarkable had happened that day, but because it had been an ordinary Tuesday. I’d left work thinking about absolutely nothing, completely unaware that somewhere nearby someone had lifted a camera and decided I was worth following home.
A chill works its way slowly down my spine despite the desert heat pressing against my back. I keep looking at the photograph, searching it for something I missed.
A reflection.
A shadow.
Anything.
There isn’t one.
Just me, living my life while someone else quietly turned it into surveillance.
“That…” My voice catches, and I have to swallow before I can make the words come out. “That’s me… f-five d-days ago.”
Ghost never looks away from me. “Yeah.”
“I was wearing that jacket five fucking days ago!”
His jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. “I know.”
The realization doesn’t hit all at once. It arrives piece by piece, each thought fitting into the next until there’s nowhere left for denial to hide.
“This wasn’t a warning.” I hear how quiet my own voice has become. “They weren’t sent to scare me.”
“No, this was a hit, Sage.”
I lower my eyes to the photograph again, tracing the outline of a woman who had absolutely no idea she was already being hunted.
The image of the two men lying in the dirt pushes into my mind before I can stop it, followed almost immediately by Ghost standing over them with smoke still drifting from the end of his pistol.
Everything clicks into place.
Not logically, but somewhere much deeper than that.
“Ghost…” I look back up at him, my voice barely more than a breath. “On the road…” I don’t finish the sentence.
He holds my gaze with that same steadiness that’s carried me through every impossible day since he walked into my life. He doesn’t ask me to forgive what he just did.
Standing there with my face staring back at me from a photograph I never knew existed, I know I don’t need him to. “Thank you,” I whisper.
Sin’s voice comes from the other side of the road. “This is clubhouse level now. You don’t move without someone knowing where you are. Non-negotiable.”
I open my mouth to argue and close it again. I look at Ghost, who says nothing, and I look back at Sin. “Okay,” I say instead.
“Let’s get this shit cleaned up, and get everyone back home and checked over with medical,” Sin states.
And I do the only thing I can right now, which is throw my arms around Ghost and hold on for dear life.
The fact he holds me back with everything he has…
Tells me he needed this just as much as I did.