Chapter Sixteen
SAGE
The ride back to the clubhouse feels longer than it should, even though the highway markers tell me we’re covering the same distance in half the time.
Nobody is riding easy anymore. Every bike sits closer to the next, every set of shoulders in front of me locked tight the entire way home, and I keep my face pressed against Ghost’s back, trying not to think about the photograph folded into his cut’s pocket.
When we finally pull into the lot, Sin is off his bike before the engine fully dies, already moving through the group, counting heads.
I climb off Ghost’s Harley on legs that don’t feel like they belong to me anymore, and they shake the second my boots hit the concrete.
I tell myself it’s the adrenaline.
It probably is.
Except every time I close my eyes, I hear it all over again—the crack of gunfire, the metallic scream of a bullet hitting Ghost’s bike, the explosion of his pistol beside my head.
And I keep seeing the look on his face.
Not angry or scared, just… certain. Like the second those men aimed at us, something inside him had already decided what had to happen next.
The parking lot is already full of noise, with bikes cutting engines one after another, brothers swinging off in various states of banged-up.
Gia is already moving through the chaos with a first-aid kit under one arm and a look on her face that says she’s done this before and hates having to do it again.
I’ve barely got both feet under me when I hear my name being shouted from across the lot in a voice that could probably be heard from space.
“SAGE!”
Marley comes surging out of the front doors at a dead run, hair flying, still in the leggings and oversized hoodie she was clearly wearing five minutes before someone called her, and she doesn’t stop until she’s crashed into me hard enough that I actually have to plant my feet to stay upright.
“Oh my God.” Her arms lock around me like she’s checking for structural damage by feel alone.
“Oh my God, oh my God, Nitro called…” She takes a breath.
“All he said was there’s been an incident on the ride, that you were shot at, and then he hung up.
Which, by the way, is the single worst way to deliver information to a person, and I have spent the last twenty minutes assuming you were dead—”
“I’m not dead.”
“I can see that now.” She pulls back just far enough to grab my face in both hands, tilting it side to side like she’s checking for damage. “Are you hurt? Are you shot? Why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost, no offense to your actual boyfriend?”
“Just a scratch on my arm.” My voice comes out steadier than I expect, though my hands are still not entirely mine yet. “Just—” I don’t have the end of that sentence.
Marley doesn’t need it. She pulls me back in, tighter this time, one hand coming up to press flat against the back of my head the way she has since we were teens and she found me crying in a library bathroom over an exam I hadn’t failed yet.
“Okay,” she says, quieter now, right against my ear. “Okay. You’re here. You’re standing. I’ve got you.”
Over her shoulder, I watch the rest of it happening the way you watch something from very far away.
Millie already has an arm looped through Anchor’s, checking him over for injuries.
Victoria is talking to Sin while rocking Marcus, with that worried look crossing her face like she is expecting her old Five-0 buddies to roll up through the gates at any given minute.
Gia moves between them, somehow keeping everyone else from completely losing their shit.
Nobody here is pretending this is normal. But nobody is falling apart alone, either.
Marley finally lets go long enough to look at me properly, and whatever she sees in my face makes her jaw tighten in a way I recognize, because it’s the same look I’ve given plenty of people who came at her.
“Who do I need to threaten with forks?” She throws my own line back at me.
Despite everything, something in my chest loosens enough to let a laugh out. “It’s handled.”
“It’s handled how?”
I glance past her to where Ghost and Sin are talking quietly across the room. One look at them tells me club shit is going down, and apparently, I’m not invited to that conversation yet. “I’ll explain. Just, not yet.”
Marley follows my eyeline, reads Ghost’s face for exactly two seconds, and apparently decides she doesn’t love what she sees there either, but she lets it go, because that’s what she does.
Marley squeezes my hand once, hard. “I’m not leaving until you tell me everything,” she says. “But I can wait until you’ve stopped shaking to start.”
“I’m not shaking.”
She raises one eyebrow and points, wordlessly, at my very visibly shaking hand.
“Well, I’m not shaking badly.”
“Sure, babe.” She loops her arm through mine anyway, steering me toward the front door of the clubhouse, toward Gia, water, and somewhere to sit down. “Come on. Let’s get you a chair before you fall into one.”
Dr. Sarah Chen arrives within minutes of us getting inside, her kit already open on the bar before she’s said a word to anyone.
She goes straight to Mace first, her hands steady and quick as she checks the ribs Ghost already flagged on the roadside, then moves through the rest of the brothers one by one.
Deek gets the cut above his eyebrow cleaned and taped.
Bear tries waving her off twice before she ignores him and checks the graze on his forearm anyway.
Koa sits through having his jaw looked at without a word, but his eyes never stop moving, tracking every person who comes through the clubhouse doors.
Marley has wandered off to check on Nitro while my eyes keep drifting to the windows.
To every engine I hear outside.
My phone feels like it weighs ten pounds in my pocket.
Those messages… I told myself they were just words. Creepy and unsettling. Easy enough to ignore if I refused to let them get under my skin.
But this?
This wasn’t somebody hiding behind a screen.
This was an SUV, with guns out the window, shooting at us.
Bullets close enough to tear through my jacket.
A line of blood still burning across my arm.
My stomach twists when I remember… the text, the committee, the men on the highway.
And for the first time, none of it feels separate anymore.
Sin doesn’t sit down once. He moves through the clubhouse issuing quiet instructions, and within twenty minutes a small team is heading back out toward the highway to make certain nothing gets left behind for anyone to find.
No shell casings or torn patches that could be traced or that could ever point back to this club or the two men still lying in the desert dirt.
I watch them leave, my fingers unconsciously curling around the sleeve covering the graze on my arm.
This morning I’d climbed onto Ghost’s bike thinking the worst thing waiting for me was another anonymous text message.
I don’t think that anymore.
Whatever started with those messages, it just found me on the open road.
“Your arm.” I blink and realize Dr. Chen is standing in front of me. “Can I?”
I look down at the blood that’s dried along my sleeve and nod. She gently rolls the fabric higher, and the second the cool antiseptic touches the graze, I suck in a sharp breath. “Sorry,” she says quietly.
I shake my head. “It’s fine.”
It isn’t.
Nothing feels fine.
She cleans the wound with quick hands, then presses a square of gauze over it. I watch her tape it into place, strangely fascinated by how ordinary it all looks, as if the last twenty minutes never happened.
“It’s shallow,” she says, giving the bandage one last check. “You’ll have a scar, but it’ll be a small one.”
A scar.
My fingers curl against my jeans before I realize they’re shaking again, and I press my hands flat against my thighs, willing them to stop.
They don’t.
Dr. Chen notices. “Adrenaline,” she says gently. “It’ll take a while to calm down.”
I nod because that seems easier than admitting I can still hear the gunshots every time I close my eyes. “Thank you,” I manage.
She gives me a small smile before moving on to the next brother who insists he’s ‘fine’ while bleeding on the clubhouse floor.
I stare down at the fresh bandage wrapped around my arm.
Twenty minutes ago, I didn’t think I’d need one.
I feel Ghost’s attention on me the entire time, even while he’s talking to Anchor about the phones and wallets they pulled from the SUV. I don’t need to look over to know it. I’ve learned the shape of his focus by now, the weight of it settling over a room.
It isn’t long before Sin’s voice cuts through the low hum of conversation. “Church. Now.”
The brothers start moving toward the Chapel without hesitation, the way they always do when Sin uses that tone.
I stay where I am, watching them file past, expecting to be left behind the way I usually am for club business.
Then Sin’s eyes land on me, and I understand before he says a single word that this meeting is about me. “Sage. You too.”
My stomach drops somewhere below my boots.
I follow him inside, taking the seat he points me toward near the head of the table, and I feel every set of eyes in the room settle on me the moment I sit down. Ghost takes the seat across from me, his expression carefully blank in the way it only gets when he’s holding something back.
Sin doesn’t waste time. “Talk to me about the photo.”
I close my eyes for half a heartbeat.
This is it! This is the moment I tell them.
About the texts, the unknown number, every message that’s been slowly tightening around my life for weeks.
I should.
I know I should.
But all I can see is Ghost on that highway. His body shielding mine. The sound of his gun going off beside my head. The look on his face when he checked my arm after we’d stopped.
If I say the words out loud, if I tell them Ghost’s name started showing up in those messages, then they will all know why those men came after us today.
They will know he got dragged into this because of me.