Chapter Twenty
SAGE
He’s still sitting exactly where he was. His elbows rest on his knees now, his hands loosely clasped together, his eyes fixed on mine with an intensity that makes my chest ache.
“I object.”
For one ridiculous second, my brain almost expects the rest of the joke.
But it never comes.
“I would’ve carried the burden with you, Objection.”
The nickname breaks something open inside me. Not because it’s funny anymore, but because it isn’t.
It is gentle.
It is him.
It is us.
My vision blurs. “Yeah.”
“No.” He shakes his head once. “You knew what I would’ve done.” His voice softens another fraction, and somehow that stings more than if he’d shouted. “You forgot who I would’ve done it for.”
The words settle somewhere deep in my chest, pressing against everything I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to hold together. A shaky breath escapes me. “I didn’t tell anyone.” The sentence leaves my mouth before I have the chance to think about it.
The second it does, I know it’s wrong.
I squeeze my eyes shut. “No.” The word comes out quieter this time. I scrub impatiently at my face, frustrated by the tears, myself, and how badly I want to rewind the last ten weeks and make different decisions. “That’s not true.”
Ghost says nothing.
He doesn’t rush in to fill the silence or rescue me from what I’m struggling to admit.
He simply waits.
The same way he always does when he knows the truth is already finding its own way to the surface.
“I t-told Marley.” The confession hangs between us.
Even saying it out loud feels like another betrayal.
“I didn’t tell her everything,” I add quickly, needing him to understand even though I know it doesn’t really change anything.
“She knew the messages were coming. She knew someone was trying to shut the inquiry down, and l-later…” My voice catches.
“She knew they started mentioning Piper.” I stare at my hands, twisting my fingers together until the ache in my knuckles gives me something else to focus on.
“I only showed her one message.” The lump in my throat grows harder to swallow. “I never told her about your bike.”
I still remember opening that photo—the scratch on the tank and the way my stomach had dropped so hard I thought I was going to throw up because I knew they’d been close enough to photograph something that belonged to him.
Close enough to hurt him.
“I couldn’t tell her.”
The apartment falls quiet again.
I can feel Ghost looking at me, but it takes me another few seconds before I can make myself meet his eyes. When I finally do, his expression hasn’t changed, and that almost makes it worse.
“You trusted Marley.” There’s no accusation in his voice, no bitterness, just hurt.
Quiet… honest… hurt.
I have to look away again before words that sound small leave my mouth. “I needed someone to know.” Smaller than they felt at the time.
“And not me?”
I nod once because I don’t trust my voice yet. When I finally find it, it comes out barely above a whisper. “Because I knew what you’d do.”
“Sage.” My name has never sounded like that in his mouth before.
Not sharp or disappointed.
Just tired.
“They sent you a photograph of my bike.” Every word lands carefully. “They already made me a target.” I feel my heart sink before he even finishes. “The only person who didn’t know that…” his eyes hold mine, “… was me.”
The truth of it hits like a punch.
I don’t argue.
I can’t.
Because sitting here now, hearing the words out loud, I realize how desperately I’d been clinging to the version of events where I could somehow protect everyone at once.
There was never a version where that was possible.
“I was protecting you!” The words sound hollow now, even to me.
Ghost holds my gaze. “By lying to the club, and to me, to my brothers?”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. The excuse I was reaching for crumbles before I can give it a voice. “By—” I stop because there isn’t another way to say it.
Ghost doesn’t help me or soften it. He waits, patient enough to let me arrive there on my own. “I need you to say it.”
A fresh tear slides down my cheek. I don’t wipe this one away. I don’t have the energy anymore. “By lying to you.” The words come out strained. I lower my head, staring at the floor because I can’t bear to watch the hurt on his face for one more second.
“Yeah, Sage, you lied to me.” The quiet that follows is thick enough to press against my chest. He gets up from the table, crosses to the window, and I watch the line of his shoulders, the way he holds himself like a man absorbing something rather than reacting to it.
When he turns back, his voice is level, but there is something underneath it, something that costs him to keep contained.
“They sent a target photograph. Men in an SUV on the highway, and they tried to put you into the asphalt at speed. They fucking shot you! They injured my brothers, Sage. And you still didn’t tell me? ”
“The road was days ago. The messages have been going on for—”
“Ten weeks. Yeah, I’m fully aware,” he says it as though he’s already done the math a dozen times, turned it over until the edges are smooth.
“Ten weeks where I was watching someone I care about carry something that was going to get her killed, and she wouldn’t let me stand beside her.
That is what you took from me, Sage. Not information. The chance to be there!”
It hits me all at once that I’ve been preparing for the wrong argument.
I had convinced myself he’d be angry that I kept the messages from him, that he’d tear strips off me for taking the risk, for trying to handle it myself.
But sitting here now, looking into his eyes, that’s not what this is.
He isn’t hurting because I was in danger.
He’s hurting because I decided he wasn’t allowed to stand in that danger with me.
The silence stretches long enough that I feel it deep inside me.
Finally, I say, “If I’d told you, you would have—”
“Made myself a target. Yes. I am aware. You said that already, multiple times.” He pauses, and something moves behind his eyes, something raw.
“And on the road last Sunday, I was a target anyway, with you on the back of my bike, because you hadn’t told me.
There is no version of this where keeping me out of it kept me safe.
There is only the version where I didn’t know and couldn’t protect you properly. ”
I sit with that for a long time. He lets me, standing by the window with his arms folded, watching me work through it the way he watches data resolve into a pattern.
“Fuck, I was afraid, okay?” I finally snap.
He turns, finally looking at me, arms crossed. “I know.”
“If it went wrong because I told you. If you got hurt because I told you—”
“Sage.” His voice softens, but it doesn’t lose its weight. “That’s not protecting me. That’s deciding my risk for me. Those are two entirely different things.”
That is the part I have to sit with. Not the accusation, but the distinction underneath it, the one I have spent weeks refusing to look at directly.
“I don’t know how to do this the other w-way,” I say, and my voice cracks, the first crack in a wall I have been holding up since the moment his phone touched the table.
“I have spent my whole life being the one who carries things so other people don’t have to…
my mother, Piper, every family that’s walked into my office.
I don’t know how to hand something to someone and trust they won’t drop it. ”
“I’m not asking you to hand me everything.” He crosses back toward the table, slower now, some of the rigidity gone out of him. “I’m asking you to stop deciding, alone, what I am capable of carrying.”
“I get it.” The words come out smaller than I intend. “I get that now.”
He walks toward me, and I stay exactly where I am, rooted to the floor as he stops close enough that I have to tip my head back to keep looking at him.
“You scared me.” My breath catches, not because of his words, but because they’re coming from him.
I’ve never heard him sound like this before.
He keeps them locked away somewhere deep inside, where they’re safe.
And right now, he’s opening the door anyway.
“Do you understand that?” His voice stays low, rough around the edges.
“I’ve run toward gunfire and never once felt what I felt staring at a screen and realizing those messages were pointed at you. ”
“I’m sorry.” It is not enough, and I know it is not enough, but it is the truest thing I have.
“I don’t want your sorry.” His hand comes up, finally, touching the side of my face, and the anger that was holding his entire body rigid a moment ago drains into something else, something that has been sitting underneath it the entire time. “I want you to stop doing this to yourself. To us.”
The words settle between us, and for a moment neither of us moves.
I can still feel the heat of his anger, the weight of everything we’ve just said to each other, but it’s changing into something else right in front of me.
Something quieter.
Something infinitely more dangerous.
My eyes search his face, taking him in as if I’m seeing him for the first time. The hard line of his jaw is still there, his shoulders still tight beneath the leather of his cut, but the fight has gone out of him. In its place is something I’ve never seen from Ghost before.
Fear.
Not for himself.
For me.
And it hits me all at once.
All those nights I’d spent lying awake convincing myself I was protecting him, he’d been doing exactly the same thing.
The apartment feels impossibly small, the air thick enough to make every breath feel like work. I can hear the traffic somewhere outside, the refrigerator humming in the kitchen, and the uneven rhythm of my own heartbeat.
Then I realize I’m not the only one breathing harder.
Ghost’s gaze drops to my mouth for the briefest second before finding my eyes again.
My heart stumbles.
The look on his face undoes something inside me that the argument never could.