Chapter Thirty-Four
GHOST
Later That Night
The bedroom is dark except for the lamp on the nightstand, its warm glow spilling across tangled sheets and the quiet space between us.
Sage sits with her back against the headboard, one knee drawn up beneath the blankets, watching me as I climb into bed beside her. She shifts closer until her shoulder brushes mine, her fingers slipping into my hand as if they have always belonged there. “Tell me,” she says softly.
I lace our fingers together and stare at the ceiling for a moment before I start at the beginning.
I walk her through Travis’ house. Koa, Mace, Slate, and Static taking out the guards.
Me sitting in the van, stripping away every option Travis thought he still had before he even realized he was trapped.
I tell her about catching him at the gate.
About sitting him back down at his kitchen table.
About the statement waiting for him before he understood the fight was already over.
About the silence that settled over the room when he finally realized every move he’d made had already been anticipated.
And finally…
The signature.
She doesn’t interrupt once.
Her thumb drifts slowly across the back of my hand while she listens, her eyes never leaving mine.
“So…” she says after a long moment. “You did it.”
I shake my head. “We did.”
She waits. I know she’s waiting for more.
“Sin saw the play before any of us. Koa and Mace got us through the front door. Slate and Static rode halfway across the country because another chapter asked for help. Everyone had a part in it.” I glance down at our joined hands. “One man doesn’t bring down someone like Calloway.”
“A club does,” she finishes quietly.
I nod. “Yeah.”
Silence settles over the room again, comfortable this time.
Sage reaches up and cups my jaw, turning my face toward hers. “I’m proud of the club,” she says and smiles, small and knowing. “But Ghost…” Her thumb brushes across the stubble on my jaw. “I’m proud of you.”
The words affect me more than everything that’s happened today.
Nobody has ever said that to me like that before.
So sure of it.
Growing up, the only sentences with my name in them were clinical—provided for, case managed, aged out. Nobody’s file ever had ‘proud of him’ written in the margin. And there were exactly three people whose opinion should have mattered enough to write it, and not one of them ever thought to check.
Twenty-three families kept their homes. Sage kept Unsilenced. Some kid in a room a lot like the ones I grew up in is going to live in a system that’s marginally less willing to eat him alive, because the woman I love decided to fight for it, and I decided she wasn’t doing it alone.
That’s as close to paid as a debt like that ever gets.
I stare at her for a second, completely unprepared for how much those four words undo me.
“You should probably stop saying shit like that,” I murmur.
One corner of her mouth lifts. “Why?”
I lean forward until my forehead rests against hers. “Because I’d tear apart the world to hear you say it again.”
She smiles a dazzling smile and leans in, pressing her lips to mine tenderly. My cock jerks in response, my fingers instantly lacing through her hair to pull her closer.
I need this right now.
I need her.
So, I deepen the kiss, my free hand sliding down to her hip and pulling her.
She giggles as I lift her over me, her body straddling mine.
My cock has absolutely no issue with her riding me right now as he appreciates her pressing down.
I growl into her mouth, and she giggles again, pulling back slowly, breaking the kiss.
“Okay, ease up there, cowboy, I’m not done with our conversation yet. ”
I raise my brow, glancing down at my erection pressing against her. I grip her hips and grind her down on me. “Fuck, baby, I’m so done talking,” I say, moving in to lift off her pajama top.
She smiles, her hands sliding to mine, and she halts me from taking off her top. My head falls back against the headboard, my cock pleading with her to reconsider.
“All in good time. You didn’t tell me you were taking Slate and Static with you to meet Travis?” she says finally.
I raise my brow at her. “You really want to keep talking right now?”
She smiles wide. “Yes, I want to continue our conversation. You can wait a little longer, caveman.”
Groaning, I try to rein in my indecent thoughts and focus. “Okay… I made the call after Church. There wasn’t time to loop you in before it mattered.”
“That’s not what I meant.” She tips her head toward the small black lens mounted above my monitor, the one she noticed for the first time two weeks ago and has been circling back to ever since. “You’ve had a camera on this desk the whole time, and you never told me that either.”
I don’t flinch from it. “It records the workstation. Nothing else.”
“That’s not the point, Ghost.”
“I know.” And I do. I’ve turned this over more than once since she first spotted it. “I don’t tell people things until I’ve confirmed them. It’s how I stay alive in a room most people wouldn’t survive.” I hold her gaze. “It’s not how I want to be with you.”
Something in her face loosens, the argument bleeding straight out of it.
She rolls her hips on top of me, making my cock liven up again, my hand sliding into her hair as she kisses me, slow at first and then not slow at all, and every sharp thing sitting in my chest tonight settles into something else entirely.
Then with enough determination to make every sharp edge I’d carried home tonight dissolve beneath her mouth.
I lose track of time.
Lose track of everything except the woman stretched over me.
And then, she pulls back.
I frown. “What?”
She smiles, that dangerous little smile that usually means I’m about to lose an argument I didn’t realize we were having.
Without a word, she swings one leg off the bed and climbs to her feet.
“Sage?” She starts walking toward the en suite.
“Where are you going?” She glances back over her shoulder, reaches for the hem of her pajama shirt, and peels it over her head before letting it fall to the floor.
“I’m having a shower.” She hooks her thumbs into the waistband of her shorts, arching a brow at me. “You coming?”
I blink at her exactly once, then I’m moving.
“Well, when you ask that nicely…”
She laughs as I all but launch myself off the bed, dragging my T-shirt over my head while following her into the bathroom. By the time I reach the doorway, she’s already stepping beneath the spray, steam curling around her as the water splashes against the tiles.
I kick the rest of my clothes somewhere behind me and step beneath the spray after her.
Heat rolls over my skin, washing away the grit of the day, and for the first time since this morning, my shoulders loosen.
Sage turns toward me through the steam, droplets catching in her hair, her smile softening for the briefest second when our eyes meet.
I close the distance between us. My fingers find her wrist, drawing her gently toward me before I lift it to my mouth and press a kiss against the inside of it.
Her pulse flutters beneath my lips.
I feel it.
Feel the tiny hitch in her breathing as my thumb brushes across the inside of her wrist.
When I look up, something in her expression has changed.
She’s not soft when she looks at me like that.
She’s issuing a challenge.
“You planning on being gentle all night, or is there a version of you that doesn’t run a risk assessment first?”
I don’t answer right away. Instead, I let my hand drift down the curve of Sage’s waist, over her hip, until my fingers find her clit, and I watch her jaw tighten when I don’t give her what she’s asking for yet. I circle slow, barely there, and her hips buck forward chasing more contact.
“Ghost.”
“I like to be thorough.”
“I’m aware. I filed the complaint weeks ago.” Her hand fists in my hair, dragging my mouth down to hers, and she bites my bottom lip hard enough that I growl against her mouth. “Quit thinking so much.”
That does something to me low in my gut, something that snaps whatever restraint I was holding onto clean in half.
I grip her hip hard enough that she gasps, and I turn her, pressing her front against the tile this time, my chest flush to her back, my mouth at her ear. “Careful what you ask for, Objection.”
She shivers at the name, arches back into me, and I run my hand down her spine, over the curve of her ass, between her thighs, and she’s already soaked for me, water or not. She rocks back against my hand, impatient, and I chuckle low against her neck.
“Ghost.”
“Yeah?”
“I said quit thinking so much, not be smug.”
“Didn’t hear a complaint in there.”
I slide two fingers into her without warning, curling them just right, and whatever comeback she had loaded dissolves into a moan that echoes around us.
I work her slowly at first, feeling her tighten around my fingers, feeling the way her knees start to shake, and just when she starts chasing that edge in earnest, I pull my hand back.
“Ghost, I swear to God—”
“Consider it revenge.” I press a kiss to the back of her neck, my voice rough at her ear. “Every time you’ve walked off half-dressed just to watch me suffer.”
“That’s not revenge, that’s just mean.”
“It’s efficient.”
She huffs out a laugh that turns into a groan when I finally line myself up and drive into her in one hard stroke that has her slapping a palm flat against the tile to brace herself. “Fuck,” she chokes out.
“That’s my girl.”