GHOST (Bone Hollow Sinners MC #20)

Prologue

Ezekiel

The office is dark except for the green glow of Conrad's desk lamp, turned low, and it makes everything in the room look drowned.

Two in the morning. The compound is asleep.

Somewhere out past these walls the wind is moving through the pines the way it always does this time of year, a long exhale that sounds like the mountain breathing, and I am sitting in a leather chair that has held a hundred men before me while my president tells me how to die.

"Cerberus," Conrad says, and lets the word sit there between us like a body on a table.

Priest stands by the window with his arms crossed.

He hasn't said anything since I walked in.

Priest doesn't talk unless he has something to say, and the fact that he's here at all, at this hour, behind a locked door, tells me more than any words could.

This is not a normal conversation. This is the kind of conversation that ends with a man's life rearranged into something unrecognizable.

"I've heard the name," I say.

"You've heard the edges of it." Conrad turns a folder around on the desk and slides it toward me.

I don't open it yet. I'm watching his face, because Conrad's face is a closed door most days and right now there's a crack in it, something that looks almost like grief, and I don't understand why.

"Cerberus is a network. Human-run, but it's got its teeth in shifter country from here to the Gulf.

Trafficking. They move wolves like cargo.

They make the suppressants that keep them docile in transit, and they sell the surplus to anyone who wants a wolf they can control.

Weapons on the side. Drugs underneath all of it.

They've got money and reach and patience, and we've been fighting them at the fingertips for three years without ever once touching the hand. "

I open the folder. Photographs. Maps. A web of names connected by lines I can't yet read. Cages. I make myself look at the cages.

"We can't hit them from outside," Conrad says.

"Every time we get close they cut the limb off and grow it back somewhere we can't see.

We need someone inside. Someone who can vanish so completely that nobody comes looking.

Someone whose disappearance won't raise a single question because everyone already knows where he is. "

I close the folder. I understand. I understand the way you understand a drop the second your foot leaves the edge, when the falling hasn't started yet but is already inevitable.

"You want me to die," I say.

Conrad doesn't blink. "I want you to be dead. There's a difference."

The difference is everything and it is also nothing.

The difference is that I will keep breathing.

The sameness is that the man named Ezekiel Hale will cease to exist, will be carried out of this world in a box and put into the ground with my name on the stone, and the thing that walks away will be something else. Will be a stranger wearing my hands.

He lays it out plain. There's a raid scheduled.

A Cerberus front operation two counties over, a fuel depot they use to launder product.

We hit it next week. The building burns.

In the wreckage they recover a body — already procured, Conrad says, a John Doe from a county morgue matched to my height and build, dental records doctored to read as mine.

The fire does the rest. No one will look too hard at char.

They'll look at the records and the records will say Ezekiel Hale, and the records will be wrong, and that wrongness will be the truest thing I ever do for this club.

"And then?" I ask.

"And then you walk into Cerberus as a new man.

We've built him. Background, history, a body count to make him useful.

You work your way in. You feed us everything.

Locations, leadership, money. You stay until we have enough to take the whole thing apart at once, all of it, every limb in the same night. " He pauses. "And then you come home."

"How long?"

"As long as it takes."

The honesty of it is almost a kindness. He could lie. He could say six months, a year, give me a number to hold onto. He doesn't, because he respects me too much to feed me a date he can't promise, and because we both know that a thing like Cerberus does not fall on a schedule.

There's only one question I actually care about, and I've been holding it in my mouth this whole time like a stone I'm afraid to swallow.

"Can I tell Margo?"

Priest moves at the window. Just slightly. Conrad's jaw tightens.

"No."

"Conrad—"

"No one can know. Not your brothers. Not your woman.

Especially not your woman." He leans forward, and now the crack in his face is wide open and what's behind it is something I'll think about for seven years.

"The cover has to be total, Zeke. A funeral can't be acted.

Grief can't be faked, not the kind that holds up.

If Margo knows you're alive, then her tears are a performance, and a performance has tells, and Cerberus has eyes in places you wouldn't believe.

One slipped word. One day she's not sad enough at your grave.

One stranger watching her too long. And the cover breaks, and you're dead for real, and so is everyone you came home to protect.

" He sits back. "If she grieves you, the grief has to be true.

Which means she has to believe you're gone. Which means you have to let her."

I sit in the green-drowned dark and I think about the woman in my cabin.

She's asleep right now. I know exactly how.

On her side, facing the door, one hand flung across to my half of the bed with the palm flat against the sheet like she's keeping the place warm for me.

She always sleeps like that when I'm out late, like her body refuses to admit I'm not there even while her mind lets her rest. In the morning she'll wake before me and pad to the kitchen and put coffee on and she'll be humming something, she's always humming something, and when I come up behind her she'll lean back into me without turning around because she knows the shape of me by feel.

I think about her laugh. The way it comes up out of her whole body, the way she throws her head back with it.

I think about her hands in my hair when we lie in the dark and she traces the shape of my skull like she's memorizing it.

I think about the way she says my name. Not Ezekiel — she only uses that when she's furious, and even then it sounds like an endearment.

Not the road name. Zeke. Soft. Just for me.

Zeke, come back to bed. Zeke, you're working too much. Zeke, I love you, you ridiculous wolf.

If I do this, the last thing she'll say to me, she'll say to a man she thinks is alive. And then she'll spend years saying my name to a stone.

My wolf is quiet inside me, listening. He doesn't like this. He's pacing the back of my skull, low and unhappy, because everything in him wants to go to her, to put his body between her and this whole conversation. No, he says, in the wordless way he says everything. Not her. Anything but her.

But that's exactly it. That's the reason.

The wolves in those cages in the folder — somebody loved them too.

Somebody's somewhere right now sleeping with a hand across an empty half of a bed, not knowing it'll stay empty forever because Cerberus took the other half and we couldn't reach far enough to stop it.

If I don't do this, that keeps happening.

To people I'll never meet. To people Margo will never meet.

The math is ugly and simple and I hate it and it doesn't stop being true because I hate it.

"How long do I have," I say. "Before."

"A week."

A week. Seven mornings of her humming in the kitchen.

Seven nights of her hand across the bed.

Seven days to memorize a woman I'm about to spend the rest of my life without, and I can't tell her, can't hold her any tighter than usual, can't let one single thing change or she'll feel it, she feels everything, she'll know.

"Okay," I say.

Conrad nods. There's nothing else to say and we both know it. Priest crosses the room and puts his hand on my shoulder on his way out, just for a second, the only goodbye he knows how to give, and then it's just me and the green lamp and the folder full of cages.

I close my eyes.

Seven years from now, I'll come back to this moment again and again, turn it over in my hands in the dark of a hundred unfamiliar rooms, and I'll understand that this — right here, two in the morning, the chair, the choice — this was the last time I was entirely myself.

After this I'm two men. The one who keeps living.

The one who has to die so the other one can.

I'll lose track of which one I am. I'll forget the sound of my own real laugh because Ghost doesn't laugh, Ghost watches, Ghost survives.

The warm thing in me, the loud open thing Margo fell for — I'll have to bury it deeper than they bury the body, and some part of me will never dig it back up.

The raid happens.

I won't describe it. There are things I did that week that I've never said out loud and never will, and the fire is one of them.

The building burns. The body is recovered.

The records say what they're built to say.

And somewhere in a county morgue, a man with no name lends me his death so I can keep my breath.

The funeral is on a grey Tuesday.

I'm in the tree line above the cemetery when they bring the coffin out.

I told myself I wouldn't come. I came anyway, because I am not strong enough to not come, and I will pay for that weakness with seven years of remembering it.

The whole compound is there in black. My brothers carry the box that's supposed to be me.

Conrad's face is stone. Priest's is stone. And then I see her.

Margo is in a black dress and her sister is holding her up by the arm and she's not crying yet, she's just standing there at the graveside looking at the hole in the ground like she's waiting for someone to tell her it's a mistake.

They lower the box. Coffin's stone catches the grey light — my name, carved deep, the dates, the little span of years that's supposed to be all I get.

And that's when she goes. Her knees buckle and Blythe can't hold her and she folds down over the empty grave with a sound that travels all the way up the hill and into the tree line and into me and I will hear that sound for the rest of my life.

It is the sound of a heart being unmade.

It is the sound of the truest grief there is, and Conrad was right, you cannot fake it, and I am the one who made it real.

I don't move. I don't breathe. I don't exist. That's the job now. Not existing.

My wolf is screaming inside me, throwing himself against the walls of me, go to her, go to her, GO TO HER, and I lock him down so hard that something between us tears, the first tear of seven years of tearing, and I turn away from the only thing I've ever loved while she screams my name at a box of someone else.

I walk into the trees.

I don't look back, because if I look back I will run to her, and the mission will fail, and real people in real cages will die, and her grief — the grief I just bought with her whole heart — will have been for nothing.

I become Ghost.

And I stay dead for seven years.