2. Lockdown #3
"There's more of them." Monk, low, right beside me now, coming up from behind, his footsteps almost as quiet as mine. "Staging area's to the left. Two men in it, at least."
"Nearest exterior door?"
"South corridor. Metal door, push bar. Saw it my first night." A beat, his breathing levelled. "Never tried it."
"We try it now."
"Right at the junction, then straight."
We went into the south corridor. Behind us, shouting, boots on concrete, the search bleeding off the main floor into the back. They'd found the two men on the ground.
"Who are you?" He asked it without slowing. Flat, direct, like following a stranger through a locked building at least bought him a name.
"Ghost."
"That's not a name."
"It's the only one that matters right now."
"The giant man on the mezzanine. You know him?"
"He's why I was here tonight."
He took that in stride. Three steps. Four. "He's the one who put my brother in the hospital. I know it now."
I looked at him. His face was bloody and swelling and set with a fury so controlled it read as almost calm.
"I figured." Quieter than I meant. I didn't have the details. But I'd heard the threat and seen his face, and the rest made sense. The south corridor was ahead and the sounds behind us were closing.
The door was where he said. Metal, industrial, a horizontal bar.
I hit it with both hands. Nothing.
"Stuck." I hit it again, shoulder into the steel, the sound ringing down the hall. "Or blocked."
"Together." He set his hands on the bar beside mine, raw tape around his knuckles. His body was close enough that his heat pressed along my arm.
"One, two?—"
We shoved on two, both of us, like the count was a courtesy. The bar gave. The door swung out and the night poured in and hit me like cold water. Clean, dry asphalt and the whole missing weight of blood and smoke and two hundred screaming people.
I pulled in a breath so deep it ached.
Loading dock. South side. Dark save for a flood lamp over the emergency door, a yellow cone across empty concrete. A dumpster, an empty delivery truck, nothing but a black desert alley. The perfect pre-planned exit.
And cutting through the darkness, the sound I'd been waiting on. Two Harleys, low and rolling, headlights swinging around the corner of the building.
Blade on point. Irish followed closely.
My knees nearly went. The tension that had held my spine rigid since the lockdown fell all at once and left my hands shaking. They'd have seen the front seal with me still inside, and gone to the fallback we'd set. South loading dock.
Blade cut his engine. His eyes went from me to Monk, the blood, the bruises on his bare torso, and back to me.
"Gravedigger?"
"Confirmed. Inside. But he saw me."
"You hurt?"
"No."
"Him?"
"He needs medical attention. And he comes with us." It was out before I'd decided it. Except the deciding had happened somewhere between the ring and the corridor and the two men on the floor and the way this stranger had looked at me like I was real.
Blade held my eyes a beat. Then looked at Irish. "Mount up. We're gone."
I turned to Monk. "Follow me."
I jogged around the corner toward the tire shop where my bike was still staged. Monk followed. I swung on and kicked it over and the engine caught and settled, the idle vibration running up into my hands.
"Get on." My voice came out softer than I expected, and I couldn't have told you where it came from.
He stood beside the bike. Blood on his face, raw taped knuckles, bruises spreading across his torso in the floodlight. He looked at the Harley, then at me.
"You're asking me to get on a motorcycle with a stranger named Ghost who just showed up out of nowhere, put a guy on the floor, and has two more bikers waiting on him?"
"Yeah." I couldn't help it. The corner of my mouth pulled up. "That's what I'm asking."
He looked back at the warehouse. Shouting still leaked through the walls. The enforcers would eventually come out of the east door. Then he looked back at me.
He got on.
His arms came around my waist. His chest against my back, bare skin and sweat and the heat of another body pressed to mine, and I felt the contact everywhere at once. My spine. My shoulder blades. The backs of my arms. His breath at the side of my neck.
My hands tightened on the bars.
Irish turned the corner and rode past us first. I followed. Blade fell in behind.
The warehouse shrank in my mirrors. The road opened dark and straight and the engine climbed as I rolled the throttle on and let the night take us. Cold air, clean, tasting of sage. Vegas lay across the basin below, a long smear of light with black on every side.
His arms tightened. The grip had changed. Not practical anymore, not panic either. Something else.
I leaned into a curve and he leaned with me, no hesitation in it, his body just going where mine went.
And somewhere low in me, in the place that had been coming loose since two dark eyes found me across a room where nobody's supposed to find me, something settled. Something as scary as the sound of those bolts sealing the warehouse doors tight.
For the first time since I could remember, the noise in my head had nothing to say.