1. Lola #2
Nobody had ever looked at me like this. Like they'd found something they hadn't expected and weren't sure what to do about it.
We talked. Not the way most people talked, filling silence because it made them nervous.
We talked in fragments. Short exchanges separated by stretches of quiet that should have been awkward and weren't. He told me the jukebox had been there longer than the club.
I asked how long he'd been in Forsaken and he said long enough.
Neither of us mentioned the Jackals, or my father, or the fact that every minute I sat on this stool was an act of disloyalty that could burn my world down.
The silences were the best part. They weren't gaps that needed filling.
They were spaces he'd built on purpose, and sitting inside them felt like finding a room I hadn't known existed.
Every silence between us said more than the words did.
Every time I glanced at his hands on the bar, at the angle of his jaw, at the way his shoulders sat with that studied, careful stillness, I felt the pull tighten.
The bar thinned around us. Truckers left.
Brothers drifted through the back door. The jukebox ran out of credits and nobody fed it more.
I'd been here for hours, and I'd said more words to this man than I said to anyone outside of Sarah in months.
Half of what we'd communicated had been in the spaces between speaking.
"I should go," I said.
He nodded. No protest, no offer to walk me out. Just a nod, steady, and his eyes holding mine.
I slid off my stool. Pulled my jacket on. Zipped it and felt warmth move through me that had nothing to do with the leather. A feeling that was entirely mine. Something that belonged to nobody but me.
"Goodnight, Ghost."
I walked out into the parking lot. The cold hit me and I stood for a long moment, breathing, keys in my hand, my pulse steady and loud music still ringing in my ears.
I drove home in the dark. Highway, mountains, headlights cutting through empty road. His face was in my head the whole way. That level stare, the quiet, the way he'd sat two stools away and given me room even while his attention never left me.
I was Stone's daughter. He was the Angels' VP. The space between those facts was a minefield and I'd spent three hours walking through it barefoot, and the worst part, the part that made my hands tighten on the wheel, was that I wanted to go back.
I pulled into the lot outside my apartment building. Cut the engine. Sat there with my hands on the wheel and the dashboard light fading.
My apartment was on the second floor. Small, clean, mine.
I'd moved out of my father's house at twenty-one because I'd needed a space that didn't belong to the club, a door I could close that wasn't inside Stone's perimeter.
He hadn't liked it. He'd sent Colt to check the locks, Brennan to vet the neighbors.
He had still called every night at ten to make sure I was home for the first few months.
But he'd let me go, because even my father understood that a twenty-one-year-old woman needed walls of her own.
But Ghost had seen me differently. He’d looked past the princess, the crown, Stone’s girl. Looked at me the way you look at something real that you’ve found by accident, and the steadiness of his attention had reached into a place I'd been keeping locked for years and turned something over.
I went inside. Locked the door. Stood in the dark kitchen with my keys still in my hand.
The rest of the weekend passed the way weekends always passed.
Saturday at the Jackals' clubhouse, stocking the bar with Nita, helping set up for the evening.
Men in cuts who'd known me since birth, calling me sweetheart and princess, because I was Stone's girl and that carried weight.
Sunday dinner with my father, his coffee, his voice filling the kitchen while he talked about a ride he was planning, some business up north.
I smiled in the right places. I was the good daughter.
The loyalist, steady, reliable, a woman who had never done a single thing to make her father wonder who she really was.
But every night I lay in the dark and thought about Ghost.
The stillness in him. The weight. The quiet authority that came from a place so deep it didn't need to announce itself.
Every man in my father's club filled rooms with their presence, their voices, their bodies.
Everything about them was designed to take up space.
Ghost took up no space at all, and I'd looked at him and wanted to stop moving too.
Wanted to sit in that stillness with him and find out what it sounded like when he let someone in.
On Wednesday night I sat on the edge of my bed with my keys in my hand.
I could feel the weight of what I was about to do pressing against the inside of my ribs. Last Friday I'd had Sarah. A cover, a reason, someone to blame the choice on. This was different. This was me, alone, with my keys in my hand, making a decision I couldn't pin on anyone else.
Stone's daughter, driving to the Angels' bar. Going back for him. Because I couldn’t let that be the only time I ever saw him. It was dangerous, and I knew it.
But I stood up. Picked up my jacket and walked out the door.
The drive took an hour. Dark highway, mountains on both sides, headlights cutting through empty road. I rolled into the lot at Angel's Rest. Bikes out front like before and the familiar neon sign in the window.
I sat in my car for thirty seconds. Thirty seconds to change my mind, to start the engine, to drive home and be the girl I'd always been.
Instead, I got out. Walked across the gravel, opened the door and went in.