4. Ghost
FOUR
GHOST
Every time someone came through the front entrance at the Angel’s Rest, I looked up and part of me hoped. But it was truckers, locals, brothers. Women who weren't Lola. I told myself I wasn't watching the door, and the lie had become so familiar it barely registered anymore.
Club business continued. A run to Billings.
Jackals pushing boundaries on the northern routes, testing, probing.
Angel called church and I sat in my chair and said the things that needed saying.
None of it reached the part of me that was still standing in a dark corridor with the warmth of her body fading from my skin.
This girl had got under my skin and the feeling was refusing to leave.
Razor caught it first. We were on the porch after church, him smoking, me with a coffee I'd forgotten to drink. He was looking out into the compound, I was watching the highway for no particular reason I told myself.
"You waiting for someone?" he asked.
"No."
He took a drag. Let the smoke out slow. Razor ran hot in a crisis, volatile, unpredictable. In the quiet moments he was sharper than people gave him credit for. He didn't push. Just sat there smoking, and the question hung in the air between us.
I drank my cold coffee and gave him nothing.
The weeks had dragged. I did the work, kept the routine, held the line.
But the routine felt hollow in a way it hadn't before.
The room I slept in felt like a room instead of a home.
Before Lola, I'd been comfortable alone.
After her, I knew the comfort had been a lie I'd told myself so long I'd mistaken it for truth.
Priest found me one night staring into the distance, my expression giving nothing away.
He was the newest of the brothers, intense, carrying whatever weight had brought him to us with a private ferocity that I recognized because I'd worn it myself.
He leaned against the fence post and didn't say anything for a long time.
"You good?" he asked eventually.
"Fine."
"You've been standing here for an hour."
"I like the view."
He looked around. Looked at me. Whatever he saw, he kept to himself. "Okay," he said. And walked away. I liked Priest. He understood that some things couldn't be helped by talking about them.
I was in love with her. I could say it now, in the privacy of my own head, stripped of the tactical justification and the self-deception I'd been running since the night she walked through the door.
I was in love with a woman I'd spent one night with.
A woman whose father would put me in the ground if he ever found out.
I was in love and I had no way to reach her, no right to try and it felt ridiculous even in my own head.
Then she came back.
Saturday morning. The bar was quiet, barely open. Hank was out back cleaning up. I was in the corner booth with coffee doing some paperwork. The door opened and I looked up instinctively and this time it was her.
I knew immediately that everything had changed.
She stood in the doorway the way she did before, scanning the room and finding me.
But the energy was wrong. She wasn't here for the same reason she'd come before, that much was obvious.
She was looking for me the way someone looks for solid ground in an earthquake.
I was on my feet before I'd thought about it. She crossed the room toward me, her face set, her hands in her jacket pockets. Up close she looked tired. Her eyes held a weight I'd hadn’t seen in them before, and it put every nerve in my body on high alert.
"I need to talk to you," she said. "Somewhere private."
I took her through the back. The STAFF ONLY door, the corridor. I led her to the far end where we could be alone and stopped.
She took a breath.
“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it. I’m pregnant. It's yours."
The corridor felt even quieter than it had before. The muffled bar noise behind the door. The hum of the heating system. And her voice, those five words, hanging between us. Rearranging every molecule in my body.
I didn't speak. The silence wasn't on purpose and it wasn't the practiced quiet I wore as armor.
It was the silence of a man whose brain was processing a truth too large for the usual channels.
She was reading my face, trying to find the reaction underneath the stillness.
Her chin came up. Defensive. Bracing for the worst.
"Say something," she said.
I was looking at her. At her face, her hands in her jacket pockets, the defensive set of her jaw.
At the woman who'd come to tell me the truth because she was too brave and too stubborn to do anything else.
At the slight change in her body that I should have noticed instantly, the fullness in her face, the way she was holding herself with one arm angled across her stomach like a shield she didn't know she'd raised.
Mine. The word arrived before the thought.
Before the logic, before the calculation, before the assessment of what this meant for the club, for Stone, for the fragile peace between two organizations that had been circling each other for years.
Mine. My child. Growing inside a woman I'd touched once in that dark corridor and hadn't been able to stop thinking about since.
"How far along?"
"Ten weeks."
"Have you told anyone?"
"No." Her voice cracked on the word. Barely, the smallest fracture, but I heard it.
"I found out three weeks ago. There's nobody I can tell, how can I?
I know what you are to my fathers world.
I've been sitting with this alone..." She stopped.
Swallowed. "You had a right to know. Whatever you do with the information is your call. "
She was giving me the exit before I'd asked for one. The set of her shoulders, the way she'd framed it. She'd spent three weeks expecting me to walk away.
"Three weeks," I said. "You've been carrying this for three weeks."
"Yeah."
"Alone."
“I didn’t have a choice."
The quiet had changed. It wasn't empty. It was full of a word that kept arriving no matter how many times I tried to think around it.
Mine.
"You're not alone with this anymore," I said.
The words came out of a place I didn’t know I had.
Deeper than the VP or the quiet man who watched from corners, heart locked.
This came from somewhere underneath all of it, from the man I'd been before I learned to disappear, the one who'd had a life, a future, people he cared about before the military took it all and left him with nothing but the ability to be invisible.
This woman was carrying my child. She'd carried the knowledge alone for three weeks, in a world where telling anyone would have destroyed her, and she'd come here to stand in front of me and give me the truth because she believed I deserved it.
The courage of that. The weight she'd been holding.
Three weeks of silence in a life built on loyalty, knowing that the secret growing inside her was the biggest betrayal her world could imagine.
I was done being invisible.
Her face broke. The defensive posture cracked. Her eyes went bright. She pressed her lips together, hard.
"You're staying with me," I said. "The compound. Behind the gates. Tonight."
"Ghost, you don't have to..."
"I know I don't have to."
"My father..."
"I know who your father is and that’s exactly why you’re staying with me.”
She searched my face. Fear still there, but underneath it, the weight shifting. Relief, or the beginning of it.
"Okay," she said.
I took her hand. Led her across the compound yard. Cold night, clear sky, mountains dark against it.
Priest was on the porch. He looked up, his gaze moving from me to Lola to our hands. Whatever he saw on my face stopped the question before it formed. A nod. He went back to his book.
Angel was in the common room. I left Lola in the hallway and walked in.
"Got a minute?"
He set his pen down. Read my face.
"There's a woman in the hall. She's pregnant and it's mine. But it’s more complicated than that. She’s the Jackals president’s daughter."
Angel sat with it. The same methodical patience he brought to every decision. The president's calculation flashed behind his eyes before the man took over. He rubbed a hand across his face.
"Jesus, Ghost."
“I told you it was complicated.”
"How long?"
"Ten weeks. It was only one night, but…” My answer trailed off.
He looked at me the way he had when we were younger, standing in front of brass who wanted us to sign a lie. The look that said are you sure, because there's no coming back.
"You sure it’s yours?"
“Yeah, no doubt.”
"Stone's going to lose his fucking mind. Ghost, I love you like you are my blood, but fucking hell.”
"I know that, trust me. I know.”
"This could blow up everything. Do you have any idea?”
"I know, Angel. Trust me, I know.”
A long beat. Then his expression shifted. He'd brought Callie behind these same gates when the world was hunting her. He'd stood in this room and told the brothers that a woman he shouldn't want was under his protection. He knew the cost. He knew what it was worth.
"Then she stays," he said. "We deal with the rest." He waited until I met his eyes. "This gets ahead of us, we're all in it. You understand that."
"I understand."
He picked up his pen. "Go take care of your woman."
My room. End of the hall. I closed the door behind us. She stood in the middle, jacket still on, taking it in. A bed, a chair, a lamp. The room of a man who'd never accumulated anything because accumulating things meant admitting you planned to stay.
"It's not much," I said.
"It's yours." Her eyes found mine. "That's enough."
We sat on the bed. The pretense was gone.
"What's your real name?" she asked.
"Ethan."
She smiled. Small, surprised. "Ethan. That’s very normal."
"Sorry to disappoint."
"No, I just..." She laughed, quiet, almost involuntary. "I've been having this conversation in my head for three weeks and I didn't even know your name."
"What else do you want to know?"