5. Lola
FIVE
LOLA
Three days of waking up in Ghost's bed, in his room, behind the Angels' gates. Three days of learning the shape of a life I hadn't known I wanted.
Coffee in the morning with a man who said more with a look than most people did with a paragraph.
The compound was calm, ordered. Nothing like the Jackals' clubhouse with its noise, its constant performance, the energy of men proving they belonged.
Here the brothers moved with purpose and left space for silence.
Bree brought me food the first morning. She paused in the doorway of Ghost's room with a plate, a warm smile, the easy kindness of a woman who'd shown up somewhere she didn't belong and remembered it.
"Eat," she said. "You're growing a whole person. That takes fuel."
Evie found me in the corridor on the second day, her arms full of towels. She stopped, looked at me direct. More curiosity than judgment. “You're staying?” she asked. I said yes. She nodded, satisfied, and walked on.
Nobody interrogated me. Ghost's face had settled the question before anyone could ask it, and whatever the brothers thought about their VP bringing the Jackals president's daughter behind their gates, they kept it behind their teeth.
Ghost was different behind a closed door. Still spare with his words, but the space between us had changed. It wasn't the charged, careful energy of two strangers circling each other across a bar. It was the ease of two people learning to share a room.
He made breakfast. That was the thing that surprised me, this big, scarred man standing at the stove in sweatpants scrambling eggs with the same methodical attention he brought to everything.
He cooked the way he talked. No wasted motion, no flourish, just steady hands producing something solid and warm.
"You cook," I said, sitting on the counter with my feet dangling.
"I eat. Cooking is a prerequisite."
"Romantic."
"I've been told."
He looked at me then, one eyebrow raised, the faintest suggestion of humor in his expression, and I laughed. The sound of it filled his small kitchen and he watched it happen with an expression I was starting to recognize. The look of a man encountering a sound he'd forgotten existed.
The second night, I woke at two in the morning and he wasn't in bed.
I found him on the porch, sitting on the steps, looking at the mountains under the moon.
I sat beside him. He put his arm around me without speaking.
We sat like that for a long time, the cold air on our faces, the warmth of his body along my side, the compound quiet around us.
"I don't sleep much," he said eventually.
"I noticed."
"It's not new. Before you."
"I know." I leaned into him. "But maybe I can help."
The third evening, I joined the brothers for a meal. Angel sat across from us at the long table in the common room, his wife Callie beside him, and he looked at me with the same thorough attention Ghost gave everything, but warmer. Less guarded.
"You're welcome here," he said. Simple, direct. Not a speech. Just the president of the Forsaken Angels telling the Jackals president's daughter that she had a place behind his gates.
After dinner Ghost walked me through the compound.
Not a tour, exactly. More the quiet drift of a man sharing the place he lived by letting me see it at my own pace.
The workshop where Duke kept his tools in the kind of order that bordered on religion.
The garage, bikes lined up in a row, chrome catching the overhead light.
The vegetable garden along the south wall that Bree had planted and Evie maintained with the focused energy of a woman who needed living things to tend.
It was bigger than I'd expected. Functional, well-kept, lived-in. Nothing like the Jackals' clubhouse with its rough edges and its aggressive energy. The Jackals' place was built to project power. This place was a home that happened to have a gate around it.
"My father built his clubhouse to intimidate," I said. We were standing by the garden, the evening air cold, his arm around my shoulders. “You guys built your club to last."
He looked at me. "Angel built it. I just made sure nobody burned it down."
On the fourth morning I woke to find him dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at me.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing." A pause. "You sleep with your hand on your stomach."
I looked down. My palm was flat against my skin below my navel.
"It's early," I said. "There's nothing to feel yet, but it’s become a habit I guess.”
"I know."
But his eyes stayed on my hand, and I watched him file the moment away in whatever internal system he used to track the things that mattered. My hand. The morning light. Me, still here.
"I need clothes," I said. "I can't keep wearing your shirts."
"I like you in my shirts."
“Ethan! I’m serious. I just need to go back to my apartment and grab a few things. It won’t take me long.”
“Go on then. Take one of the trucks."
He kissed me before I left. Standing in the doorway of his room, his hand on the back of my neck, a kiss that was unhurried, thorough, the kiss of a man who was learning how to say things with his body that his voice couldn't manage yet.
When he pulled back his thumb traced along my jaw and he looked at me with the most visible expression I'd ever seen on him.
"Come back," he said.
“Don’t be silly, Of course I’m coming back."
"I know. I just wanted to say it."
I smiled at him. Touched his face. He turned his head and pressed his lips against my palm, a gesture so tender from a man so guarded that it settled into my chest and stayed.
I drove to my apartment. I'd been telling myself it was a simple errand. Twenty minutes, in and out. I wasn't thinking about what it meant that I was packing bags like a woman who'd already made a decision she hadn't officially spoken.
My fathers men, Colt and Brennan were in the parking lot.
They were leaning against the jackals truck by the building entrance. Road-hard life long Jackals with flat eyes who'd bounced me on their knees when I was five and were now blocking the door to my apartment. They didn't speak at first then Colt jerked his chin toward the road.
"Your dad wants you at the clubhouse."
The look on Colt's face told me everything, they knew.
Someone had probably seen my car at the compound.
Jackal eyes on the highway, clocking me behind enemy gates.
It had probably gotten back to my father the way everything did.
His world ran on information and loyalty. I'd just blown a hole through both.
I got into the back of truck.
At the first red light, I pulled my phone from my jacket pocket. Kept it low, so they couldn’t see what I was doing, and typed with one thumb. Three words.
Jackals have me. Clubhouse.
I hit send. Watched the message go through. Then I deleted the thread and put the phone back in my pocket before the light changed.
It was the only move I had. I couldn't fight. Couldn't run. Couldn't call for backup without escalating this into something that ended with bodies on the road. But I could make sure Ghost knew where I was. I could make sure he had the information, and then it was his choice what to do with it.
So I just kept my breathing steady while my mind ran through every version of what was about to happen.
My father's face when he saw me. His voice when he asked the question I knew was coming.
The cold that would settle over him like a door closing, and the knowledge that this time, when it closed, I might be on the wrong side of it permanently.
I put my hand on my stomach. Just for a second. Just to remind myself what I was carrying and why it mattered more than fear.
The Jackals' clubhouse was full. Word had spread. Men filled the main room. Cuts on. Arms crossed. Thirty men who'd been told their president's daughter was sleeping with the enemy. They watched me walk in. Men I'd known my whole life. They looked at me like a stranger.
My father was at the head of the table.
He filled the chair the way he filled every room. Hands flat on the wood. Coffee untouched. He looked at me and his face wore the expression I'd been dreading since those two pink lines.
Cold. Controlled. The quiet my father did when things were bad.
"Is it true?" His voice carried through the room. Not loud. He never needed loud. "You've been seeing the Angels VP. Behind my back. Behind this club's back?”
“Yes." It was pointless denying anything now.
The word dropped into the silence.
“And if you must know, I’m also pregnant," I said. "It's his."
The room shifted. Bodies tensed. Hands moved.
Someone in the back swore under his breath.
My father's jaw tightened, the muscles working beneath the skin, and for one terrible second I thought the cold would break and the fury underneath would come through unchecked.
I'd seen it happen once, years ago, with a brother who'd stolen from the club fund.
My father had been calm right up until the moment he wasn't. The violence that followed had been so controlled.
So precise. So utterly without waste. It had been terrifying to watch.
I braced for whatever was about to happen.
It didn't come. He sat there. Hands flat, eyes locked on mine.
The control it cost him was visible in every line of his body.
His shoulders, rigid. His neck, corded with the effort of holding himself in that chair.
The white of his knuckles where his fingers pressed against the wood.
He was choosing. Every second, choosing not to be the man his fury wanted him to be.
I was his daughter, and even now, even with this, the father was fighting the president for control.
"The Angels VP," he said. Flat. Measured. "You let the Angels VP touch you."
I could have made it smaller. Could have called it an accident, a mistake, something that happened to me rather than something I chose. I didn't.
"I'm not going to apologize for it," I said. My voice was shaking but the words held steady. "And I'm not going to stand here and pretend I was some helpless girl who got taken advantage of. I walked into that bar with my eyes open. I went back with my eyes open. I chose this."
Nita was by the bar, arms folded. Two younger Jackals were whispering in the back, angled toward the door. My father's sergeant-at-arms stood behind his chair with his hands at his sides and a look that said he was waiting for the word.
I stood in the middle of the room. Twenty-seven years of loyalty, of being the good daughter, of following every rule, and this was what it came to.
A woman standing alone in front of men who'd respected her an hour ago, carrying a child that represented everything they hated, without a single face in the room on her side.
I could have broken. Standing there, surrounded by hostility, with my father's cold eyes and thirty years of authority pressing down on me like weather.
I could have cried. Could have begged. Could have made myself small and sorry, hoped the princess card still had currency in a room where I'd just shattered every rule the princess was supposed to follow.
I didn't. I was Stone's daughter. I stood the way he'd taught me to stand. Feet planted, chin level, shoulders back. If I was going to lose everything, I was going to lose it standing up. I was going down in flames and be unapologetic about it.
"He didn't come to me," I said. I kept my voice level.
Kept my eyes on my father. He was the only one who mattered.
We didn't look away. "I went to him. You raised me to look people in the eye and tell the truth even when it costs everything.
So here I am. Looking you in the eye. Telling you the truth.
It's going to cost me everything I have, and I'm doing it anyway, because that's what you taught me to do. "
My father's face changed. Those words landed somewhere underneath the president. In the place where the father lived. The one who'd sat on the edge of my bed when I was nine and promised me we were enough.
The room was deathly still. All of men, none of them breathing, all of them watching their president process the worst news a man like Stone could receive.
His daughter pregnant with the enemy. His legacy compromised.
His authority challenged. Not by a rival.
By the one person in the world whose betrayal he'd never planned for. He'd never imagined it was possible.
I saw him look at my stomach. Just for a second.
His gaze dropped from my face to my midsection and then back up, and in that fraction of a second I saw the calculation happen.
The grandchild. His grandchild. Growing inside me, half Jackal, half Angel, a living embodiment of everything he'd spent thirty years keeping separate.
His jaw worked. His hands pressed harder against the table. I could see him fighting through it, processing, the pragmatist and the father and the president all pulling in different directions.
He opened his mouth.
The front door opened.
Every head turned. Every body tensed. Hands went to waistbands, to belts, to the places where weapons lived. The door of the Jackals' clubhouse didn't just open uninvited.
Ghost walked in.
Alone.