6. Ghost
SIX
GHOST
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
I was in the common room, coffee in my hand, waiting for Lola to get back from her apartment. Simple errand. Twenty minutes each way, ten to pack a bag. She'd been gone forty minutes. Not late yet, but I'd been counting.
The message was three words. Jackals have me. Clubhouse.
I read it twice. The coffee cup hit the table harder than I intended and the liquid slopped over the rim. It hit immediate. Total. A cold clarity that cut through everything else. I'd spent my career assessing situations, reading the moment a scenario shifted from manageable to critical.
This was critical.
Razor was on the couch in the common room. He looked up when I stood.
"Lola's been picked up by the Jackals. They've taken her to the Jackals clubhouse."
He read my face. Put down his beer. "How do you know?"
"She texted me."
"I'll get the brothers. Full ride."
"No. Just me."
His expression shifted. "Ghost. You can't walk into the Jackals' clubhouse alone. That's suicide."
"I'm not rolling up to Stone's front door with twenty bikes. That's a declaration of war and Lola's in the middle of it."
"Going alone is how you end up in the ground brother."
"She sent me that text because she trusts me to handle this. I'm not showing up with an army. Tell Angel where I went. If I'm not back in two hours, it's his call."
I rode out of the Jackals compound. The highway opened ahead of me, mountains on both sides, the road cutting through the valley.
I rode at speed and let the engine noise fill the space where thinking would have slowed me down.
The highway was empty. Late afternoon, the sun sitting low behind the mountains, throwing long shadows across the road.
The light made everything look sharper. The trees, the rock face, the mile markers counting down the distance between the life I'd built and the one I was about to risk it for.
I thought about Angel. What he'd say if he could see me now.
Probably nothing. He'd just look at me with that expression that meant he understood because he'd been here himself, standing on the edge of a decision that could cost everything, choosing to jump because the woman on the other side was worth the fall.
I thought about Lola's face when she'd told me about the pregnancy.
The defensive set of her jaw. The crack in her voice when she'd said alone.
Three weeks she'd carried it. Three weeks of isolation in a world that would have destroyed her if it had known the truth.
She'd walked through that with her spine straight, her eyes clear.
She'd driven an hour to hand me the truth like a grenade with the pin pulled, knowing I might drop it.
I wasn't going to drop it.
I knew what I was doing. Walking alone into the Jackals' clubhouse was the opposite of everything I'd ever been. No margin. No position. No invisibility. Just a man standing in front of a clubhouse full of hostile bikers with nothing to leverage except the truth.
I was apprehensive. I could at least admit that, riding the highway at ninety with the wind tearing at my jacket. I was well aware of the possibility that I'd walk through that door and never walk back out.
But Lola was in that room. Alone, facing her father and men who probably now saw her as a traitor, carrying our child.
I'd told her she wasn't alone with this anymore.
Those words meant I either got off the bike, walked through that door, and stood beside her.
Or they meant nothing. There was no middle ground.
There was no version of this where I stayed invisible and she stayed safe.
The only version that worked was the one where I was seen.
I knew when I was approaching The Jackals' clubhouse. I saw the bikes in the lot from a quarter mile out. Dozens. Every patched member called in, this was going to be exactly as bad as I thought.
I pulled in and killed the engine.
Nobody outside, so that meant every brother was in.
I sat on my bike for ten seconds.
Forty-one years. Every instinct I had. Every year of training. Every hard lesson about what happened when you made yourself a target. All of it told me to stay on the bike, call for backup, handle this the smart way.
But Lola was in that building. Alone, carrying our child, and facing her father's fury without a single ally in the room.
I got off the bike.
The gravel under my boots was the loudest sound in the world.
I opened the door to the clubhouse.
Thirty faces turned toward me. The room was thick with leather, smoke, the coiled hostility of men held in check by one man's authority and straining against it. Every set of eyes landed. The weight. The heat. The violence ready in every body in the room.
Lola was in the middle. Alone, her face pale, her jaw set. She saw me and her whole body changed. Her face changed. Her hand came up to her mouth. Relief and terror, both. I'd just walked into the most dangerous room in Montana for her, and she knew it.
I walked forward.
Three men stepped into my path. Colt, Brennan, a prospect I didn't recognize.
Three bodies between me and Stone's table.
I didn't slow down. I didn't go around them.
I walked with the unhurried precision of a man who had accepted the possibility of not surviving this and had decided it changed nothing.
The certainty of that, the total absence of hesitation, made them step aside.
Touching me would have cost them more than letting me pass, and every man in the room could feel it.
Past the bar. Past the pool table. Past the men with their hands near their weapons.
My boots on the timber floor were the only sound.
Step after step. The room was frozen around me, held in place by the force of a man doing the one thing nobody expected him to do.
The invisible man, walking into the center of a room full of killers, slowly, deliberately, making sure every person in it could see him.
I stopped in front of Stone's table.
He was broader than I'd remembered. A physical presence that filled the chair and compressed the air around it.
His hands were flat on the wood, and his gaze was locked on mine.
Two men, two clubs, a pregnant woman between us.
He looked at me the way I looked at everyone, with the thorough, patient attention of a man who read people for a living, and I let him look because I had nothing to hide and he needed to see that.
"You've got fucking balls walking in here," he said.
"Your daughter is carrying my child." My voice came out low and spare. Wasting words in this room could get me killed. "She's mine. The baby is mine. I'm here to take her home."
The room erupted. Voices, movement, three Jackals surging forward. Stone raised one hand. The room froze, the voices quietened. Thirty years of authority in that gesture, thirty years of absolute command, and the room obeyed.
"You think you can walk into my clubhouse," Stone said, "and tell me you're taking my daughter."
“Well, I'm not asking permission."
Silence. The kind that has a sound. I could hear my heartbeat. The creak of leather. The breathing of thirty men held in check by one raised hand.
Stone studied me.
"You know what I could do to you," he said. "Right here. Nobody would find you."
"I know."
"And you walked in anyway."
"I did."
"Why?"
"Because your daughter spent weeks carrying this secret alone because she was afraid of what you'd do. She shouldn't have had to be afraid. And she shouldn't have had to carry it alone."
That landed underneath the president. I saw it register. His jaw loosened a fraction. His focus shifted to Lola, briefly, and what I saw in them wasn't anger. It was the thing underneath anger. The wound underneath the fury. His daughter had been afraid to come to him.
The president recovered fast.
"So what's your plan?" He leaned forward.
The chair creaked under his weight. His focus hadn't left me since I'd stopped in front of the table and they weren't leaving now.
"You take my daughter. Take my grandchild.
Bring them behind your gates. Then what?
You think this ends clean? You think you ride off into the sunset and I send a card at Christmas? "
"I think you're a pragmatist," I said. "I think you've held this club together for thirty years because you know when to fight and when to think.
And I think you know that killing me puts your daughter in the crossfire of a war that'll cost you men, territory, and the grandchild you just found out about. "
The words landed like stones in still water. The ripple spread through the room. The Jackals behind me shifted. Stone's sergeant-at-arms took a half step forward and stopped when Stone's hand came up again, palm out.
"You're trying to figure me out," Stone said. His voice dropped lower. Almost private, despite the thirty men hanging on every word. "You're sitting there trying to read me like a goddamn book."
"It's what I do."
"I know what you do. The one my men talk about when they think I'm not listening.
" He leaned back in his chair. Studied me with a focus that felt like being put under glass.
"They say that nothing gets past you. That you're the most dangerous man in the Angels because nobody knows what you're thinking. "
“Well, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking about right now.
I’m thinking about your daughter," I said.
"I'm thinking she deserves better than being a casualty of something that started before she was born.
And I'm thinking that you know that, because you raised her to be exactly the woman she is, and you didn't raise a weak one. "
Stone's face tightened. I'd gone somewhere personal and he felt it. The father again, pushing through the president.
"Keep her safe. Raise the child. Make sure she never has to choose between us, because I'm not asking her to cut you out. But I'm not giving her up."