2. Ghost
GHOST
She's holding on too tight.
Her arms are locked around my waist, her face pressed against my back, her whole body tense like she's bracing for impact. She's never been on a bike before — that much is obvious. Every curve makes her grip tighter. Every acceleration makes her stiffen.
I should tell her to relax. Loosen up. Move with the bike instead of fighting it.
I don't.
Because her hands are fisted in my jacket and her thighs are pressed against mine and I can feel the heat of her through the leather, and if I open my mouth right now I'm going to say something I'll regret.
The desert stretches out around us, dark and endless, the lights of Phoenix shrinking in my mirrors. I push the bike faster than I need to. Put some distance between her and whoever's hunting her. Between the mess back there and the safety of my territory.
Between her body and my ability to think straight.
Fuck.
Three hours on this bike. Three hours of her pressed against me, her arms around my waist, her breath warm through my shirt. Three hours of being hyperaware of every place her body touches mine.
I've done long rides before. Done them exhausted, injured, running on nothing but adrenaline. None of them felt like this. None of them made me white-knuckle the handlebars just to keep from thinking about the woman behind me.
She shifts, adjusting her grip, and her hands slide lower on my stomach. Just an inch. Probably doesn't even realize she did it.
I feel it everywhere.
She's twenty-four. She's Nate's client. She's a job.
I repeat it like a mantra. Let the words drown out the heat of her, the scent of her, the way her body has slowly relaxed against mine over the last hundred miles.
She's not holding on for dear life anymore.
She's leaning into me, trusting me to keep her upright, trusting me to get her somewhere safe.
That trust is going to be a problem.
The clubhouse is quiet when we pull in. Past three in the morning — most of the brothers are asleep or gone. Just a few bikes in the lot, a light on in the main room, the familiar smell of motor oil and beer hanging in the air.
Home. Such as it is.
She climbs off the bike slowly, legs unsteady, and I watch her take in the scene.
The converted warehouse. The few bikes still in the lot, gleaming under the security lights.
The Sons of Ruin banner over the main door.
The chain-link fence, the security cameras, the general sense that this is not a place for civilians.
She's so far out of her world she might as well be on another planet.
"This is your... place?" she asks.
"Clubhouse. Yeah."
"It's very..."
She doesn't finish the sentence. Doesn't need to. I can see her recalibrating, trying to fit what she's looking at into her understanding of how things work. Pop stars don't end up at biker clubhouses in the middle of the night. This isn't part of her reality.
But she doesn't complain. Doesn't wrinkle her nose or make some comment about slumming it. Just looks around with those sharp eyes, taking it in, filing it away.
Adapting.
"Come on," I say, and head for the door without waiting to see if she follows.
She follows. I can hear her footsteps behind me — hesitant, uneven on the gravel. She's still wearing those heels from the show, and they're not doing her any favors out here.
Tonight, I just need to get her inside and settled before I do something stupid.
The main room is mostly dark, just a few low lights behind the bar. Rev's there, nursing a beer and flipping through something on his phone. He glances up when we walk in.
His eyebrows climb toward his hairline.
"Well," he says. "This is unexpected."
"Don't start."
"I'm not starting anything. I'm just observing that you left four hours ago to help your brother with something, and you've come back with—" His gaze slides to India, takes her in with obvious curiosity. "A guest."
"She's in trouble. She's staying here until the trouble's handled."
"Uh huh." Rev sets his phone down, giving me his full attention now. "What kind of trouble?"
"The kind where someone wants to hurt her and I'm going to make sure they don't."
Something shifts in his expression. He's heard that tone before. Knows what it means.
"Need anything tonight?" he asks.
"I'll brief everyone tomorrow. Right now she needs sleep."
Rev nods and turns back to his phone, but I catch the look he gives me as I steer India toward the back hallway. Curious. Assessing.
He's going to give me shit about this later. I can already tell.
My room is at the end of the hall. I've been meaning to get my own place for years — somewhere off-site, somewhere that's just mine.
But the clubhouse is convenient. There's always something that needs handling, and the weeks turn into months and months turn into years.
So here I am. Still in the same room I moved into when I first patched in.
I haven't brought anyone back here in a long time. It's not a space I share. Not a space anyone sees.
I open the door and step aside to let her in.
She hesitates on the threshold, looking around. It's not much — bed, dresser, a chair in the corner. Clean but sparse. No decorations, no photographs, no personal touches. Nothing that says anything about who I am or where I've been.
"You can take the bed," I say. "I'll be right outside."
"Outside?"
"In the hall. On the couch. Whatever. Point is, no one gets through me to get to you."
She turns to face me, still standing in the doorway, those dark eyes searching my face. Looking for something. I don't know what she expects to find.
"Why are you doing this?" she asks quietly.
"Nate asked."
"That's not what I mean." She takes a breath, and I watch her choose her words carefully.
"You don't know me. You don't owe me anything.
You could have handed me off to someone else, set me up in a safe house, washed your hands of the whole thing.
But you drove three hours in the middle of the night, pulled me out of my life, brought me to your home, and now you're giving me your bed while you sleep in a hallway. " She pauses. "Why?"
Because Nate asked. That's the answer. The only answer that should matter.
But she's looking at me like she already knows that's not the whole truth. Like she can see right through the bullshit to whatever's underneath.
I don't have an answer for her. Not one I'm willing to say out loud.
"Get some sleep," I say instead. "We'll figure out the rest in the morning."
I pull the door closed before she can ask anything else. Before I have to look at her for another second and pretend I'm not feeling exactly what I'm feeling.
The couch at the end of the hall is old, worn, uncomfortable as hell. I've slept on worse. I've slept on sand and rocks and the floors of buildings that were falling apart around me. A shitty couch is nothing.
But I don't sleep.
I lie there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, listening to the silence of the clubhouse settle around me.
And I think about the woman on the other side of that door.
The way she looked at me. The way she felt pressed against my back for three hours, her hands gripping my jacket, her body slowly relaxing into mine like she'd decided to trust me whether I deserved it or not.
She's beautiful. That's the first problem.
Not the polished, plastic kind of beautiful I expected from a pop star. Something warmer than that. Realer. The kind of face that makes you want to keep looking. The kind of mouth that makes you think things you shouldn't be thinking about a woman you met four hours ago.
She's smart, too. Sharp. Figured out it was Harris before I even had to say it.
Didn't fall apart when most people would have.
Didn't scream or cry or demand I make everything better.
Just looked at me with those dark eyes and asked why I was helping her, like she genuinely couldn't understand why anyone would.
That's the second problem.
The third problem is the way my chest feels tight every time I think about her. The way I want to go back in there and make sure she's okay, make sure she's sleeping, make sure nothing in the world can touch her while I'm still breathing.
I've protected people before. Plenty of them. It's what I did for years — keep the asset alive, get them from point A to point B, don't get attached. Simple. Clean. Professional.
This doesn't feel simple.
This doesn't feel clean.
This feels like the beginning of something I'm not going to be able to walk away from.
I stare at the ceiling and count the hours until morning.
She's Nate's client. She's a job. She's sixteen years younger than me and lives in a world that has nothing to do with mine.
None of that matters.
She's been under my roof for twenty minutes and I'm already gone.