Ghosts
There are nights I can’t stop the past from dragging me under.
It starts the same way it always does.
The glass in my hand. The silence too loud. The city stretched out beyond the windows, glittering and empty at the same time.
And her voice.
Not Brooklyn’s.
Hers.
My wife.
Dead ten years and still sitting in the back of my skull like a ghost that refuses to leave the room.
When I close my eyes, I remember her true smile, with her chin dropped and her eyes darting away, as if happiness was a secret in my world. She didn’t belong at Club Z. She didn’t belong in the dirt I dragged home. And she paid for it.
The memory never comes clean. It drags blood with it, the smell of metal and smoke, the image of her hand slipping from mine in the wreckage. I couldn’t save her. Not from them. Not from me.
I’ve buried men for less than what they did to her.
And I’d do it again.
But it doesn’t change the truth: I failed her.
That failure rots inside me like a second heartbeat, pulsing every time I look at Brooklyn.
Every time she tilts her chin and fights me, it’s like she doesn’t know I’ve already dug her grave beside mine.
Every time she cries and still stays, like she doesn’t understand that’s the most dangerous thing she could ever do.
Because the last woman who stayed—
She died.
My hand shakes around the glass, the whiskey biting as it goes down. I tell myself I drink to forget, but the truth is uglier—I drink to remember. To keep the wound open. Because if I ever let it heal, then she really is gone, and I can’t live with that.
Not again.
I rub my hand over my jaw, feeling the scrape of stubble, the rawness in my throat I’ll never admit to out loud. Brooklyn doesn’t know. She sees only the mask I give her—the control, the hunger, the obsession. She doesn’t see the rot underneath, the reason I can’t let go.
If she ever knew about my wife, about what it cost to love me.
She’d run.
And I couldn’t chase her.
I’d have to let her go.
The thought cuts me deeper than any blade ever has.
“Christ,” I mutter into the dark, setting the glass down too hard. It rings against the table, sharp as a gunshot.
I want to be angry. I want to slam the walls, call Rafe, tear him apart piece by piece for daring to circle her like she’s already his. But underneath all that rage is the truth I don’t say out loud: I’m terrified.
Terrified because she looks at me like she sees more than I want her to.
Terrified because I can’t stop pulling her closer, even knowing the history I carry will swallow her whole.
Terrified because the last time I loved a woman, I put her in the ground.
And still—I want Brooklyn.
More than the club. More than the empire I built. More than my own skin.
If I have to bleed again, I’ll bleed for her.
If I have to burn, I’ll burn with her.
But I’ll never—never—let the ghosts take her too.
The ghosts never come softly.
They don’t creep in, don’t whisper.
They break the door down.
In the first crash, the impact’s sound is always from metal, and steel folds in on itself like paper. I can hear it even now, ten years later, rattling through my skull.
Then the silence.
That brutal second where the world holds its breath before it remembers how to scream.
I’d give anything to cut that silence out of my brain.
But it always comes back.
I see her face in fragments.
Blood on her lips. Hair tangled across her cheek. Her eyes—still open. Too open. Staring at me like she couldn’t believe it ended here.
The fire hadn’t even reached her yet. The wreck was still groaning, dripping smoke. And I remember—Christ, I remember—my hands trying to pull the door open, metal tearing at my palms until skin ripped. My voice went raw as I begged her not to close her eyes.
But she did.
Slow.
Final.
Her fingers slipped from mine, and the world went black with her.
I buried them all for it.
Every man who had a hand in it. Every coward who thought they could touch what was mine. Their blood ran into the dirt until the streets stank of iron.
And still—it didn’t bring her back.
The worst part?
It wasn’t even Club Z’s doing. Not really.
It was mine.
Because I dragged her into this world.
I made her a target.
And the minute she wore my ring, she might as well have been marked for death.
The truth never heals.
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, palms grinding into my face like I can scrub it away.
But her ghost clings. It always clings. And it whispers the same warning I ignore every time Brooklyn tilts her chin at me, every time she looks at me like she hasn’t decided whether I’m salvation or damnation—
You’ll kill her too.
The glass sits untouched now, the whiskey gone flat. I don’t need it tonight. The memories are enough.
I remember how she smelled—jasmine and cigarette smoke. I remember the little scar on her jaw from when she fell off her bike as a kid, the one she hated and I kissed a hundred times. I remember the way she’d look at me in bed, quiet, like she knew the storm I carried but wanted me, anyway.
And then—I remember the coffin.
Black wood.
Closed.
Because I couldn’t bear to let anyone else see her the way I last saw her.
I carried it myself.
Lowered it myself.
And I swore, as the dirt covered her, that no one would ever touch what was mine again.
That vow turned me into the man Brooklyn sees now.
Possessive. Controlling. Brutal.
I’m not proud of it.
But I don’t know how to be anything else.
And God help me—when I look at Brooklyn, I don’t want to be anything else.
She’ll never know what the ghosts carved out of me. She’ll never know the way I still wake up gasping for air, reaching for a body that isn’t there. She’ll never know how close I came to letting the entire empire burn to ash just to follow my wife into the grave.
But Brooklyn is different.
She drags me back.
She makes me want to live, even when I swore I never would again.
And that terrifies me more than the night she died.
Because if I lose Brooklyn the way I lost her—I won’t survive it twice.
The coffin never leaves me.
It’s always there, nailed shut, pressing on my chest when I try to breathe.
Her ghost lives in the silence between heartbeats. In the crack of gunfire. In the screech of tires on wet asphalt.
And then—Brooklyn.
She doesn’t know she’s walking through the graveyard of me. She doesn’t know that every time she laughs in my kitchen or tilts her chin in defiance, she’s brushing dust off a tombstone I swore no one would ever touch again.
The cruelest part is—sometimes I see them overlap.
Her dark hair spilled the same way. Her lips parted with the same stunned softness. Her eyes caught mine like they knew exactly what kind of man I am and chose me anyway.
The ghost hisses: You’ll kill her too.
But Brooklyn’s voice cuts sharper, realer.
“Dean.”
Just like that, the coffin cracks.
Not open. Not gone. But cracked enough for air to bleed through.
And I hate her for it.
I want to drag her down into the dirt with me, make her see the blood under my nails, the ruin in my chest. I want her to scream at me, run from me, hate me.
But she doesn’t.
She steps closer instead.
Always getting closer.
And God help me—when I imagine hands on her that aren’t mine, when I think about Rafe circling, watching, waiting—rage sears through me so hot it burns the ghost back into her coffin.
Brooklyn doesn’t belong in the ground.
She belongs here.
With me.
Breathing my air, wearing my mark, screaming my name until it’s the only language she remembers.
I rub my palms hard over my face, drag the weight of her ghost away and let the new one in.
Brooklyn’s ghost hasn’t even been born yet, and already I’m terrified of it.
I know one truth as sure as the dirt over that coffin—if I ever lose her, I won’t walk away this time.
I’ll follow her down.