Phantom (Shotgun Saints MC #3)

Prologue

Phantom

I call Jolene at four in the afternoon and tell her to come to the ranch.

I don't tell her why. Don't explain, don't soften it, don't give her time to build a defense before she gets here.

Just: Come to the house. We need to talk.

At first, there’s silence on the line, then she speaks. "When?"

"Now."

I hang up before she can ask questions, set the phone on the porch rail, and lean back in the chair—my father's chair, the one he wore smooth over forty years of sitting right here watching the sun go down over land he built with his bare hands.

The leather's cracked now. The wood's weathered, but it holds.

Like everything on this ranch, it holds because someone made sure it would.

The land stretches out in front of me—a hundred thousand acres of Texas dirt, grass, and sky so wide it makes you feel small and permanent at the same time.

Cattle are moving in the south pasture, dark shapes drifting against the gold.

A hawk is circling lazily over the tree line.

The ranch hands are finishing up for the day, trucks kicking dust as they head toward the bunkhouse.

I've sat on this porch a thousand times.

After church meetings that ended in blood. After phone calls that ended careers. After burying my father in the family plot behind the main barn, standing there with dirt on my hands and the weight of every decision he ever made landing on my shoulders like a yoke.

This one shouldn't be the hardest.

But it is.

***

She pulls up thirty minutes later. White Cadillac Escalade, spotless, because Jolene doesn't drive dirty vehicles. She doesn't do anything dirty.

Everything about her is maintained—the blonde hair blown out even when she doesn't have anything planned, the nails done, the jewelry tasteful, the posture straight.

She steps out of that truck like she's stepping onto a stage, and I think: She's been performing for thirty years. And I let her.

She walks across the yard in boots that have never seen a barn floor and climbs the porch steps with her chin up.

Blue eyes sharp. Already reading me, the way she's always read me—scanning for the angle, the threat, the thing she'll need to counter.

"Harlan." She stops at the top of the steps. Doesn't sit.

"Sit down, Jolene."

"I'd rather stand."

I look at her for a long moment.

The woman I married when I was twenty years old because she was pregnant and my father told me that's what men do.

The woman who gave me three children and a house that always smelled like something baking in the kitchen, and our marriage that functioned the way a machine functions—efficiently, reliably, without warmth.

"Sit down," I say again. Not louder. I don't need to be loud. I've never needed to be loud.

She sits. Perches on the edge of the other chair—the one that's been empty for years because nobody takes the seat next to the president unless they're invited.

Jolene used to sit there every night, then she didn't.

Then she'd show up at club dinners and sit there anyway, even after the divorce, even after the papers were signed, the ring was off, and there was nothing left between us but habit and history.

That's why we're here.

"This needs to stop," I say.

She doesn't flinch. "What needs to stop?"

"You know what."

"Say it."

I look out at the land. My land. My father's land. The land my grandfather cleared with a mule team and a grudge against God.

I've made every hard call a man can make on this property. Ordered things done that most men couldn't stomach. Buried secrets in this dirt that will never see daylight.

This should be nothing compared to that.

"You can't keep coming around, Jolene. Not to the clubhouse. Not to dinners. Not to events. Not to this porch." I say it even. Flat. The way I deliver verdicts at church—no heat, no negotiation, just the facts of what's been decided. "We've been done for a long time. It's time to act like it."

The silence that follows has weight.

I can feel her absorbing it—feel the moment it lands, the way a bullet lands.

Not the impact. The half-second before the impact, when the body knows what's coming but hasn't caught up yet.

Then she laughs. Short, sharp, nothing funny about it.

"You called me out here for this? You called me out to the ranch—to our ranch—to tell me I'm not welcome anymore?"

"It's not our ranch. It hasn't been our ranch in a long time."

"The hell it hasn't." She's on her feet.

Fast. The poise cracks and underneath it is something raw.

"I lived here for twenty years, Harlan. I raised your children in that house.

I hosted every club dinner, every party, every goddamn barbecue.

I held this family together while you ran your club and played president and—"

"Jolene."

"—and now you're sitting in your daddy's chair telling me I'm not welcome?

" Her voice climbs. Not a scream—Jolene doesn't scream—but the control is slipping.

"I dedicated my life to you. I gave you everything.

Shiver, Grace, Dakota—I gave you three children.

I stayed when other women would have walked out the goddamn door.

I stayed because I loved you and I believed—"

She stops. Swallows. The Texas heat is pressing down on both of us and I can see the sweat at her hairline, the place where the careful maintenance meets the reality of a woman falling apart.

"You believed what?" I ask. Quiet.

"That it would be enough." Her voice breaks on the last word. "That staying would be enough. That showing up every day and loving you and holding this family together would eventually be enough."

I don't say anything for a while, because she's not wrong.

That's the part that makes this hard. She's not wrong about any of it.

She did stay. She did love me. She did hold things together when I was too deep in club shit to see what was breaking at home.

She sat in that chair and smiled at brothers' wives and organized fundraisers and kept the house running and never once let anyone see the cracks.

She did everything right by the rules she understood.

It just wasn't the right game.

"It wasn't nothing, Jolene." I say it carefully, because I owe her that much. "What we had. What you gave. It wasn't nothing."

"Then why wasn't it enough?"

I look at her. This woman I've known for over thirty years. The mother of my children.

The blonde hair and blue eyes that used to be pretty and are now sharp, honed by decades of holding on to something that was never really hers.

"Because it wasn't," I say. "And we both know it. We've both known it for a long time."

She stares at me and I watch the hope die.

Not all at once—it's been dying for years, maybe decades—but this is the last of it.

The final flicker going dark behind her eyes.

I've seen men take bullets with more composure than what crosses her face right now.

"You're throwing me away." It's not a question.

"I'm telling you the truth. I should have told you a long time ago."

"The truth." She spits the word. "You want to talk about truth, Harlan? The truth is that I built something with you. A life. A family. A legacy. And you're sitting there throwing it in the dirt because you never loved me the way I—"

She catches herself. Jaw tight. Hands fisted at her sides. The nails she maintains so carefully digging into her own palms.

"The way you loved me," I finish for her. "No. I didn't. And that's not your fault. But it's the truth, and I'm done pretending it isn't."

Something shifts behind her eyes. The grief is still there but it's hardening. Calcifying in real time, right in front of me, the way grief does when it has nowhere to go and turns into something feral.

"You'll regret this."

"Maybe."

"Your daughters—"

"My daughters are grown women. They'll understand."

"They'll understand that their father tossed their mother aside after thirty years?"

"They'll understand that their father finally had the decency to stop wasting their mother's time."

That lands. I see it hit.

She flinches—a real flinch, not performative, the kind that comes from hearing something true that you'd rather die than acknowledge.

She picks up her purse.

The purse that's probably worth more than most of the trucks in the parking lot.

Her hands are shaking but her spine is straight because Jolene does not bend in public, even when public is just me and the cattle and a hundred thousand acres of indifferent Texas.

"Thirty years," she says from the top of the steps. Not looking at me. "Thirty years, Harlan. And this is how it ends. On a porch."

We ended thirteen years ago. Signed the papers, split the assets, took the rings off.

It should have been over then. But she came back around—kept showing up, kept sitting in that chair, kept acting like the divorce was a technicality and not a verdict.

And I let her. Because it was easier than this.

I don't respond. There's nothing to say that won't make it worse.

She walks to her truck, opens the door and sits behind the wheel for a full minute before she starts the engine.

I know she's crying in there because I can see her shoulders shaking through the tinted glass.

The Escalade pulls away. Gravel crunching. Dust rising. And then nothing. Just the land and the sky and the hawk still circling overhead like it's been watching the whole time.

I sit in my father's chair and I don't feel relieved.

I feel like I just amputated something that's been dead for years but was still attached.

***

The sun is halfway down when I hear the diesel.

Not the Escalade. The throaty rumble of a three-quarter-ton Chevy hauling a two-horse trailer, coming up the ranch road too fast, the way Dakota always drives because she inherited my lead foot and her mother's disregard for speed limits.

She pulls around to the barn first.

I hear the trailer door open, hear her talking to the horse the way she talks to all of them—low, steady, the tone she uses when she's coming down from competition adrenaline.