“She’s gone,” he rasped, his voice hardly recognizable to his own ears. “They took her, and I can’t?—”
The words choked off as he upended a shelf of equipment. Monitors crashed to the floor, their hard drives bouncing and splitting open. Each act of destruction felt like tearing off a piece of his own skin, but he couldn’t stop.
A new shadow filled the door: Bear, built like a freight train, moving with the calm of a man who’d seen real violence and didn’t mind stepping into it.
“Jesus.” He crossed the room in two steps, dodged the next swing, and slammed Ghost into the wall so hard the air left his lungs.
Ghost twisted, pure instinct, kicking, trying to rip loose.
Bear didn’t let go even when he caught the big guy in the jaw. “Enough.”
His shoulder shrieked; his chest filled with broken glass. His nerves were on fire, scraping down to bone. He tried bringing his knee up, but Bear absorbed the blow.
“Fucking knock it off,” Bear growled and held him tight, muscles locked, every inch of him unyielding. “Anger doesn’t help. You think it does until it ruins everything. Trust me.”
He thrashed for another second, but then the anger gave way to exhaustion, his body going limp in Bear’s grip. The fight drained out of him like blood from a wound, leaving him hollow. His ribs ached where Bear had slammed him into the wall, but the pain was a distant thing, meaningless compared to the fear eating through his chest.
Nobody moved.
Bear kept him pinned, waiting for the signal that it was over. Boone’s boots edged into his vision, then stopped. Jax hung back with Greta… and others.
Jonah, Anson, X, and River all stood in the doorway, staring at the wreckage with varying degrees of shock on their faces. Even King was there, the big dog silent for once, his ears pinned flat against his skull.
Fuck. Everyone had seen that meltdown.
“You done?” Boone asked, voice flat.
Ghost didn’t answer. Couldn’t. His throat felt scorched.
When Bear eased up, he slid to the floor. His palms bled. His knuckles, too. His ears rang with static, vision tunneling to pinpricks. The Hub—his sanctuary, his domain—lay in ruins around him. Broken glass glittered on the floor like fallen stars. Smashed monitors. Shattered plastic. Papers everywhere, fluttering in the draft from the open door.
The silence stretched, broken only by the rasp of his breathing and the storm hammering the roof.
Ghost closed his eyes, pain radiating through his body. Naomi was gone. He’d put himself back on Isolde’s radar. And he’d just destroyed the only place he’d ever felt in control.
“She’s gone,” he said again, softer this time, the words like sand in his throat.
Boone knelt in front of him, boots crunching on broken glass. “Who took her?”
“Don’t know.” He shook his head, feeling each muscle in his neck strain with the effort. “Two men. Professional. In and out, no trace.” He forced himself to meet Boone’s eyes. “I called Isolde.”
Boone’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing, just waited for more. He and Walker were the only ones here who knew what that meant.
“She claims she didn’t take Naomi, but she knows something.” Ghost dragged a hand across his face, feeling the stubble rasp against his palm. “Said I should look closer to home.”
“And you believe her?” Boone’s voice held no judgment, just the steady question of a man who’d seen enough lies to last several lifetimes.
Ghost hesitated. Isolde was a liar, a manipulator, a snake in human skin. But this time... “Yeah. I do.”
Boone gave it one more second, then straightened and held out a hand. “Then we have work to do.”
We.
Ghost looked at the outstretched hand for a moment, then at the men crowded into the doorway. Both River and X were uncharacteristically serious, neither of them mouthing off for once. Jonah looked as somber as Ghost had ever seen him, arms crossed, jaw tight. Bear loomed in the background like a mountain, blood on his lip where Ghost had caught him with that wild swing. Anson hovered at the edge of the group, keepingGreta and Cinder out of the line of fire in case things exploded again.
And Jax stood apart from the others, eyes fixed on Ghost, not on the destruction. He wasn’t surprised. Wasn’t judging. Just waiting, like he’d known all along this storm was coming.
They were all there. For him. For Naomi.
