“Better than most would,” I tell him, which worries me. Most people would be freaking out, scared to leave their apartment, but Iris has been pushing to go to work. Sometimes I sense her restlessness to leave the casino, which is only fair,she can’t live without leaving the casino forever. I also selfishly need to know if she’s with me because she wants to be and not because she has no choice. The sooner we solve this cartel issue, the better it will be for everyone.
Still…
There is a voice at the back of my head that dreads the end. I’m not completely certain that Iris will choose to stay with me once she is free to leave. It’s been so fucking easy for people in my past to write me off. When I fell into the bottle, no one cared to ask why it happened. Why someone whose life, until then, had always been on the straight and narrow. Why the fuck the oldest son raised to run his family’s empire was suddenly spiraling. No, they just watched me lose fucking control until I was beyond saving.
Will Iris see the same thing once the blinds fall? And when everything has been taken care of and she starts asking questions, peeling into my past, will what she sees scare her off. Leave me for dead like my own fucking family did?
“Have you told her?” Pope asks, sensing the darkness setting in. I’ve always been accused of carrying a dark cloud over my head, but I feel it darkening. I uncap the water and force myself to take a sip to quench my dry throat.
“Tell her what?”
“Don’t fuck with me, Ghost.”
“There is nothing to tell,” I say, walking to the window and looking out. “I am not the man I was before I joined the Sinners. My past doesn’t matter.”
“Would you say the same about hers?”
Fuck!
“We make ourselves, Pope. Once in a while, the past might come back for a bite, nibble away pieces of your sanity, but essentially, we make ourselves.” The past doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t. I won’t let it. I’ve worked too fucking hard to become Ghost to let the pathetic Bruno Benito ruin it. He’s dead. Buried. Forgotten, damnit!
A long beat of silence follows and I pray that Pope drops it. He knows damn well how much I despise talking about my past. Even thinking about it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
“I reached out to my cousin, Priest, who is the president of the Steel Order MC in Austin,” Pope says, and I let out a silent sigh of relief at the topic change. “I called him to ask about the cartel that is targeting Iris.”
I turn away from the window and the view of the Vegas strip. “What did he say?”
“That they’re fucking bad news,” he says, leaning back in his seat. “Priest warned me that we’re in for war if we engage with this group, but he pledged his club’s support if we decide to take them on.”
A war.
Fuck. Those are never fun. I’ve been in a couple of them myself. Blood is shed, lives are lost, and there is never truly a clear winner when lives are lost on the battlefield.
“I could take her away,” I muse, leaning against the wall. It’s not the first time I’ve contemplated this course of action. “We could leave Vegas, the whole state. Hell, I could take her out of the country and get her away from here.”
“Would she want to leave? Would you?”
“No,” I say as the memory of Iris sobbing in the bathroom about not wanting to start her life elsewhere comes back. “Fuck!”
“I spoke to leadership about this. Perhaps it should worry me that as the president, some of my men are so fucking blood thirsty,” he says, taking another sip of the whiskey. “The guys are not exactly happy to have the cartel think they can just stroll into Elysium and dish out threats.”
“You’re not really saying you’ll go to war with Víboras Gemelas, are you?”
“That is exactly what I am saying,” he says, tossing back the rest of the whiskey. “If they show up to our club, then there will be war. Don’t worry, it’s not our first. And Ghost, we take care of our own.”
The “This is not New York” part is left out, but I hear it loud and clear. And how ironic is it that I would feel a stronger kinship with people I am not related to than with my own flesh and blood? Words fail me and I’m uncertain how the fuck I could ever show my gratitude to my MC family for the support they give me in all the ways my real family never did.
“Thank you,” I manage.
“We’re not doing this just for you,” Pope says. He’s right about that, but I figure he says it so I don’t feel indebted to the club. It’s too late for that. I already owe them everything. “I sent some of the boys out to the city to dig around and find out where the cartel members are staying in Vegas. I’ll have the report in a few days. In the meantime, we have to wait for Priest to arrive with reinforcements and once everything is in place, we will strike.”
And then everything will be over.
Iris will finally be free to live as herself, or the version of her past. I can’t help but wonder which identity she’ll choose to live as. Or, once the dust clears and the danger has passed,whether she’ll choose me or go back to a life where I will be nothing but a ghost of her past.
Chapter Five
Iris
