Page 20 of Ghost’s Awakening

Or we go check on Liam at UMC.

Why did I say no? I could have fought that broken man. Pulled the hits, made it look real without doing real damage. Liam would never have known. The crowd would never have known. I could have walked out of that ring with my four grand and my brother's name still safe in my own mouth instead of hanging out of a stranger's.

Because Liam wouldn't have wanted it. Not even the fake version of the beating. Not even the one where nobody actually got hurt. He'd have looked at me from that bed with those brown eyes and he'd have known, and something between us would have cracked.

My brother didn't climb boulders because it was easy. He climbed them because the hard line was the only one that meant anything, and the day I stopped believing that was the day I lost the right to sit in the chair beside his bed.

But what was my code worth if he died while I held onto it?

I shook my head. Focus. Done is done. I couldn't un-say it. All I could do now was put myself between him and the man who'd promised to visit.

The clock on the wall read 4:12. It was dark outside the windows.

Thirteen miles, give or take. We'd come in past Henderson, and I'd driven that stretch to the pit every Thursday for four months. I knew about where this place sat between the highway exits and the hospital. And there was no lock on his door and nobody standing on the other side of it. Hopefully.

I swung my legs off the bed. My feet hit cold floor. The bruises across my torso protested. But I'd fought through worse.

I didn't trust these bikers to just let me walk out. They'd been decent, more than decent. But I was an asset now, a man who'd seen this Gravedigger's operation from the inside, and people don't let assets leave. Not in my experience.

My shorts were on the chair. The wraps were still on my hands, stiff with dried blood. No shoes. No shirt. No phone, no wallet, no cash.

I opened the door slowly. The gravel lot lay dark and quiet. One flood lamp at the gate, another at the main building. A watchtower near the fence, a faint glow inside it. Security.

The October cold hit me the second I was outside, and I moved fast toward the gate, gravel biting my soles, the air sharp enough to sting my eyes. At the gate I found a smaller door built into the steel frame, a personnel cut-through. Unlocked from the inside, probably the only side it could open from. If I left, there'd be no turning back.

I slipped through, eased it shut behind me, and ran.

GHOST

I came out the door of Church at a dead sprint and the October air punched the breath out of me.

My bike sat in the second row. The Harley I'd spent two winters tearing down and building back meaner, stripped light, tuned until it ran angry, the fastest thing I'd ever thrown a leg over. I ripped my helmet off the bar and jammed it on, the strap fumbling in fingers that wouldn't hold still.

My brain was doing the thing it does in a crisis, firing off in twelve directions at once, except every direction kept bending back to the same place and the same face.

Gravedigger had people. A year or more of building in the dark. How many had he pulled out of that circuit? How many fighters he'd turned into muscle were out there right now wearing no colors and answering to a man who ran a pit? If he gave the order… If he'd already given it…

I twisted the ignition. The engine cracked awake, hard and mechanical, rolling off the buildings and across the gravel.

"Open the gate!" I screamed at the watchtower. The guard's head came up in the window. "Gate! Now!"

The motor caught. The steel started rolling.

"Ghost! Wait!"

I turned in the seat. Reaper crossed the lot at that pace of his that wasn't a jog and wasn't a sprint, ground disappearing under him without any effort showing. Behind him, Tank, the shotgun across his back catching the light. And behind Tank was Irish, tugging his helmet on as he walked, visor up, grinning, because the bastard grinned at everything.

"I need to go, Axel. Now."

"Not stopping you." Reaper reached me and his hand came down on my bar. His silver-gray eyes held steady. "Kai asked me to ride with you. Tank and Irish are coming too. Whoever this Caleb is, whatever his line to Gravedigger turns out to be, you'll be standing in the blast radius by default."

"Kai asked you to…?"

"Kai asked, I agreed, and Tank and Irish didn't need asking. You're not doing this alone, Jake."

Something pulled tight behind my eyes at the sound of my real name out of our VP's mouth, and I swallowed it down.

Tank was already astride his Harley, the big frame making the bike look like a toy. It turned over with a rumble I felt in the ground. Irish swung on his own and kicked it to life.