Page 45 of Ghost’s Awakening

Ghost slept hard. All the speed in him switched off at once when sleep finally won, and what was left sprawled face-down against my shoulder with one leg thrown over both of mine, taking up most of a narrow bed. I lay still and ran the inventory. Sore in muscles no training session had ever found. A towel on the floor that was going straight into the wash and staying there. And under all of it, quiet, a feeling I had to reach back four months to name. A day was coming, and there was no body waiting in it for me.

Getting out from under him took patience. I moved an inch, waited, moved another. He grumbled something that never became a word, rolled into the warm dent I'd left, and kept sleeping, and I stood there in the dark grinning at him longer than I'll ever admit. Then I dressed and went to pay a debt.

This club had put guards on my brother's hospital, voted a war for me, and fed me for a week. I couldn't patch and I couldn't pay. That left me two ways to pay, and only one of them didn't need anybody to bleed.

The kitchen at five was black and silent, and I brought it up one switch at a time. Steel counters running long under the lights. The flat griddle. A walk-in stocked deep enough to feed a siege, which, given the fence and the cameras outside, was probably the idea. The knives hung on a magnet strip in an order somebody had thought hard about, and the aprons had their own hook, and I stood in the middle of another person's system for a second, respecting it. Then I raided it.

Eggs by the crate. Bacon. Peppers, onions. And treasure, split between the walk-in and the dry pantry: a wedge of parmesan and a bundle of basil going soft behind a case of eggs, and shoved behind the flour where nobody had looked in months, dried oregano and a can of crushed tomatoes big enough to need two hands. The menu wrote itself. Griddle runs the classics for the crowd. Oven runs frittata, my mother's Sunday trick for feeding a full house, peppers and onion and basil under a thick layer of grated parmesan.

I lit the burners, set the coffee urns going, and started cracking eggs.

The bacon was in ranks and the onions were sweating when the doors slammed open at six, and Irish made it four steps into his own kitchen before his boots stopped dead.

"No." He said it to the room. Then to the ceiling. "No, no, no. What is this? Who let this happen?!"

"Morning." I cracked an egg one-handed in each hand, mostly because he was watching. "Coffee's done."

"That's my griddle!" He came at me pointing. "That's my apron! Those are—why are the onions already sweating?!" He reached the counter, took in the frittata trays going together in rows, and I watched his outrage split down the middle. Half of it was the food. The other half came out first. "And what am I supposed to do now?! Do you have any idea what you've taken from me? I had two grown men to boss around in here every morning! That was the whole point of the kitchen! Nolan burns things! Declan pretends he's deaf! It's the best hour of my day and you've—" Both arms swept the working kitchen. "You've ruined it with competence!"

"You can still boss me around."

"You don't need bossing! Look at you! It's insulting!" He grabbed a strip of pepper off the prep pile, held it up to the light like evidence, and ate it. His eyes stayed narrow the whole time he chewed. "This is a coup. I want it on the record."

"Noted."

The kitchen filled as the compound woke. Nolan and Declan came in at half past six, stopped, and read the scene: me on the griddle, Irish circling me at full volume. They looked at each other. Whatever passed between them didn't need sound. Declan tied on an apron and took over the toast without one word. Nolan poured two coffees, handed one across, and drank his while he watched the room work.

"About time somebody who can actually cook took this kitchen." Mild as milk. He sipped.

"Excuse me?!" Irish's spatula came up like a drawn sword. "Two years! Two years I have kept this club fed⁠—"

"Fed is generous." Declan kept buttering.

"Alive, then! Two years I've kept this club alive, ever since⁠—"

He stopped himself. The spatula came down. Something crossed his face, fast, and all the noise went out of him in the middle of his own sentence.

The griddle hissed into the gap. Nolan lowered his coffee. He and Declan traded a look that had old hurt in it, and then Nolan turned to me, because my face had asked the question before I could decide not to.

"Since Maria left." His voice stayed quiet. "Hawk's wife. She ran this kitchen since before most of this room patched. Fed the whole club out of it. Birthdays, funerals, everything between." He turned his mug a slow half-circle on the steel. "Two years ago she took their daughters and went. The life got to be too much. Too many close calls." A pause. "Nobody blamed her. Hawk least of all. But it's been colder in here since."

I looked at the kitchen again with that in it. The pans had the size for a crowd. The long counters. The order on the knife strip I'd stood there respecting at five in the morning without knowing whose order it was. A woman's system, still running, kept warm for two years by a loud redheaded treasurer who couldn't cook and wouldn't let her room go dark.

"So I stepped in." Irish's volume came back, but the bottom of it stayed soft. "Somebody had to. And for the record, Maria herself once told me my carbonara had promise."

"She said it had ambition." Declan didn't look up from the toast. "Different word."

"Same spirit!" The spatula rose again, and the room could breathe again, and he aimed it at me. "Fine. The coup stands. But on paper this is still my kitchen, usurper, and I'm auditing that frittata."

"Audit away. You're the treasurer."

"Thank you! Finally somebody respects the office!"

Ghost showed up at seven. His hair told the whole story of last night to anybody who cared to read it, and he came through the doors mid-yawn, found me at the griddle, and cut straight through the crowd like the crowd wasn't there.

"You left." Low, right at my shoulder, his voice still rough from sleep. No accusation in it. Something warmer underneath.

"Debt to pay." I flipped the bacon. "Grab a plate."