Ghost Riders (A Dark MC Romance)

The Long Coercion

"Skillet's running too hot," Cutter said.

Anna glanced over her shoulder. He turned the knob down, and the metal settled to a low spit.

"Probably should have caught that earlier," he said, tapping the wooden spoon on the rim. "You want this ladled out now, or you waiting on the bread?"

"Ladle it," she said.

"Bowls are right here." He reached for the stack on the shelf. "Take your portion before Victor comes looking."

"He asked for the numbers first."

"He can wait five minutes while you eat."

"No," she said. "He won't."

She watched him ladle the dark stew, calm and unhurried; the tight knot beneath her collarbone went slack for a single second. That was all. A skillet temperature, a pair of bowls, grease smoke curling toward the vent. It shoved the yard gravel and the sound of the shot out into the dark, but then the cold dread pooled right back in.

She turned to the cutting board and brought the heavy blade down hard.

A comment about a burner had bought her three seconds of comfort from a man she could never trust, inside four walls she could not leave. Victor had not built the fence in an afternoon; he had let her set the posts herself, traded for small mercies until she was the one oiling the hinges. The clock over the stove read eight forty-seven.

The inventory log sat on the counter edge, clipboard face-up, columns complete in her own neat script.

She picked it up.

Anna stepped through the doorway with her head straight, kept her pace even, and turned into the hall.Victor's office smelled of cedar and old paper, the wall of monitors throwing pale blue light across the wood paneling. Anna set the clipboard on the desk. Marcus's desk. She rested her palms on the polished edge.

Victor did not look up right away. He turned through the pages with a thumbnail pressed to the margin, reading the column totals the way a man reads something he already suspects he knows. The monitors behind him showed the yard, the south gate, the loading dock, all of it quiet and halogen-white. He set the clipboard down. "What would you do with the overflow if we pulled the partition wall?"

She heard herself answer before she could stop it. The words came out clean and practical, something about rotating the canned stock forward and keeping the perishables along the north wall for airflow. Victor listened with his chin tilted, tracking what she said and weighing it; that was the worst part. The attention felt real.

"That's workable," he said.

She stood there, her palms still resting on the dark wood.

"Lila's been solid on the tallies," he said, casual, already reaching for a pen. "Efficient. Keeps the count clean."

Anna nodded.

The nod happened before the thought did. And then the thought arrived anyway, slipping in sideways: at least she has something to do, at least she is not sitting in a room with nothing but four walls. She had just defended it. In her own head, she had made it reasonable.

Victor kept writing.

She looked at the monitors. The south gate camera showed a strip of gravel, the freight dock, two men waiting by the chain link. Nothing moved yet.

"Go supervise the count," Victor said, his attention staying on the ledger. "South gate, nine o'clock. Lila'll have the tally sheet..."

Anna picked up the clipboard and walked to the door.

The halogen yard opened ahead of her, bright and cold across the gravel. Somewhere past the chain link, Lila was already working the shift.The south gate was cold, halogen-bright, and loud with the diesel thrum of the freight truck. Anna stood beside Lila on the concrete platform, holding the manifest level.

"Marking crate nine," Anna called out. "Seals intact."

Lila kept her head down over the clipboard. "Bay four, dry goods, forty-two kilos." Her pen scratched the tally sheet in a flat rhythm, moving along the row of pallets with mechanical efficiency. It was a habit built under perimeter cameras, where slip-ups carried real penalties.

"Next lot," Anna said, tapping the edge of the board. "Seven-dash-zero."

"Clear," Lila replied, checking off the entry. "Seals match the manifest."

The loader wheeled a pallet jack along the dock edge, his spine turned to them as he worked the far stack. Anna kept her pen moving, shifting her glance sideways for one beat. Lila was gripping the edge of her clipboard with both thumbs. Beneath the hem of her coarse work jacket, the sleeves had ridden up half an inch, exposing the mottled purple bands encircling both wrists, the skin chafed raw and yellowing at the bone from cinched nylon ties. Lila had already looked away. Not at her, but out at the chain-link fencing, checking the black space beyond the arc lights before returning to the tally sheet. A fast redirect; the cameras recorded nothing out of line. The loader grunted, hauled the jack around, and stepped behind the stacked crates. "Lot eight," Anna said. "Final batch." Lila read from the plastic tag hanging off the wire mesh. "Seal nine-zero-four. Tally matches the slip." Anna looked down at the carbon sheet. The manifest ink was clear: seal nine-zero-six. A mismatched crate, or an unlogged transfer from the holding shed. One word would halt the bay, summon the yard guard, and put Lila under the halogen floodlights to explain the discrepancy. Her ballpoint hovered over the box for half a heartbeat. Without looking up, Anna dragged the tip through the printed six, looping the ink into a blunt, deliberate four before checking the sign-off box. Lila's gaze flicked up, catching the movement of Anna's hand. Her breath caught once in her throat, barely audible over the idling diesel, before settling into the cold air. Two seconds passed. Anna saw the count behind the words; it was the identical ledger she ran every hour inside the perimeter, calculating what to swallow and what to hide. Lila’s expression remained blank, but the arithmetic stayed visible. She knew. Not about Jason, because Anna could not prove that; she simply knew the cameras, the steep cost of a careless word, and the silence required to stay alive under Victor’s watch. They survived under the same concrete rules, and speech would only break the fragile perimeter they maintained. "Last crate," Anna said quietly. "Sign off on the slip."

"Done," Lila said.

The loader returned to the bay, and both women kept their attention on the paper. The count finished clean. Lila signed the bottom of the tally sheet, clipped her pen into her pocket, and walked toward the compound entrance without another word. The heavy steel latched in the frame behind her.

Anna remained on the platform and watched the truck roll forward, red taillights fading into the darkness down the gravel access road. Somewhere past that fence line, Jason was moving. She had tallied forty-two boxes, kept her hands level, and fed the cameras what they wanted. She turned back toward the main building. High above the concrete apron, where the second-floor office jutted over the yard, a pane of glass reflected the cold halogen array. Behind the glass, outlined against the faint blue glow of the monitor bank, Victor's silhouette stood unmoving, looking straight down onto the empty platform. Anna pulled her coat tighter, lowered her eyes to the clipboard, and stepped through the door.The control room was barely wider than a doorframe. Equipment racks pressed in from both walls, and the monitor bank threw a flat gray sheen across the concrete floor. Cutter pulled the door shut behind him, cutting the yard noise down to an oily hum.

Diego had caught a flicker on the north panel an hour back, stopping by the doorway. "North feed keeps dropping," Diego had said, watching the hallway behind them. "Line noise or a bad relay?"

"Probably dust in the terminal," Cutter had answered, giving him the flat brush-off. "I'll clear the contacts before shift change."

"Don't take too long in there. Victor's already checking the gates."

"I know what needs doing." That had ended it.

He moved to the main board and scanned the indicator lights, touching nothing yet. Six tiled squares showed the north corridor in pale halogen, plain concrete running straight to a length of chain link at the perimeter fence. Empty. The digital clock above the breaker read 9:04, four minutes after the freight truck had rolled through the gate.

He reached down to the north bank breaker, finding the recessed toggle switch beside the primary fuse block. Steady hands. They were the same hands that stirred the grease down in the shop and cooked the morning oats without scorching the pan. He flipped the black switch.

The six corridor screens dropped straight to black.

No trip alarm sounded, and the relays clicked once into silent reset. Cutter stepped back and fixed his gaze on the dead glass, checking the tiny green cycle diode beneath the housing. The auto-restart sequence was hardwired into the chassis, giving four minutes before the cameras cycled back on without an override code. Victor built redundancy into every circuit in the compound, but he had never figured out how to wire it into men.

Cutter counted thirty seconds while the ventilation fan rattled in the casing. Outside, the south yard stretched under gravel dust and diesel smoke, where Anna had stood by the dock stairs holding the transport manifest against her hip. He pushed the thought back down.

Sixty.

Jason was either through the exterior doors by now, or he was pinned against the wire. Cutter had no radio, no back line, and no way to signal him. He had laid out the window, and that was the whole bargain.

Two minutes.

Victor kept men stationed on corners Cutter had never been cleared to map. A single misstep on the gravel would drop Jason before the screen phosphor warmed again.

Three minutes passed. Cutter rested a palm on the warm sheet metal, tracking the final seconds through the dull thrum of the transformers.

The north bank flickered with static, and then the corridor jumped back into white light.

Still empty.

Cutter dropped his hand, turned the lock latch, and stepped out.