Ghost Riders (A Dark MC Romance)

Isolation

She heard the boots on the porch before the door moved. Anna kept her palms pressed against the scarred wood, counting three steps across the boards until the screen latch lifted and Victor filled the doorway.

Twenty minutes went by, maybe more. The coffee in Victor’s cup had gone cold; Anna left it untouched, left it unmoved, and sat with her hands flat in her lap, staring at the counter. The boxed phone sat beside the envelope, framed by the folded shirts, neat as a threat.

Get up, she thought. Put the shirts away; wash the cups.

Her body remained rooted to the chair. The leaden ache settled into her collarbones the way it always did after he left, a blunt pressure choking the air down to gray dust. Now she just sat inside it and let the clock tick.

At some point she tried to remember the last time she’d talked to Marissa.

It was a small thing, the kind of detail someone remembered without trying. Marissa’s laugh was sharp, always dragging out the end of a sentence when she made a point, yet Anna found nothing. A blank stretch sat where the voice belonged.

Mrs. Chen, then. The neighbor had left tomatoes on the porch step every August, knocking twice without waiting for an answer, but Anna came up completely empty.

She sat with the quiet, counting backward from the last morning she could pin to a real voice. Day after day showed the exact same frame: Victor’s black coffee, the crunch of boots on gravel outside, and the phone that never rang with anyone she had chosen. Eleven days. The brutal math lodged deep in her gut like cold lead.

She looked at the boxed phone on the counter, remembering his hand resting on the laminate before he stepped out. “It’s a clean number,” Victor had said, tapping the plastic wrap with a blunt thumbnail. “You need something, you dial. Nobody else needs to reach this room. Just me. You understand that, Anna?” “I understand,” she had told him, her voice flat. “Good girl.” Him. Only him.

She looked at the bolted screen door where the morning light cut through the wire mesh in pale, flat lines, carrying the smell of stale tobacco still hanging in the kitchen. Marissa’s number had probably slipped from memory anyway, and it made no difference; the phone on the counter belonged to him. Everything in this room had been paid for or arranged to point straight back to him, and she had sat at the center of his perimeter for eleven days without once asking how she got there.

The clock kept moving. Anna sat very still and let the number settle. Eleven.

Diego’s boots hit the same gravel line for the third time in an hour.

Jason clocked it from the shadow of the clubhouse alley, one shoulder flat on the cinderblock, the other angled toward the kitchen path. Diego was not running a perimeter. He was running a loop; tight, deliberate, the same twenty-yard stretch between the side gate and the kitchen window, and every pass brought him close, catching the latch if the screen door rattled.

Jason had learned to read that kind of walking in Ely prison. A man covering ground without a destination was not guarding a place; he was guarding a person.

The bay door rolled up behind him. Cutter backed the truck in slow, no urgency in it, just a man with a Saturday morning and a quart of oil he had put off all week. He popped the hood and let it fall open, then crouched beside the front wheel and started laying out his tools on a shop rag, one by one, unhurried.

Jason kept his back pinned flat.

Diego came around again. Cutter watched the socket wrench in his hand. Diego passed the kitchen window, slowed at the corner, and turned back.

Cutter set the wrench down and reached for the drain plug.

“Rotation’s twelve minutes,” he said, not looking up. “Give or take?”

“Tighter than last week.”

“Yeah.”

Jason watched Diego’s back disappear around the far corner of the building, boots grinding gravel in the same flat rhythm. The kitchen window caught the morning light and held it, pale and still.

“Thursday still works,” Cutter said. He pulled the plug and let the dark oil spill into the pan beneath. “Four AM, cameras go down for the supply rotation. Fifteen-minute window, same as before.”

“Window’s not the problem.”

Cutter looked up then, just briefly, the way a man checks a gauge. “Then what is?”

“He’s got Diego running that path every twelve minutes,” Jason said. “That’s not compound security. That’s Anna.”

Cutter wiped the plug clean on the shop rag, slow and deliberate, and set it aside. “On Anna.”

Jason said nothing. He did not need to.

The oil dripped into the pan, steady and black. Diego’s boots came back around the far corner, right on schedule. Six steps. Seven. Jason counted them off, waiting until the man cleared the glass.

Victor always tightened the leash before he made a move. He had seen it twice before, once before the Desert Wolves retaliation, once before Marcus stopped picking up the phone. The pattern stayed the same; the target changed.

“We go Thursday,” Jason said. “Same time.”

“And if Diego’s rotation holds?” Cutter asked, looking right at him. “You going to pull the pin anyway?”

“Then we work around it.”

Cutter nodded once and reached for the fresh oil, cracking the cap without ceremony. The bay smelled of hot exhaust and metal, sage blowing in sharp off the lot. Diego’s boots scraped gravel again, right on time.

Jason stood frozen in the alley shadow, watching the kitchen window.She heard the boots on the porch before the door moved.

Anna kept her palms pressed against the scarred wood; she counted three steps across the boards, then the screen latch lifted, and by the time Victor filled the doorway she had set her jaw into something neutral.

He carried a thermos, green metal scuffed at the base, and set it on the counter beside the cardboard carton without asking permission to enter.

“You use it yet?” He nodded toward the packaging.

“No.”

“Good.” He unscrewed the cap, poured himself nothing, and merely checked the level inside. “You need anything, you dial. That’s all it’s there for.”

Her focus shifted to the dented flask. “I was thinking about Marissa.”

Victor stood motionless.

“She used to call Sundays,” Anna said, her tone thinning out. “She hasn’t...”

“Marissa’s got her own problems.” He set the lid down on the laminate. “That boyfriend of hers, you know what he was into. Gangs, Anna. Real ones. I told her to put some distance between herself and anyone connected to this house, for her own sake.”

The words landed like lead weights; they were solid, cold, and hard to push against.

“And Mrs. Chen,” Anna said. “She stopped coming by.”

“Her son moved her.” Victor spoke flat, like someone reading off a manifest. “After the raid, he drove up from Tucson and took her to Reno. Didn’t want her near the neighborhood. Can’t blame the man.”

The electric dial over the basin hummed, its red second hand ticking forward.

“I didn’t know that,” she said.

“No reason you would.”

He took the threaded cap and twisted it back into place with one slow, deliberate turn; the kitchen smelled of stale morning coffee, and beneath it, cold tobacco hung stubborn in the drywall.

“You should eat something,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

He checked her face for a second, just long enough to weigh her silence, and Victor lifted the thermos to head for the exit. He pulled the mesh open, stepped out, and let the latch fall shut with a flat metal click.

Anna sat alone in the quiet.

Marissa’s runner. Mrs. Chen’s boy. The raid’s fallout scattering everyone into clean corners. Every detail lined up with brutal, seamless utility, leaving her ribs aching against the stillness.

She counted back anyway. Eleven days. The tally remained fixed.

She stared at the packaged cellular unit, then watched the damp ring drying off the Formica counter in the dry heat while Victor’s boots crunched the gravel outside, unhurried, fading into the heat of the road.

The wall timer kept grinding forward.

Eleven days, and every piece of math added up clean, yet she still could not summon the last voice that had belonged to anyone else.