Ghost Riders (A Dark MC Romance)

The Math

The north corridor cameras had been live for forty seconds when Jason moved.

He tracked the count under his breath; forty seconds was the dead window Cutter had promised. The control room door clicked shut behind Cutter, and Jason used the metal latch falling home as his mark. He threw his weight hard into the breaker housing, slipped left, and hit the gap between the generator shed and the east wall. No lens caught that six-foot slot.

"Three days," Cutter had told him over the grease-stained counter, sliding a scrap of receipt paper between two mugs. "Take the gap by the shed. After that, you're on your own clock."

"How long do the feeds drop?" Jason had asked.

"Long enough if your feet aren't lead," Cutter said. "Twelve paces to the turn. Four to the dry storage. Don't look back to see if I'm watching."

"And if you get company?"

"Then I do my job, kid. You make sure you do yours."

He had burned the paper after three minutes, but the ink stayed behind his eyelids.

Diesel fumes and scale coated the brick; the cold concrete bit straight through his denim jacket. He kept his heels silent, staying low while he ran the count. Twelve paces to the junction. Four more brought him to the south-facing latch of the old storage room. At the corner, he froze. Back in the north corridor, Cutter's heavy soles dragged across the deck plates. A slow, heavy patrol, loud enough to tell anyone listening that the shift was routine and empty. The footsteps faded toward the loading bay.

Jason slipped inside and let the door rest in the frame.

The air held stale motor oil and decomposing cardboard. A bare bulb hung from a pull chain overhead, but he left the room black. Shielding the penlight with his palm, he tracked a thin yellow beam across the far bulkhead: battered metal shelves, a rusted hand truck, two stacked shipping pallets. The hidden seam sat behind the second rack; Cutter had laid it out clean. Jason locked his fingers into the shelf angle and eased the metal frame six inches out, masking the iron scrape inside the hum of the ventilation blowers.

The seam looked like plain sheetrock until he dug his heel into the base corner.

The drywall popped loose.

Three ledgers sat inside the exposed stud cavity, bundled tight in black electrical tape. Jason gripped the bindings and thumbed the top ledger open under the penlight beam.

The handwriting hit him instantly; small, tight strokes leaning sharply left. Marcus had penned every line. It was the identical slant on his childhood birthday cards, on the registration slips for summer ball, and across the letters to Ely that Victor had quietly intercepted and doctored. Seven years of dirty ledger work spread across the ruled pages, tracking dates, names, and cash tallies down the margins. It was a complete blueprint of the whole syndicate.

He jammed the books inside his coat and shoved the drywall square back into place.

Then boot soles hit the corridor floor. Not Cutter's. The strike was wrong. Slow, deliberate footsteps dragged across the outer concrete, feeling for an angle. Jason locked his muscles, three bindings crushed under his arm, and stopped his breath.

"Sit," he said.

Not unkind. That was the worst part.

Anna sat down. The chair was leather, soft, the kind of chair that made you feel chosen, and she kept her hands flat on her thighs. Victor set a plate in front of her. Rice, grilled chicken, a wedge of lime. He poured water without asking, then settled back into his own chair and tapped the top manifest with two fingers.

"Three northern runs. Pre-dawn, starting Thursday." He slid the page across the wood. "I want your read on the crew rotation." She reached for the water glass, her hand resting on the heavy tumbler. Before her fingers even closed around the cold glass, Victor tilted his head, watching her palm settle. "Diego flagged something earlier," Victor said, casual as a grocery list. "North camera. Said it flickered?" A hard thrum hit her collarbone, a sharp, sudden kick in her chest that pulled the breath short in her throat. Her knuckles wanted to lock white around the glass; she caught the twitch before the skin tightened, keeping her fingers relaxed, resting loose against the sweating pane. "Probably the cold," she said, keeping her voice even, unhurried. "That whole bank's been glitching since October, old equipment." Silence settled between them. Victor didn't blink. He sat back, his dark eyes fixed on her mouth, tracking the line of her jaw and the slow rise of her shoulder while the desk lamp buzzed between them. A beat stretched, then another, heavy and measuring, the silence working like a hand searching for a pulse. He reached down and picked up his fork. "That's what Cutter said." He cut into the chicken. "Dust in the housing..." "Probably right," she said. She looked down at the manifest on the wood, letting her breath out through her nose in a slow, imperceptible draw. Names, departure windows, grid coordinates for drop points, real figures she absorbed quietly, keeping her face perfectly still. "Reyes and Dominguez on the first leg," she said. "They know that stretch." Victor nodded slowly. "That's what I thought." He ate, and she ate. The fork was heavy silver, ridiculous against paper manifests, and he talked through the second and third routes with dollar amounts attached to each, dropping names she had never heard before tonight. She filed every single one. This was the performance. She understood it clearly; he wasn't asking for her expertise, but building a record of her participation where every nod she gave him served as a signature. She nodded. She asked one small, practical question about the third drop point, and he answered it fully, which told her he wanted her to know. Outside, a truck idled somewhere in the yard and then cut out, leaving the office cold.

Victor circled a name on the bottom manifest and slid it across to her.

"I want you on the Thursday run," he said. "Logistics only. You'll ride with Reyes."

She looked at the circled name, the drop point, and the time stamp. Thursday, 4 AM.

"Okay," she said.

He owned the word the moment she said it, and she knew that, but she said it anyway because the ledger she was building inside her head - names, routes, dollar amounts, Thursday, 4 AM, three northern drop points - that ledger was hers.Back in her room, Anna closed the door and stood in the dark for a moment before she moved.

The small notebook was in the drawer beneath her spare clothes, the kind with a cardboard cover and narrow ruled lines, bought months ago from the commissary cart and never used. She sat on the edge of the bed and opened it to the first page.

She wrote the date. Then Thursday. Then 4 AM.

The pen scratched softly. Reyes. Dominguez. The grid coordinates she had read off the manifest, the drop points, the dollar amounts Victor had dropped between bites of chicken like they meant nothing. She wrote his exact phrasing where she could still hear it; the blunt cadence stayed intact.

"Three northern runs," he had told her across the kitchen table. "I want your read on the crew rotation before Friday."

"The timing looks tight," she had said, watching him slice the meat.

"Then make it work. Lila knows the schedule; keep her on the books."

"Understood."

"Don't lose focus now, Anna. Everything here runs because I tell it to run."

She wrote that too. Her hand steadied as she worked. Ink filled the narrow rule, marking the boundary of what Victor claimed to hold and the ledger she kept for herself.

She turned the page and kept going.

The three-day isolation. She wrote the dates, the locked door, the meals left outside. The timestamped photographs Victor had spread across the table to prove every tracked step at the bus station; he had shown each print with slow deliberate care.

"You like looking at tickets, Anna?" he had murmured, tapping the glossy paper. "You think there's a bus leaving that I don't see?"

"No," she had said, her hands flat on the wood.

"Remember that next time."

She recorded what he said, what stayed unspoken, and the exact weight of both. The falsified manifest, freight count, Lila's name kept off the discrepancy column. Lila's wrists, the pale ridged marks left by the restraints, the way she pulled her sleeves down in the kitchen like the scarring was an unpaid debt. Anna wrote it all. Every detail swallowed down, recorded line by line.

She filled four pages; then five. The pen ran thin on the last line, so she pressed harder to keep the ink black.

When she finished, she capped the pen and sat still.

The notebook was thin, maybe forty pages, but it carried weight in her grip.

She crossed the room to the closet and moved the hanging clothes aside. The old coat hung at the back, her mother's, dark wool gone soft at the elbows, the sort of item Victor bypassed because it belonged to years before him. She worked the notebook through a small seam gap inside the lower hem, easing the cardboard into the inner wool batting. She smoothed the fabric with her palm. The coat hung straight. Nothing showed.

The room looked unchanged; the lamp burned low, and she shut the opened drawer.

Proof, if she got it out. A sentence, if caught.

She switched off the lamp and lay down in the dark, still dressed.