Ghost Riders (A Dark MC Romance)

The Return

The lamp was off, and the room remained dark.

Anna lay on the blanket with her boots laced, staring upward while the jacket hung inside the closet six feet away. She could feel the weight of what it held, pulling at her from across the room.

Jason had been back on the property two weeks. The Welcome-Home fire was done, the chapel appearance settled, his first full circuit through the fence behind him. She had watched him walk the perimeter line, holding her posture rigid and her mouth shut. Two weeks, and he was already reading the yard the way Marcus used to.

The northern runs remained recorded in the hem of that hanging coat. Three drop points, the Thursday clearance, crew shifts, and Lila's payroll entry marked with the contusions Anna tracked by hand. A camera meant a grave for both of them. She kept coordinates copied from the haul sheets before the teeth took the original slips.

She had spent months running an operation inside this house. The recognition settled heavy on her ribcage like an unpaid tab. If she ran a line, Jason ran one too, and Victor monitored every shift. The stitched paper inside the lining would either clear the gate or break everything down.

Anna kept her gaze on the ceiling, listening to the dark.The kitchen smelled of burnt grease and bleach, and the overhead fluorescent tube buzzed one long, flat note. Anna found Lila at the prep counter before the compound woke up; a cutting board sat in front of her, both wrists moving through the work. The sleeves of her pullover had ridden back. Anna looked once and looked away.

She took a sheet pan from the rack and set it on the counter beside the oven. The metal rang upon the iron grate.

Lila did not stop cutting.

Anna started on the coffee, measuring grounds by feel, listening to the yard outside. No boots on gravel yet. The sky through the window above the sink was the color of ash.

Victor came in at ten past six.

He bypassed knocking; the entry latch gave way and the cold came in with him, and he stood inside the frame long enough to read the room. Anna turned from the counter and held the manila folder across the space between them.

"Rotation analysis," she said. "Through the end of the month."

He took it. He refrained from opening it right away; he looked at her instead, the folder loose at his side, the same flat appraisal he used when he wanted a person to fill the silence.

She stayed quiet.

"Everything on the shifts?" he asked.

"Crew names down the left, windows and vehicles across the top," she said. "Route timing on the second sheet."

"Just what I asked for?"

"Orderly, deferential," she said. "Nothing to flag."

He opened the folder; the pages inside were clean, formatted the way he liked. What the paper also held was everything she had recorded by hand over six weeks: which drivers ran light, which camera sweeps had blind spots, which handoff points sat outside the fence line long enough to matter. She had buried it in plain sight - false mileage tallies, route timing discrepancies - coded into the same clean columns Victor expected. He would never see it unless he already knew what to look for.

Victor flipped the paper over. "You checked these routes yourself?"

"Twice," she said.

Anna kept her hands at her sides.

He closed the folder.

"Before Thursday," he said.

"It's done," she said.

"And nobody else looked at the vehicle logs?"

"No one," she said. "Just me."

He looked at her a moment longer, then let his gaze drift slowly toward the prep counter. He did not look at the cutting board; he looked at the base of Lila's skull, where her hair was pulled back in a fraying elastic. "The kitchen hours," Victor said, his voice flat and level. "Make sure Lila stays logged down to the quarter-hour. Jason gets ideas when her time isn't accounted for." Anna felt the air thin out in her lungs. "She's on the ledger every day." "Keep her there," Victor said. "Nobody moves off the books unless I sign off on the line." He tapped the corner of the folder against his hip, took one more measured look at Lila's bent neck, and walked out without pulling the door shut behind him.

The yard crunched under his boots, then went quiet.

Anna crossed the kitchen floor and pulled the door shut until the latch caught. She stood with her hand on the handle, her back to the room, waiting while his truck reached the far end of the lot and dropped away.

When she turned, Lila was watching her from the counter; neither of them said anything. Lila's wrists were still bare where the sleeves had ridden up. Anna held her gaze for a second, and then turned back to the coffee pot, and Lila went back to the board.

The fluorescent tube buzzed on; outside, the sky went pale.She stood at the window a long time after the coffee pot went cold.

Jason crossed the yard below, moving through the dark between the tool shed and the fence line, and Anna watched him without lifting the curtain. He moved the way Marcus used to move. That same flat patience; no wasted steps. He paused near the far post and stood still, and she followed his line of sight to where Victor's truck sat under the security lamp, and she understood what Jason was doing. He was reading the yard. Counting gaps. Marcus used to stand at the edge of the asphalt the same way, watching traffic pass without blinking.

She let the curtain fall.

The room stayed dark; she had not turned the lamp back on.

She lay down on top of the blanket, boots still laced, and stared at the ceiling. The coat hung in the closet. Forty pages sewn into the hem. Three northern drops, the Thursday window, crew rotations, Lila's wrists. Six weeks of evidence she had no language for, because naming it made it real and real things got you buried in the desert.

Jason did not know.

That was the problem. Not Victor; not the Thursday run; not the camera sweeps. Jason. Because Jason moved like Marcus and watched like Marcus and if he kept watching, he would see her. Not the version she showed Victor. The real one. The one keeping books inside a coat.

She pressed the back of one hand against her mouth.

The thing she could not afford was for Jason to find the ledger before she had a way out for both of them, because Victor monitored every conversation and every door, and if Jason moved on the information before the window opened, Victor would know she had been running her own operation for three years inside this house. That was a grave. She had seen the grave; she knew what the desert looked like at two in the morning when Victor wanted a point made clean.

But if she stayed silent and Jason moved without her data, he moved blind.

She turned onto her side, facing the closet.

The coat was invisible in the dark. She knew where it was.

Protecting Jason meant handing over the pages she had hidden, which meant exposure, which meant Victor. Protecting herself meant keeping the ledger sealed and watching Jason walk into the yard with Marcus's old patience and no map.

She could not do both.

The weight of it locked her ribs tight.

She whispered into the cold sheets, tasting the dry air. "I can't protect both of them."

"He will kill you," she said to the room. "He will find every scrap."

The dark absorbed it. The compound was quiet.

"You run now, or you bury him," she muttered. "No in-between."

Somewhere past the fence, Jason was still in the yard, still reading whatever the yard told him, still watching Victor's truck the way Marcus used to watch the road. She pressed her hand harder against her mouth and said nothing.