Ghosts
1365 Words
"Absolutely not."
The words left my mouth before Cruz even finished grinning.
The VP looked offended.
Deeply offended.
Personally wounded.
"You didn't even ask which bartender."
"I don't need to."
"That's rude."
"It's experience."
Clyde snorted.
Aurora hid her smile behind her coffee cup.
I pointed at Cruz.
"You've tried recruiting three bartenders, two waitresses, a mechanic, and a guy who sold fireworks out of a storage unit."
"The fireworks guy had potential."
"He blew up a mailbox."
"Exactly."
I rubbed my forehead.
The woman was impossible.
The fact she'd somehow become one of the best vice presidents I'd ever known said concerning things about my judgment.
The clubhouse door opened again.
This time nobody was laughing.
One of the prospects stepped onto the porch.
Young.
Nervous.
Trying not to look nervous.
Which somehow made him look more nervous.
His eyes landed on me.
"Uh... President?"
That got everyone's attention.
The kid swallowed.
"There's somebody here asking for you."
The atmosphere shifted instantly.
Years of habit.
Years of violence.
Years of enemies.
Laughter disappeared.
I was already standing.
"So bring them inside."
The prospect hesitated.
"That's the thing."
I didn't like that.
"What thing?"
The kid glanced toward the parking lot.
"She won't come in."
Silence.
Cruz frowned.
"She?"
"Yeah."
The prospect scratched the back of his neck.
"Says she'll only talk to Jack."
My stomach tightened.
Not fear.
Instinct.
The same instinct that had kept me alive through combat and club wars.
Aurora was already standing beside me.
One hand resting lightly against my arm.
Not stopping me.
Grounding me.
"Let's go see."
The gravel crunched beneath our boots as we crossed the lot.
Clyde moved to my left.
Cruz to my right.
Aurora just behind us.
The old formation happened naturally.
Nobody discussed it.
Nobody needed to.
The woman waited beside an older pickup truck parked near the road.
Mid-thirties maybe.
Dark hair.
Tired eyes.
Clothes dusty from travel.
She looked exhausted.
Not dangerous.
But I'd learned a long time ago appearances meant nothing.
The woman watched us approach.
Her gaze stopped on me.
"Jack Steele?"
I nodded.
"Depends who's asking."
Something flickered across her face.
Relief.
Then uncertainty.
Then grief.
The kind of grief that hollowed people out from the inside.
My stomach sank.
I knew that look.
Everybody in this club knew that look.
The woman reached into her jacket.
Clyde moved immediately.
One step forward.
Muscles tightening.
Ready.
The woman froze.
Slowly.
Carefully.
She pulled out an envelope.
Nothing more.
Clyde relaxed exactly zero percent.
She held it toward me.
"My brother asked me to deliver this if anything happened to him."
Nobody spoke.
I took the envelope.
The paper felt old.
Weathered.
The handwriting on the front made my blood run cold.
Because I recognized it.
I hadn't seen it in almost two years.
But I recognized it instantly.
Aaron Mitchell.
Brother.
Lost Soul.
Dead.
Killed during the war.
"What is this?" I asked quietly.
The woman's eyes glistened.
"He wrote it before he died."
My throat tightened.
The parking lot suddenly felt very still.
Very quiet.
She looked around at the clubhouse.
At the bikes.
At the patches.
At the men and women standing around me.
Then she looked back at me.
"He said if the Lost Souls survived..."
Her voice cracked.
"...you'd know what to do."
I stared at the envelope.
The weight of it felt heavier than paper had any right to.
Beside me, Cruz had gone completely silent.
Even Clyde wasn't moving.
Aurora's hand found mine.
The gesture small enough nobody else would notice.
But I felt it.
The woman took a shaky breath.
"I drove twelve hours to get here."
Her eyes dropped to the envelope.
"He said it mattered."
I looked down at Aaron's handwriting.
A dead brother's final request.
A message carried across half the country.
A message that had somehow survived a war.
Slowly, I slid my thumb beneath the seal.
Whatever was inside had waited two years to be read.
Tonight seemed as good a time as any.
I opened it.
The paper felt heavier than it had any right to.
I stood in the middle of the gravel lot with it folded once in my hands, the porch light catching the edge like it didn’t want to be read.
Behind me, the clubhouse was still alive.
Music. Laughter. Bottles clinking.
A world that hadn’t learned yet what was standing ten feet outside its door.
Aurora was the first to step closer.
Not asking.
Just there.
Cruz came up on my right, arms folded, eyes sharp but quieter than usual.
Even Clyde didn’t speak. That alone told me everything.
The prospect stood a few feet back, shifting like he wanted to disappear.
I exhaled through my nose and unfolded the letter.
“Inside,” I said.
The door creaked open behind us, but I didn’t turn.
If I read this once, I wasn’t reading it twice.
So I read it out loud.
---
“Jack,” I started.
“My guess is if you’re hearing this instead of burning it, then things didn’t end clean.”
A short breath left me.
“Good. That means you’re still thinking.”
Cruz muttered, “That sounds like him already.”
I kept going.
“You remember Joe Dirty and Harmon McCoy.”
Even Clyde went still.
“They rode with a Lost Souls chapter twenty years back. Not yours. Not the one you built. An older one. Different roads. Different war.”
“They were never ours.”
That landed hard.
“They were Family.”
The word didn’t belong in our world.
“They were planted inside that chapter by Axel McCoy.”
Silence went absolute.
“Joe and Harmon weren’t brothers. They were eyes and ears—feeding everything back to Axel. Routes. Money. Weak points. Names. Everything that chapter built.”
My jaw tightened.
“And when Axel got what he wanted…”
I stopped for half a second.
“…the Riverside Chapter burned.”
Clyde’s voice cut low. “That wasn’t accident.”
“No,” I read on.
“The doors were locked from the outside.”
That settled into the lot like something permanent.
“They called it faulty wiring. A tragedy. A mistake.”
“But it was cleanup.”
“They disappeared Joe Dirty and Harmon McCoy the same night. No bodies. No records. No follow-up.”
A pause.
“After that, Axel stopped looking inward.”
“He started building outward. Bigger. Cleaner. Harder to trace.”
I exhaled slowly.
“So if whispers ever come back about Riverside…”
“Don’t run from it.”
“Walk into it.”
Cruz scoffed softly. “Of course he says that.”
I turned the page.
There wasn’t another page.
Just the real weight of it.
“And Jack…”
My grip tightened.
“You’re not dealing with history anymore.”
“You’re dealing with what survived it.”
“Destiny Fairbanks.”
The name hung there.
“Axel’s dead. But power doesn’t die with men like that. It transfers.”
“She’s consolidating what’s left.”
“And she’s doing it through leverage.”
A pause.
“Which brings me to Hope Fairbanks.”
The air changed.
Not louder.
Not quieter.
Sharper.
“Seventeen when I last had confirmation. She'd be 19 or 20 by now..”
“She isn’t being raised to lead anything.”
“She’s being positioned.”
Clyde muttered, “That’s a bargaining chip.”
Aurora didn’t correct him.
That was answer enough.
“Hope isn’t power,” I read on.
“She’s pressure.”
“The only part of Destiny’s structure that can’t be replaced without breaking everything around it.”
A pause.
Then the final weight:
“If you ever need The Family to move…”
“You don’t touch the system.”
“You touch what makes the system move.”
I lowered the paper slightly.
The clubhouse behind us was still laughing.
Still drinking.
Still alive.
And for the first time, it felt like they were doing it in a different world.
Not because anything had changed.
Because now we knew what was underneath it.
- Writer
