Three Ruthless Bikers : One Temptation

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT — Ghost Feels It

LENA'S POV

The evening after the clinic appointment, the compound felt different.

Lighter somehow. The good news from the scan had spread through the inner circle quickly, and even though most of the club did not know the details, they seemed to absorb the lifted mood the way the compound always absorbed things. Someone put music on low in the common room. David made an actual joke at dinner that made Axel choke on his food laughing.

I sat with my plate mostly finished and watched all of it happen around me and felt something settle that had been unsettled for weeks.

After dinner, when most people had drifted off to their own corners of the compound, I found Ghost sitting alone on the back steps that led out to the small garden Anna would eventually claim as her own. He had a glass of something in his hand that he was not really drinking, just holding, looking out at the dark.

I sat down beside him without saying anything.

We stayed like that for a while.

"You did not come find me when we got back," I said eventually.

"I wanted to," he said. "I was reading the recusal updates from Helen. By the time I finished you were already at dinner."

"You could have come to dinner."

"I needed a minute first," he said.

I looked at him. "For what."

He was quiet for a long moment, turning the glass slowly in his hand. "I have spent most of my life keeping things at a distance," he said. "Distance was safety. If I did not let myself want something too much, losing it would not be able to destroy me the way losing my mother and my brother destroyed me." He set the glass down on the step beside him. "I have been doing that since I was nineteen years old. It is the only thing I know how to do well besides running this club."

"And now," I said.

He turned to look at me. "Now there are three heartbeats on a screen that are not biologically mine," he said, "and I have never wanted anything the way I want to be there for them. It terrifies me more than Edmund does."

I reached over and took his hand. "Why does it terrify you."

"Because wanting something this much means I have something to lose," he said. "I built an entire life specifically so I would never be in this position again."

"And now you are."

"And now I am," he agreed quietly.

I shifted closer to him on the step. "Ghost. Put your hand here."

He looked at me.

I took his hand and pressed it flat against my stomach the same way I had done with Axel and Rook earlier that week, except this time it was just the two of us in the dark with the compound quiet around us.

We waited.

It took a minute, but one of them moved, slow and deliberate, right under his palm.

Ghost went completely still.

I watched his face in the low light from the kitchen window behind us. Watched something break open in him that he had clearly been holding closed for a very long time. His jaw tightened. His eyes, when they finally moved from my stomach to my face, were wet in a way I had never seen from him before.

"Lena," he said, and his voice came out rough.

"I know," I said.

"I do not know how to do this," he said. "I do not know how to let myself want something this badly without being terrified every single day that it is going to be taken from me."

"You do not have to know how yet," I said. "You just have to keep showing up. That is what Axel and Rook are doing. That is what I am trying to do too. None of us know exactly how this works. We are figuring it out as we go."

He looked at me for a long moment, his hand still flat against my stomach, feeling each small movement as it came.

"Whatever they need," he said finally, repeating the words from earlier that week but slower now, more deliberate, like a vow rather than a reaction. "Whatever it takes. Biology does not matter to me. These are mine. I decided that the moment I found out and nothing that comes out of a DNA test changes it."

"I believe you," I said.

"I know you do," he said. "That is what terrifies me the most. That you believe me completely and I am still scared I am going to fail at this."

I shifted even closer and put my head against his shoulder. He went still for a second, then relaxed into it, his free arm coming around me carefully.

"You have not failed at anything since the night you let me through that gate," I said. "I do not see why this would be different."

He was quiet for a while. Then he said, "thank you," so softly I almost missed it.

We sat like that for a long time, his hand still resting against my stomach, the night settling fully around us, the compound quiet and warm behind its walls.

Rook found us there eventually, on his way back from a final check of the perimeter.

He stopped a few feet away when he saw us, the particular stillness of someone deciding whether to interrupt something.

"I can come back," he said.

"No," Ghost said. "Stay."

Rook came and sat on the step below us, close enough to be part of whatever this was but giving us the space we had clearly needed. He looked at Ghost's hand still resting against my stomach and something passed across his face, quiet and understanding.

"You felt it," Rook said. Not a question.

"Yes," Ghost said.

"Good," Rook said simply.

We sat together in the dark, the three of us, the compound breathing quietly around us, and nobody felt the need to say anything else for a long while.

Eventually Ghost spoke again, his voice steadier now than it had been earlier.

"Edmund is going to keep fighting this," he said. "The legal case, the witnesses, all of it. He is not going to stop just because the foundation of his world is cracking."

"I know," I said.

"Whatever he does next," Ghost said, "whatever he tries. I need you to know that none of it changes what I just told you. These children are mine. You are mine. Not because I own you the way he thought he owned you. Because I choose you. Every single day, for as long as you let me."

I looked up at him in the dark.

"I choose you too," I said. "All three of you."

Rook, from the step below, said quietly, "we know."

And for the first time since Edmund's bounty had doubled, since the breach at the east wall, since every threat and filing and headline, I felt something I had not let myself feel fully until that exact moment.

Safe.

Completely and entirely safe.