Claimed By My Biker Stalker

Chapter 7 — Ghost Work

Nixx

Reno thought he was smart. That was the first problem. The second problem was that smart men usually got cocky, and cocky men got predictable eventually.

I sat inside a rusted-out plumbing van three blocks from the Hell’s Fire warehouse district with a pair of binoculars resting against my knee and an untouched gas station coffee going cold beside me. Midnight had already crawled past, dragging North Town into that strange dead stretch where the bars started emptying and the real criminals came out to work.

Most people thought tracking meant chasing footprints through the woods. Movies loved that s**t. Real tracking was patience. Recognizing patterns. Tiny repetitions people didn’t realize they were making.

Reno had been skimming product from the Daggers for almost four months before disappearing. Not enough to trigger alarms immediately. Just enough to slowly bleed profit until Jarek noticed numbers that didn’t add up.

Then Reno vanished.

No calls had hit his known numbers in almost forty-eight hours, none of his accounts had shown any recent activity, and there hadn’t been a single traffic camera or state checkpoint ping placing him outside New Mexico.

A ghost.

Except nobody became a ghost completely. Not unless they were dead. And Reno definitely wasn’t dead.

Not yet.

I watched two Hell’s Fire prospects unload crates from the back of a box truck while making notes in a small weatherproof notebook balanced against my thigh.

Delivery times.

Vehicle descriptions.

Faces.

Patches.

Who carried weight and who followed orders.

Hell’s Fire moved sloppy compared to the Daggers. Too much ego. Too much drinking. Their people relied on intimidation instead of discipline, which meant eventually somebody always screwed up.

My knee ached faintly from sitting too long, the old injury throbbing deep beneath the scar tissue in that familiar way that always dragged me backward for a few seconds whether I wanted it to or not.

Kandahar.

One buried IED.

Seventeen seconds of smoke, fire, and screaming metal.

That was all it had taken to permanently reroute my entire life. The military doctors called me lucky afterward. I told one of them to go f**k himself.

Lucky would’ve been walking away untouched instead of getting shipped home with metal in my leg and paperwork explaining why I was suddenly too damaged to keep doing the only thing I’d ever actually been good at.

The Daggers didn’t care about medical discharge papers though. Jarek cared whether you were useful.

I was useful. Very useful.

I glanced toward the warehouse again just as one of the prospects lit a cigarette near the loading dock. Moron. Gas fumes thick enough to taste and this dumb bastard wanted nicotine.

My phone buzzed once against the dashboard.

Jarek:

Anything?

I typed back immediately.

Movement tonight. Smaller shipment than usual. Probably testing new route.

Three dots appeared.

Jarek:

Keep eyes on warehouse. Marcus thinks Reno’s using Hell’s Fire territory as temporary cover.

Possible.

I slid the phone aside and leaned back against the seat. Normally this part of the job calmed me down.

There was something almost meditative about surveillance work once you settled into the rhythm of it. Observation. Stillness. Letting the silence stretch long enough for patterns to emerge on their own. Most nights I could sit for hours without my attention drifting anywhere unnecessary.

Tonight, though, my concentration kept splitting itself in half. One second I was focused on the warehouse across the street. The next, my brain was replaying fluorescent tattoo lights, pale blue eyes, and the sound of JJ laughing under her breath at one of my dumbass comments.

The memory of her laugh kept replaying in my head like something deliberately trying to irritate me. Which was ridiculous. I barely knew her.

Twenty minutes in a folding chair at a bike festival shouldn’t’ve lodged somebody under my skin this badly.

And yet.

I looked toward the clock glowing faintly on the dashboard.

11:43 PM.

The tattoo shop would be closing soon, the neon sign dark while JJ finally escaped the fluorescent lights and the constant noise for a few hours.

She would go home. Probably asleep. Or maybe not.

Maybe Havoc would come home drunk smelling like whiskey and cigarettes. Maybe he would pick fights over imagined disrespect because insecure men always needed somebody smaller to bleed on after a bad night.

Maybe he would put his hands on her. f*****g Donald.

Something dark shifted low in my chest at the thought, cold enough that I had to consciously unclench my jaw before my teeth cracked together. I hated how quickly my brain went there now.

A movement near the warehouse snapped my focus back instantly.

Black SUV pulling into the alley. Tinted windows. Out-of-state plates.

Interesting.

I raised the binoculars slowly, adjusting the focus until the grainy shapes near the loading dock sharpened into something usable.

The driver stayed inside the SUV while one of the Hell’s Fire prospects approached the passenger window carrying a clipboard tucked beneath his arm. They spoke briefly before cash exchanged hands through the open window in a movement so practiced it barely looked suspicious anymore.

Not Reno.

But connected somehow.

Nobody moved product through Hell’s Fire territory without permission, and nobody handed over envelopes that thick for fun. I memorized the plate automatically while the prospect stepped back from the vehicle, stuffing the cash into the pocket of his kutte before waving the SUV through the gate.

Two minutes later, the vehicle rolled back onto the street and headed east toward the interstate while the prospects finished unloading crates from the warehouse.

My knee popped painfully when I finally climbed out of the van.

The ache settled deep into the joint immediately, familiar and unwelcome. Desert heat usually kept it manageable, but sitting too long always pissed it off eventually. The military doctors had called it “residual instability.” I called it a permanent souvenir from the IED that nearly tore my leg off six years ago.

The desert wind rolled down the street in slow hot waves carrying dust, oil, and the baked smell of asphalt that never fully cooled after sunset. North Town always smelled vaguely burned to me. Burned engines. Burned pavement. Burned lives.

Honestly, I liked it here.

Most people thought that was insane. They looked at southern New Mexico and saw a sun-blasted wasteland full of biker gangs, meth addicts, and people one bad month away from losing everything they owned.

They weren’t entirely wrong. Still felt more honest than most places I’d lived.

I crossed the street casually, staying close to the shadows near the warehouse fence while I studied the building. Cheap security cameras hung above the loading dock with exposed wiring running along the wall. Hell’s Fire cut corners constantly. Half their operations survived purely because local cops were either scared of them or getting paid by them.

One of the prospects barked out a loud drunken laugh somewhere behind the building. Another answered immediately. Already drunk and the shipment wasn’t even fully unloaded yet.

Fucking embarrassing.

I crouched near the fence line and studied the tire tracks cutting through the dirt beside the dock. Heavy repeated traffic. Fresh grooves angled farther north than the older routes we’d been tracking.

New distribution line maybe. Useful information if it held.

This part of the work had always come naturally to me. Observation layered over instinct until the whole world became patterns and probabilities instead of people. Most men looked at a warehouse and saw a warehouse. I looked at it and saw habits. Weaknesses. Blind spots. Exit routes. Men who got lazy in predictable ways.

Which was probably why it irritated the hell out of me when my brain suddenly wandered somewhere else entirely.