Eleven
Now
“Do we still have his credit card on file?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Holly said from the doorway, bright autumn sun highlighting her hourglass shape.
Maggie nodded. At the moment, nausea wasn’t crippling her and she was cramming in as much office time as she could muster. “Go ahead and charge him, then, and we’ll–”
A hand landed on Holly’s waist, just as a shadow blotted out the sun. And judging by the terror that overwhelmed Holly’s expression, it wasn’t Michael.
“Hey there, darlin’,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Mind if I slip through?” The shadow shifted, crowded a petrified Holly against the jamb, and stepped into the office. That was when Maggie realized the voice wasn’t so unfamiliar after all.
Roman was older – they all were – but his hair was still that shaggy, sandy lion’s mane, and he still had those sharp, coin-worthy features. Where Ghost had been dark and dangerous, Roman had always been charming; he could smile the panties off a girl in five minutes flat.
Not that it had ever worked on Maggie, though.
Her stomach tightened, and she wondered if it was her morning sickness rallying, or just nerves. Guess she’d find out if she had to heave over the wastebasket.
“Roman,” she said, coolly, giving him the look that sent prospects scrambling to open doors and carry groceries for her.
Roman propped a shoulder against a filing cabinet, folded his arms, and got comfy. His grin was still lazy and cutely crooked. “Well, Miss Maggie. Look at you. All grown up finally.”
In the doorway, Holly lingered, a white-knuckled hand gripping the doorframe, eyes darting between the two of them. She made no move to leave, though, concerned about this stranger’s intentions. Maggie almost told her to go – almost. And decided at the last second that a witness wouldn’t be a bad idea.
She sent him a tight, unfriendly smile. “I’ve always been grown up, Roman. I’ve just got a few more crow’s feet now.”
Roman snorted. “Just the same, huh?” He cast a glance around the office. “’Cept your man’s built you quite the little empire here, hasn’t he?”
The back of her neck prickled. Roman had always been able to get Ghost’s hackles up, but she’d always managed to keep cool and aloof. Outwardly. “He built it for the club,” she corrected. “For his brothers. Their future.”
“Right, right. The future.” He scuffed the toe of his boot across the tile. “It never turns out like you think it will, does it?” He flipped her a hooded look, his eyes bright in the fall of afternoon sunlight.
She suppressed a shudder.
Roman turned, then, and glanced over his shoulder at Holly, lazy, predatory smile spreading across his face. “Nice to see some things never change. You still got all the prettiest groupies around here.”
Holly’s eyes flipped wide.
“She’s an old lady,” Maggie snapped. “Show some damn respect.”
“Ooh-hoo, my mistake,” he chuckled. He held up both hands, palms toward Holly. “Apologies, ma’am. Mrs. Old Lady.”
“What do you want, Roman?” Maggie asked.
“I wanna talk to your man.” He turned back to face her. “I come bearing gifts.”
~*~
How many times, Ghost wondered, was some idiot with a death wish going to go bother his old lady at the office? “For the sake of your pretty little nose,” he told Roman, sneering, “you’re damn lucky I got to you before Michael did.”
Roman, looking pleased and amused, slumped down with his elbows on the bar and lifted his brows in question. “Michael?”
“Married to the old lady you were hitting on.”
“Ah.”
“He doesn’t have my way with words.”
“Noted.”
Ghost, standing behind the bar, added a splash of whiskey to his coffee and didn’t offer any to Roman. He thought it fitting symbolism: the bar – the club – between them. Both on either side of something they’d both once had, now opposed.
“What gifts?” Ghost ask, impatient.
“Hmm?” Roman trailed his fingertips down the polished wood of the bar top, not making eye contact.
“You told Mags you came ‘bearing gifts.’ Hand ‘em over already and get your ass outta here.”
He grinned. “Charming as ever.”
“Five seconds, Roman.”
The man heaved a dramatic sigh. It was a shame he was straight, Ghost thought, because he would have been a perfect match for Ian.
“Fine,” he said, head lifting. “I got you a parlay with the prez of the Saints.”
Ghost blinked. “A parlay?”
“You know, like–”
“I know what it means. What I don’t get is why you think I’ll believe you.”
For the first time this afternoon, Roman grew serious. His voice lowered; he leaned forward on his stool. “Look. Kenny. I know there’s bad blood. A lot of it. I’m not an idiot.”
Ghost lifted an eyebrow.
“I’m not. I know, alright. I know you got no reason to trust me, or listen to me, or anything. We’ve got a shit past, you and me. But it’s just that – the past. I want to be a Lean Dog again. And I’m trying to show you that I’m looking out for the club. So I got the Saints president to agree to a meeting.”
Ghost took a long swallow of his coffee. And another. Added more whiskey. “You understand there’s no precedent for that. Taking back an excommunicated member.”
Roman shrugged. “The Lean Dogs are the most powerful outlaw MC in the world. And this is the mother chapter in the U.S. You don’t need precedent. You can do whatever you want.”
“Why would I want to bring you back into the fold?”
Roman leaned in even closer. “You’re not your uncle. You care about your brothers.”
“You’re not my brother.”
Roman’s grin tugged to the side, wry and unhappy. “Do you know how hard it was back then? To be the best, the fastest, the strongest, and know that none of it mattered because I wasn’t blood?”
“So hard you betrayed your own club, apparently.” Ghost felt a stirring of long-buried rage in his gut, the rusty, poisonous anger he’d never been able to purge. His current club brothers knew that Duane had been his uncle and president – but they didn’t know how much he’d hated the man. How much he still did.
“I made a mistake,” Roman said. “And I’m trying to make amends.”
Slanted amber sunlight fell in through the gaps in the blinds, and it lit up Roman’s eyes like jewels. His eyes had always been his tell; it was why he liked to avoid gazes and smirk down at the floorboards. Whatever he was thinking, whatever he was trying to hide, a little sunlight in his eyes and you could see straight through him, into the dark, twisted inner coils of his mind.
Ghost looked at him now, the blue and green and hazel striations of his irises, and though he didn’t know what Roman was being honest about, he could see an honesty there. This whole scenario might be an elaborate trap, but he wanted something. Badly. He wanted the club back.
And Ghost, damn him, had always had a soft spot for someone caught up in the wicked gears of his uncle’s outlaw machine. Roman was an asshole and a traitor, but who was to say Duane hadn’t made him that way?
Shit.
He said, “Remember that night you got shot?”
Roman nodded. “The drug drop out in the sticks.” He had the good grace to look sheepish. “Um…”
“Call your contact. I’ll take that parlay, but we do it today, and we do it on my turf.” Ghost felt a smile threaten. “And I’m bringing my boys.”
~*~
Michael piloted the boat with an expert hand. It was a recent acquisition: a MasterCraft with an inboard motor and a diving platform off the back. It cut through the dark river water like a blade, its wake a tumble of froth. Late afternoon sun glinted off the water, unbearable without sunglasses. The dock that was their destination lay just ahead, the pontoon boat tied up at the end already populated with bodies.
Ghost smiled to himself as he faced into the wind.
So far, taking Roman’s hair-brained plan by the horns and redirecting it was the second most satisfying moment of his day, the first being witnessing Roman meet Mercy for the first time.
Back at the clubhouse, Ghost had fired off a group text to Mercy, Walsh, and Michael, telling them to finish up for the day and come over ready to ride. Roman had looked at Walsh with dismissal, and then a grudging respect when scrutiny proved he wasn’t to be mocked. Michael had earned yet more reluctant respect – and then…Mercy.
“Jesus. Supersize Geronimo,” Roman had said, and then looked like he wanted to take the words back.
“Meet my son-in-law,” Ghost had said, smug. “Mercy.”
Mercy had extended one of his giant, bear-paw hands for a shake, smiling in that way that made neighborhood kids scared to trick-or-treat at his house. “Geronimo. I like that.”
Roman hadn’t accepted the shake. Smart man.
Michael slowed the boat when they neared the dock, sending it into a slow turn that brought them up to the edge. Water slopped and the motor growled low and deep.
Rob Goodwin of Goodwin’s Boat Rentals, and the owner of this particular dock, stood waiting for them, and tossed a length of rope that Ghost caught and used to tie up the MasterCraft.
“Ghost!” Rob greeted the second the motor cut out, in his jovial, booming voice. He had a twist of tobacco in his lower lip and his forehead was red and leathery from a lifetime on the water. “What’re you boys up to this evening?”
“Oh, you know.” Ghost stepped out of the boat and onto the dock, clapping the old man on the shoulder. “Just boring old club business.”
Rob laughed. “Yeah, yeah. It’s always boring with you.”
The others climbed out of the boat, crowding together on the end of the dock, Mercy’s shadow swallowing all of them. Ghost thought Roman looked edgy, though he hid it well. Good, he thought, with some satisfaction.
Rob tossed a look toward the pontoon boat and lowered his voice. “I don’t know what you want with that lot, but I’ve explained everything to them. Y’all are just gonna have a nice little chat, and then all go on your way. They know the boys in blue will be all over ‘em if they so much as blink funny.”
Ghost squeezed his shoulder before he let him go. “I appreciate it.”
Rob nodded. “I’m just gonna go on down here a ways and inspect my other boats.” Which meant he’d be out of whisper range, but close enough to hear and see anything untoward, and he’d be watching them like a hawk.
Ghost turned to Roman. “That them?”
Roman shaded his eyes with his hand and squinted toward the boat and the three men waiting for them on it. His throat jumped as he swallowed. “Yeah.”
Mercy shoved him between the shoulder blades and he stumbled forward a step. “Thanks for volunteering.”
“I can’t believe you let your kid marry this nightmare,” Roman whispered as he passed Ghost and led the way up the dock to the pontoon boat.
From behind, Ghost watched Roman lifted his shoulders, align his spine, and then skew the whole picture with a practiced slump. Pretend-casualness. The transformation occurred between one heartbeat and the next, from nervous captive to swaggering leader. That was the problem with him, the thing he’d never understood about himself. He could pretend to be anyone or anything he needed to be, depending on the situation, but that wasn’t how leadership worked.
“Roman? What the hell is this?” A wiry young guy in a denim cut stepped up to the edge of the boat, squinting at their group with his lips pulled back off his teeth. It was too cold out on the water for his tattered shirt with the sleeves cut out, and all the fine blonde hairs on his arms stood on end, his skin pebbled with goosebumps.
“Come on, Deacon, you know the Lean Dogs weren’t gonna come to you.”
The kid snorted, gaze tracking across all of them. Half-spooked, half-pissed. Ghost was surprised to find a vice president patch stitched above his breast pocket.
“This ain’t exactly neutral territory.”
“No such thing,” Ghost assured him as he stepped up onto the boat’s deck. It was a party barge, and stayed stable beneath his boots. No doubt Rob had picked it for its roominess, and its visibility – there was nowhere to hide on this thing.
The kid – Deacon – was Aidan’s age, maybe a little younger. He worried his lower lip between his teeth as the Dogs crowded the deck in front of him.
“Ghost,” Roman said, fully-in character now, at ease, good-natured. “Meet Deacon. VP of the Dark Saints. Deacon, this is Ghost Teague.”
Deacon nodded; a muscle jumped in his throat as he swallowed. “Figured.”
“Where’s Boomer? There he is.” Roman walked toward the huddle of three men waiting under the party deck, hands in their pockets, heads on the swivel.
They were young too, Ghost noted with a start. Even the man Roman approached and shook hands with. Thick and wide-shouldered, he lacked Mercy’s height, but was the solid, muscular sort of man you wouldn’t want to start a fight with. He wore his dark hair buzzed close on all sides, long and bristly on top. His jaw was square and firm, nose sporting a bump from a badly-healed break. But his eyes were young, and blue, and vulnerable. He was scared – scared shitless. Hiding it well, but still. His bare, beefy arms clenched and relaxed, clenched and relaxed. His president patch was new, black with clean white stitching, its edges sharp.
One of the brothers flanking him was the sergeant at arms. The other averted his gaze, glancing out across the shimmering, flickering water.
“Boomer, good to see you, man.” Roman clapped palms with the president and leaned in close for a brief hug, and a whispered exchange of words.
Ghost was dumbfounded. Where had these kids come from? Clubs were by nature eclectic; the younger generation was recruited as the older generation aged and grew arthritic, but both sides of the spectrum were well-represented.
This crew, though, at least the four present, looked like they’d all just come from the same frat house. He’d never seen anything like it.
Roman turned, a friendly arm slung across Boomer’s impressive shoulders. “This is Ghost. I’m assuming there’s no introduction necessary.”
Boomer stuck his hand out, gamely; Ghost could see a fine sheen of nervous sweat on the back of it. “It’s an honor, sir,” he said, and damn if that didn’t just take a wrecking ball to all of Ghost’s defenses.
Well, some of them. He hadn’t lived this long by being an idiot.
He shook the kid’s hand, a fast hard squeeze. As he turned loose, he said, “I’m not sure why we’re here, Boomer,” just to be an asshole.
Boomer blew out a breath and sent a quick, questioning look toward Roman before he shrugged off the guy’s arm and met Ghost’s gaze. “My club’s setting up shop in Spring City. Your crew is based in Knoxville, so I don’t see it being a problem. Sir.” He swallowed.
“Just to the south of us. And you didn’t see it as a problem?”
Ghost had no idea what his guys were doing behind him, but he figured they had their game faces on.
“Ah, don’t treat the boy like that,” Roman complained.
Ghost sent him a look.
Roman lifted both hands and stepped back, pacing toward the edge of the deck.
“Tell me about your club,” Ghost said, and folded his arms, relaxing his back and settling in.
Behind him, Mercy snorted, and Ghost bit back a smile.
“We’re small,” Boomer said, wetting his lips. “But growing.”
“You got your start in Denver?”
“Yeah. We’ve got chapters in Tulsa, Kansas City, and now here.”
“Why here?”
“The East coast is where the big money is. Here and out west. And the Dogs and the Knights are neck-deep in a turf war out there.” The kid’s voice wavered with nerves, but his gaze held steady, and he didn’t stumble over his story.
“You didn’t think setting up shop here might start a whole new turf war?” Ghost asked.
“No, sir. We don’t sell what you guys sell. The Dark Saints aren’t interested in fighting with you. The way I figure it, we can both make use of the territory. Fill in each other’s gaps, so to speak.”
“An alliance.”
“Yeah.”
Ghost looked over at Walsh. His VP gave a tiny shrug with one corner of his mouth. They needed to talk it out, but he wasn’t opposed to the idea.
This whole scenario was unfolding quicker and easier than expected. The fact niggled at the back of Ghost’s mind, a low headache he couldn’t dismiss as good luck.
“Well,” he said. “God knows I’m tired of crushing rivals.”
Boomer’s blue eyes widened a fraction.
“I’m a businessman. So long as my business isn’t getting screwed in the deal, I’m reasonable. I don’t see why we can’t work something out.”
Boomer exhaled, shoulders slumping. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, kid.”
Roman braced his hands back behind him on the boat’s rail, smiling, pleased with himself, as the setting sun turned his hair to bronze.
~*~
Maggie intended to clock out and head home all day. But afternoon turned to evening, and before she knew it, night had fallen beyond the office windows. The kind of thick, inky night of autumn and winter that hid dark secrets in the shadows. Her car looked an awful long way away where it glittered beneath the security light, and she had piles of paperwork to catch up on. So she switched the phone off and stayed, clicking away on her keyboard until she heard the drone of the new boat pulling up to the slip.
Something loosened inside her, a hard fist of tension she hadn’t known was sitting in her stomach.
It was another half hour before a shadow fell across the glass door – a familiar one; she’d know the set of those shoulders anywhere – and Ghost entered, accompanied by the jangling of the bells above. He looked tired; she knew the red Solo cup in his hand contained whiskey.
“Hi, baby.”
He grunted a hello, but came around the desk, leaned down and braced his free hand against her waist so he could kiss her. His lips tasted like Jack Daniel’s. He lingered a moment, longer than she expected, slow to pull back.
“Hi,” she repeated, softer this time, a little dizzy now.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he said with a sigh, and sat down on the edge of her desk.
“Celebratory drink? Or pissed-off drink?”
He made a considering face. “Thinking drink.”
“Ah.” She started the shut-down sequence on her computer and turned to him, elbow braced on the desk. She wasn’t going to ask outright – some traditions lingered in the MC culture, and one of them was that of keeping old ladies in the dark about club business. At least, that’s what happened on paper. In reality, Ghost told her almost everything. But that was the trick, she thought: he told her. She didn’t badger him. Their relationship had always been built on a foundation of disclosure. When it came to bouncing ideas off walls, Ghost trusted no one but her with the most tumultuous of his inner thoughts.
That’s the way it had always been.
“Roman’s up to something,” he finally said, swirling the contents of his cup and staring down into it. “I can feel it, I just can’t tell what it is yet.”
“When is Roman not up to something?”
“Fair point.”
“But why is he here now?” she asked, and Ghost nodded.
“If he’s gone all these years wanting back in the club – stewing on it – and he’s back asking in now? He’s got something planned. Something he thinks will work.”
“The club war.” She had to swallow the sudden lump of fear in her throat. She swore she could feel her baby doing frightened somersaults whenever she thought that hated word: war.
“I don’t think it’s gonna come to that,” Ghost said. “I met with the president and VP of the Dark Saints today. It was…” He made a face. “They’re kids. Younger than Aidan. And scared shitless.”
Maggie felt her brows go up in surprise. “Really?”
“Greenbroke and way out of their depth,” he said with a nod, and sipped his whiskey. “I don’t get it. Little clubs like this pop up all the time, but not right in our backyard. Knowingly.”
“Maybe they’re hoping for a friendship. They might like the idea of having the biggest club watching their backs.”
“Sure. But why does Roman have a stake in any of it?”
She spun her chair from side to side. “Do you think these kids killed the dog?”
“No,” he said, immediately. “They were spooked just talking to us.”
“Did Roman do it?” She didn’t like the man, but she hadn’t thought it his style: that kind of cruel, obvious statement.
“I think whoever’s got the Dark Saints scared did it. And that person may or may not be Roman.”