Page 10 of Ghost’s Awakening

I looked at him. His face was bloody and swelling and set with a fury so controlled it read as almost calm.

"I figured." Quieter than I meant. I didn't have the details. But I'd heard the threat and seen his face, and the rest made sense. The south corridor was ahead and the sounds behind us were closing.

The door was where he said. Metal, industrial, a horizontal bar.

I hit it with both hands. Nothing.

"Stuck." I hit it again, shoulder into the steel, the sound ringing down the hall. "Or blocked."

"Together." He set his hands on the bar beside mine, raw tape around his knuckles. His body was close enough that his heat pressed along my arm.

"One, two⁠—"

We shoved on two, both of us, like the count was a courtesy. The bar gave. The door swung out and the night poured in and hit me like cold water. Clean, dry asphalt and the whole missing weight of blood and smoke and two hundred screaming people.

I pulled in a breath so deep it ached.

Loading dock. South side. Dark save for a flood lamp over the emergency door, a yellow cone across empty concrete. A dumpster, an empty delivery truck, nothing but a black desert alley. The perfect pre-planned exit.

And cutting through the darkness, the sound I'd been waiting on. Two Harleys, low and rolling, headlights swinging around the corner of the building.

Blade on point. Irish followed closely.

My knees nearly went. The tension that had held my spine rigid since the lockdown fell all at once and left my hands shaking. They'd have seen the front seal with me still inside, and gone to the fallback we'd set. South loading dock.

Blade cut his engine. His eyes went from me to Monk, the blood, the bruises on his bare torso, and back to me.

"Gravedigger?"

"Confirmed. Inside. But he saw me."

"You hurt?"

"No."

"Him?"

"He needs medical attention. And he comes with us." It was out before I'd decided it. Except the deciding had happened somewhere between the ring and the corridor and the two men on the floor and the way this stranger had looked at me like I was real.

Blade held my eyes a beat. Then looked at Irish. "Mount up. We're gone."

I turned to Monk. "Follow me."

I jogged around the corner toward the tire shop where my bike was still staged. Monk followed. I swung on and kicked it over and the engine caught and settled, the idle vibration running up into my hands.

"Get on." My voice came out softer than I expected, and I couldn't have told you where it came from.

He stood beside the bike. Blood on his face, raw taped knuckles, bruises spreading across his torso in the floodlight. He looked at the Harley, then at me.

"You're asking me to get on a motorcycle with a stranger named Ghost who just showed up out of nowhere, put a guy on the floor, and has two more bikers waiting on him?"

"Yeah." I couldn't help it. The corner of my mouth pulled up. "That's what I'm asking."

He looked back at the warehouse. Shouting still leaked through the walls. The enforcers would eventually come out of the east door. Then he looked back at me.

He got on.

His arms came around my waist. His chest against my back, bare skin and sweat and the heat of another body pressed to mine, and I felt the contact everywhere at once. My spine. My shoulder blades. The backs of my arms. His breath at the side of my neck.