Page 14 of Ghost’s Awakening

A hand landed on my shoulder.

I flinched hard. The contact went through me, the same bright snap as the blanket but deeper, Ghost's palm flat on my bare skin, warmth spreading out from where it touched.

I turned. Ghost was beside the bed, his hand still on me, those ice-blue eyes so close to mine. There was no trace of pity in them. Something else. Something parked between worry and the need to fix what was in front of him.

"Don't worry." Quieter now. The rapid-fire gone. Just his voice, and his hand, and those impossible eyes. "You're safe here."

I held his eyes a beat longer than I had any business holding them. Then I looked down at Kai's hands, already working the first cut, and let the sting of the antiseptic give me something to lock onto that wasn't the warmth still sitting where he'd touched me.

Safe. Ghost said it like it was true. And maybe for him, inside these walls, behind cameras and gates and brothers who'd ride through the dark for each other, the word really did carry that meaning.

But my brother was in a hospital bed thirteen miles from here. And the man on the mezzanine, the one they called Gravedigger, big enough to block a doorway and patient enough to stand there and watch me bleed for his money, had said my brother's name out loud. He'd said the name of the hospital. He knew exactly where my brother was and exactly how to reach him, and right now, this second, not one person stood between that man and Liam's room.

The antiseptic burned. Kai worked. Ghost's hand stayed warm on my shoulder.

And out there somewhere in the dark, a man who'd named himself after a grave knew where my brother slept.

4

GONE

GHOST

The alarm went off and I killed it before the second beep, and the first thing in my head wasn't Church, or Gravedigger, or the fact that I'd burned my own cover less than ten hours ago.

It was him.

I lay there in the dark with my arm still stretched toward the nightstand. The window over my bed had gone the flat gray that comes before the sun clears the ridgeline, the glass cold enough to feel from three feet off. Seven. Church at eight. Hawk didn't do late and he didn't do excuses, and I'd never once tested whether he'd make an exception.

My body wanted another two hours. My body always wanted another two hours. Twenty-six years old and no amount of muscle or mileage had fixed that. Tank found me asleep on the garage floor once with my cheek flat on a wrench, and he'd been dining out on it for six months.

I dragged myself up and into the bathroom.

The faucet squeaked. I threw cold water at my face with both hands and it cracked the fog straight out of me, skin drawing tight, breath snagging in my throat. I gripped the edge of the sink and let the water run off my chin onto the counter.

Then I looked up.

The mirror handed back what it always did. Ice-blue eyes that made people remember my face even when they couldn't come up with my name. A jaw that still couldn't hold stubble for more than a day. The face my brothers looked at and saw the prospect who caught a bullet on the common room floor and had to be carried to the med bay in Tank's arms like something that weighed nothing.

The body under the face was different.

I'd come to the Steel Phoenixes wiry. Fast, but thin enough that a hard wind could've rearranged me. The muscle sat on my frame now in a way that made the rest of me look older than my face was willing to. Wider through the shoulders. Thicker in the arms. Bigger chest. Three years of the compound gym, of Blade's hand-to-hand sessions, of Tank's strength circuits that made me want to die and then made me feel like I could walk through a wall.

I was proud of it. It took me three years to build.

My eyes fixed themselves on the scar that sat high on the left side of my pectoral, a puckered knot of pale tissue about the width of a dime, ridged at the edges where Rosa's sutures had drawn it shut. My fingers found it before I decided to touch it. Slick in the middle, raised around the rim. It still pulled tight when the weather turned.

Devil's Dust got to me twice.

The first time they took me off a supply run and tied me to a chair in a warehouse and worked on the parts that don't show. Twisted my arm until the shoulder came out of the socket. Split my lip open. Cracked something low in my side that ached for a month.

I didn't get myself out of that chair. Axel cut the ropes and Tank and Irish held me down while Kai put my shoulder back where it belonged, and the only part of that night anybody ever tells is Kai walking up on Slash, my kidnapper, with a pen and sending him home with a message for the president of Devil's Dust.

The second time they came through our own walls with rifles.

I don't remember the shot. That's the thing about it. What I remember is being flat on my back on the common room floor with Kai's whole weight bearing down on me, his shirt ripped off and balled up under his hands, and the wet heat spreading underneath it faster than he could press it back. I remember my fingers locked around his wrist. I remember what I said, out loud, in front of every brother still standing.

Don't let me die. I just found my family.