Page 17 of Ghost’s Awakening

My head finished the sentence without my permission. Because I couldn't stop staring at the most skilled fighter I had ever seen in my life.

"Caleb." His name got out before I'd cleared it for takeoff. "Have you guys seen a new guy around? Tanned, dark hair, bit taller than me, banged up, Kai would've patched him, kind of…" My mouth kept going somewhere my brain hadn't signed off on. "Pretty muscul… I mean, strong. Strong-looking. Built. Like a fighter."

Blade looked at me for two full seconds without blinking.

"Medical bay." He reached for his coffee without lifting his eyes. "Probably still asleep. Which is not where your head should be, because you're briefing Church in"—he checked his watch—"fourteen minutes."

"Oh, crap." The clock over the kitchen door said 7:46. "Right. Yeah. I should probably⁠—"

"Keep it short?" Trenza leaned back and folded her arms. "Without walking everybody through every square foot of the building? It's a report, Ghost. You're not writing a novel."

I shut up and ate. The omelette was good. Nolan's timing on the eggs was dead-on, and Declan's tomatoes came the same thickness in every bite.

My head went to work on the briefing. What happened. What order. What mattered.

And Caleb. Who didn't feel like something I could trim out.

He felt like the point.

Somewhere off to my left I heard Mateo, faint, like he was talking from another room instead of eight inches away.

"And he's gone. Nothing out of him now till Church."

I got to the Church room five minutes early.

It was what it always was. The long hardwood table that took four men to move the one time we tried. Chairs worn into whatever shape the man who sat in them had pressed into the leather over the years. The patch framed on the back wall, the steel phoenix coming up out of the flames, the club's name under it.

Hawk was already at the head, seated, hands folded, still. Gray strands in his hair and in his stubble, and eyes that tracked me the whole way to my chair.

Reaper sat at his right with his boots up on the table, one ankle crossed over the other, cut hanging open over a dark shirt. Kai had the chair beside him, turned toward the window, morning light picking the violet out of his hair. Reaper's hand rested on Kai's thigh, easy, automatic, so worn-in it had stopped being a gesture at all.

"Morning." I dropped into my seat.

Hawk nodded. Reaper lifted two fingers.

Kai turned from the window and got up, crossing to me with that quick, purposeful walk of his, and put a hand on my shoulder.

"Hey. You slept all right?" His dark eyes went over my face. "I heard it was an intense night. Stuff like that sits in your head whether you invite it or not."

"Slept fine. Always do. My brain works so hard all day it just cuts out the second I'm horizontal."

Kai's mouth pulled sideways. "That's an actual superpower. Some nights I'd trade my nursing license for it."

"You'd trade it and then we'd all bleed out."

"Fair." He squeezed my shoulder once and sat on the chair next to me.

I liked Kai. More than liked. I was grateful for him in a way I'd never worked out how to say without it coming out too big for whatever room I was standing in. He'd stitched me back together more times than either of us bothered counting. He sat with me through the worst nights of that recovery, changing the packing on a hole that wouldn't close while I stared at the ceiling and worked on not screaming, and he talked the entire time. Never once about the wound. Food, music, the time he set his apartment on fire trying to make ramen. He kept talking until I stopped shaking.

He wasn't much older than me. He just had his life together in ways I was still running after.

Boots echoed in the corridor, several sets, and the room started filling.

Tank came through first and the doorframe took notice, his shoulders turning to fit the way they always did. Tyler followed, lean next to all that bulk, easy in his stride, a tablet under one arm. The size difference never stopped being funny, but you could read the rest of it in how they moved, close, in step, Tyler's hand brushing Tank's arm as they split toward their chairs.

Irish came in grinning with Nolan half a step back still going on about pepper cooking times. Irish caught my eye and winked. I grinned back. Declan came behind them, one hand on Nolan's neck, the other loose at his side, wearing that flat quiet that might have been peace and might have been him counting exits. With Declan you never got to know. Both, probably.

Blade slid in and took his seat without a sound. The sheath at his belt was a different shade of leather than the one he'd carried before. Logan's work, hand-tooled, hours of somebody's evenings stitched into every seam. Logan was up in Montana, the last days of his two weeks there, and he'd have been up for hours by now, out with the horses before the sun cleared anything. Two weeks here, two weeks there, and it worked for them in a way that shouldn't have worked at all.