Page 19 of Ghost’s Awakening

5

THIRTEEN MILES

CALEB

Four hours earlier

The hospital room was wrong.

I knew it before I could name why. The overhead fluorescents buzzed louder than fluorescents should, the hum crawling into the walls and the floor until I felt it in my back teeth. The ventilator stood beside Liam's bed doing what it always did, hiss-click, hiss-click, except the rhythm had stretched, the gaps between breaths widening until each one felt like the last.

Liam lay flat on his back, eyes closed, tube in his throat, the monitors ticking green beside him. His face was thinner than the last time I'd stood here. Cheekbones sharper. Brown curls matted to the pillow. His hands rested at his sides on the white sheet, so still that my eyes kept dragging back to his chest to make sure it was rising.

I stood in the doorway. I could see the room and smell the antiseptic, the recycled air and the faint electrical heat the machines gave off. I could feel the cold tile under my bare feet. But I couldn't step through. My legs were locked in place. My body wouldn't cross the frame, like the doorway had closed around my hips and pinned me there, made to watch and never reach.

Something moved at the far side of the bed.

He was bigger than the room should have allowed. Standard hospital ceiling, and still he filled the space under it, shoulders so wide they blacked out the window behind him, his shadow climbing the wall. A heavy, weathered face, the jaw thick and set. His eyes sat small and dark and patient in all that bulk, and they were fixed on my brother.

Gravedigger raised one hand and laid it against Liam's face.

The first pass was gentle. The backs of his knuckles tracing the line of Liam's jaw, barely touching. The second followed the same path, slower, his fingers curling along the cheek. On the third he stopped with his palm flat against Liam's face, cradling it like something he hadn't yet decided whether to keep or crush, and turned his head toward me.

His eyes found mine across the room. The patience was the worst of it. No anger. No hurry. Just the calm, satisfied look of a man keeping a promise.

"I told you I'd come pay a visit."

His voice filled the room the way the hum did, shaking in the walls and the floor and the base of my skull. The ventilator hissed. The monitors ticked. His hand stayed on my brother's face.

Then Liam's eyes opened.

Wide. Snapped open to the whites, the pupils blown huge and black and locked on me with something that hit harder than anything the man's hands could do. Liam's body didn't move. Arms flat. Legs flat. The tube still down his throat, the machine still breathing for him. But his eyes were awake and screaming and fixed on mine, and his mouth worked around the plastic, and the sound that came out wasn't his voice. It was lower and louder and wrong, a whisper that bounced off every surface and landed on me like a fist.

"Help me!"

I sat up so fast the medical bay tilted.

Pain tore through me, every bruise lighting up at once, the muscles across my stomach cramped and the cuts across my torso pulled. The mattress shifted and the thin sheet sat under my legs and my hands were locked around the bed rails, knuckles white.

This was not the hospital. I was still in the bikers' makeshift infirmary. The Steel Phoenixes compound. The lights overhead were steady, no buzz. No ventilator. Nothing but my own breathing, tearing out of me in fast, shallow bursts that I couldn't slow down.

It was a dream. A fucking nightmare.

My pulse slammed in my wrists and the sides of my neck, everywhere at once. Sweat sheeted my face and chest. The gray blanket Ghost had given me was twisted around my legs.

I breathed. In through the nose. Hold. Out through the mouth. The same breathing drill I'd learned at fifteen, when competition nerves used to lock me up before a bout, the same one I'd run in a hospital parking lot trying to make the math work on a cook's paycheck. In. Hold. Out slowly. My hands loosened on the rails. My heartbeats came down.

The pain settled from a scream to an ache. My eye throbbed. The split in my lip stung. My stomach muscles burned when I shifted, the bruises complaining about the movement.

Those thugs had done a number on me in that corridor. Could have been worse. A lot worse, if not for the man with the ice-blue eyes who'd come out of nowhere and put one of them on the floor before I'd finished understanding what was happening.

Ghost. Even now, I could still feel the shape of his hand on my shoulder, hours later. The warmth of it. The way his voice had dropped low and steady while he looked at me like he was making a promise he meant to keep.

You're safe here.

I'd been close to believing it. Sitting on this bed, blanket around my shoulders, with the lean man named Kai working the cuts while the silver-eyed one watched from the wall. I'd been so close to believing it. The compound had cameras, gates, and armed men who somehow rode kinder than their road names.

But Liam didn't have gates or bikers for bodyguards. Liam had a tube in his throat and a machine breathing for him in a public hospital, and the man on the mezzanine had said his name out loud, the name of the hospital, and smiled while he did it.