jake the panty ripper book 1 the phantoms mc series

"All I ever do is think of you" –Majid Jordan, All I Do

********************************

The rest of my week off flew by without any incident.

I didn't see Kira.

I didn't see Luke.

I didn't see Jake.

Before I knew it, I was back on day shift at the Haven.

"How was everybody's week off?" Sister Brady asked, like she did every Monday when we got back.

Everyone chattered excitedly, as if it wasn't six o'clock in the freaking morning and we weren't about to be faced with a bunch of adult diapers to change.

Me? I didn't have any exciting stories to tell about hooking up with a bartender who bore a strong resemblance to the late James Dean. And this story was told by Sister Brady, who was probably three decades older than me, give or take a few years. 

"You're looking good," remarked Moira, a pretty Nigerian nurse who worked in my ward. We'd gone to the same nursing school, had both done our practicals at the Haven. Now, she looked me over as we headed for the tea room, smiling appreciatively.

"Um, thanks?" I had bags under my eyes and a pimple on my chin that definitely indicated my impending period.

"Yup. You look like your boyfriend put it down on you last night. Way down, if you catch my drift."

I could feel my cheeks flame. "I spent the night at a girlfriend's place."

"Let me guess: The blonde?"

Sad that she knew my one and only close girlfriend outside work.

"Yes. Kira."

"So much for a wild night of hot sex, then."

I let out a groan of frustration as we entered the small, cozy tea room. Our colleagues were already inside, chatting animatedly over cups of coffee from the machine. Someone had picked up croissants – no doubt from The Coffee Maker, which opened at five-thirty – and the box sat on a table in one corner.

I grabbed one before they finished, then poured myself a cup of strong black coffee. My colleagues were animals.

"Ready for the week?" Iris, yet another former classmate of mine, asked me when I stood beside her by the coffee machine. She pushed her spectacles up the bridge of her nose, something she did frequently, alternating between that and tucking errant strands of curly brown hair behind her ears.

"I guess so. Hopefully it won't be as draining as the last week."

Burnout was almost always unavoidable in this line of work.

"I don't think Mrs. Harrison will make it through this week," Moira remarked, her voice quiet. "The Sister told me that she isn't eating much. The woman's over a hundred. She must be tired."

I bit into my croissant, stifling the moan that threatened to escape when I discovered that it was chocolate-filled. "I like Mrs. Harrison. Sometimes she thinks I'm her granddaughter," I said, which was pretty funny when you thought about it, because the woman was white as an A4 piece of paper.

"Better than her thinking you're her husband," Joel grumbled. He was a lanky, sandy-haired guy who worked in the men's ward and had a penchant for keeping M&Ms in the pockets of his scrub pants to distribute to patients. "The older women become, the hornier they get. Dr. Cartwright should do a study on that."

Dr. Cartwright was the managing director of the rest home. He certainly wouldn't have approved of a suggestion to deviate from his study of Alzheimer's to a study of libido in geriatrics.

"Are you trying to make me nauseous?" I muttered, throwing Joel a dirty look.

He gave me a mischievous grin. "Like how nauseous you were at The Wreck last week?"

Moira's wide-eyed stare met mine. "You were at The Wreck?"

"Oh, yes, she was. All over that deranged biker that got locked up a few years ago," Joel confirmed. "I forget his name."

"All over him?" I squeaked, racking my brain to decide if there was some truth to his words. The details of that night were foggy, save for the part where I ended up naked in front of Jake. That was clear as day to my mind's eye, as much as I tried to forget it.

"Did you and Seb break up?" Iris questioned, staring at me expectantly.

"No! We're still together, OK? Joel's exaggerating."

The gossipmonger arched a brow. "Whatever you say, Maya," he said, in a tone that said he didn't buy it. "If I were Seb, I wouldn't be okay with my girlfriend draped all over another man the way you were draped over that dude. No self-respecting guy would."

"Joel, shut up and get to your ward," Moira chided, and he held his hands up in surrender.

"Ease up on me. I'm just saying."

"Go," said Iris, and he shook his head, walking out with a few other nurses who were giving me curious glances that said Maya Fenton actually has a secret, naughty life, in which she's a cheating slut and biker groupie?

Ugh.

"So...you wanna tell us what that was about?"

"Doesn't anyone want to know what Joel was doing at that club?" I mumbled, finishing my croissant in two bites.

"I'm more interested in what you were doing there, actually," said Iris, nudging me conspiratorially.

"Making bad choices," I stated in a flat voice.

They both looked at me, wearing twin looks of confusion.

***

The sun was dipping low by the time my shift was over and I could get out of the building. I'd parked far from the entrance and now, with my feet hurting as I picked my way through the still-full parking lot, I mentally cursed my stupidity.

I paused when I saw that someone was leaning against Old Betsy.

Yeah, my day was not going to end well.

"Maya Fenton," greeted Ghost, arms folded across his broad, leather-covered chest. He pushed off my car, standing straight. "Been a while, huh?"

"What are you doing here?" Entertaining yet another of my dead cousin's biker ex-boyfriends wasn't my idea of a fun evening.

"Sayin' hello," he said, trying and failing to sound amiable.

Men like Ghost just didn't make niceties sound...nice. He was big and shaggy-haired, with a myriad of tattoos on every inch of visible skin. His eyes were a cold, hard grey set in a face lined with age and stress. An eyebrow piercing glinted in his right brow, and there was a stud in his chin. Those were new.

"OK. You've said hello. Now goodbye." I made a move for the driver's side. Ghost stepped in my way. I just...didn't need this.

"Maya, I wanted to see you, OK?" He scrubbed a big hand down his face. "Just to talk. See if you were doin' fine. Catch up."

I squinted at him. "Catch up?"

"Come over to the clubhouse tonight."

I backed away, already feeling goosebumps prickling my skin. Already, bad memories flooded my mind at the mention of The Phantoms' clubhouse. It was a large estate that had been passed from generation to generation of MC Presidents, and it housed rooms for the club's members. In reality, it was a location for orgies. Drugs were passed around like candy and booze flowed from the faucets.

And Ghost wanted me to voluntarily go there?

"No, thanks," I told him.

He rolled his eyes at me. "You're lookin' at me like I just suggested we get naked and fuck on my bike."

I made a strange choking sound in my throat, and before I could compose myself, my phone was ringing. I sent Ghost a glare, digging into my tote bag for my cell. Sebastian's name flashed across my screen and I answered, grateful for the disturbance.

"Hey, what's up?" I said breathlessly, expecting Ghost to shrug and go away. Instead, he stood rooted the spot, listening.

"Chinese or Indian?" Seb asked, wasting no time.

"Both."

He chuckled. "Knew you'd say that. I'll pick it up. ETA is 19:45."

"Great. Awesome."

"You sound a little off. Everything OK?"

I glanced at Ghost, who still had his arms across his chest. "Yeah. Just tired, you know?"

"You should expect a massage, then. See you later, M."

"Later."

He clicked off.

"The boyfriend?" Ghost wanted to know.

"Uh-huh. So I really need to get going."

He stepped out of my way. "We'll be talkin' soon, Maya."

"Did you just wake up and decide Hey, Maya and I have barely said three syllables to each other, but I really need to have a heart-to-heart with her today?" I snapped, losing my cool. This unwelcome, unprecedented visit was doing nothing for my already-frayed fuse.

One corner of his mouth lifted into a half-smile. "Nah. I woke up and decided that I been puttin' off talkin' to you for too fucķin' long about what went down the night Ella died."

*~*~*

Seb wasn't happy about being stood up but I had no choice. Ghost had dangled a very juicy carrot in front of me and I was powerless to resist it.

Once the gates of the clubhouse closed behind my car, my fate was sealed. I was going in. No take-backs.

I parked behind Ghost's bike and watched him gracefully descend it, a strong sense of déjà vu blanketing me. When Ella had wanted to spend more time here, she'd brought me along. She'd tried her best to completely shield me from the debauchery that went on within the house, but of course, that was impossible. I'd seen my first penis in this very house, after walking in on a Phantom using the toilet. My fifteen-year-old eyes had been scarred for life. Suffice it to say, I'd refrained from going anywhere near the ablutions in this house.

"You hungry?" Ghost asked me, pushing open the large front door. The sound of music and laughter immediately assailed us, seeming to originate from all corners of the house.

I thought of the Chinese and Indian that Seb had gone to pick up and my stomach groaned. Loudly.

Ghost let out a loud, raucous laugh. "I'll take that as a yes. Follow me."

I did as he asked, walking past a group of women clad in standard leather jackets and denim shorts or skirts. They eyed me, probably puzzled by my scrubs. I hadn't thought to change into street wear before I came here. Oh, well.

Ghost led me to the spacious kitchen, a room I remembered from years ago. I'd sat on a bar stool in front of the island to do my homework on many a night with my iPod in hand, while I tried to ignore the racket going on in the other rooms.

A guy I didn't recognize was grabbing a beer from the well-stocked refrigerator. He was tall and skinny, with a buzz cut and silver hoops in his ears. He gave me a mock-salute before greeting Ghost with a raspy, "Hello, Prez."

"Sticks," grunted Ghost.

"Excuse me?" My brow creased.

"My name," the other man clarified, grinning. When he smiled, he looked like a little boy.

"Oh. Hi...Sticks. I'm Maya."

"I know."

"Help yourself to anythin'," said Ghost, gesturing at the fridge. "I'll be in my office. You remember where that is, don't'cha?"

Unfortunately, I did, so I nodded.

"Good. Eat. Then come find me."

He disappeared, leaving me alone with Sticks, who drank his beer in silence as he watched me raid the fridge.

"You a nurse?" he asked after a while.

"Yeah. Um, how about you?" I found cold meat and cheese and decided to make myself a sandwich. Truthfully, it was all I could stomach right then. Being here made my stomach turn.

"I'm a Candidate."

"Candidate?"

"Yeah. You know, I'm gonna join this MC. Become a brother. But first I gotta be initiated. Have to get a majority vote from the other brothers when decision time comes."

"So...that's kind of like wanting to join a fraternity?"

Sticks' blue eyes narrowed at me. "Like in college? Hell, no. This kinda brotherhood is the real deal. Ride-or-die shįt." He paused to consider his beer bottle. "If I don't become a brother, I don't know what I'll do. Wearing The Phantoms' patch on my jacket – that's always been my dream."

I chewed on my lower lip to stop myself from asking what exactly he had to do to become a member – brother.

"You'll get in," I offered, finding a loaf of whole-wheat bread in the steel bread bin.

"If you're fucķin' Ghost, don't ask him to make sure I get in. I wanna do this myself."

I slammed the cover of the bin down and turned to face the idiotic youth. "I'm not sleeping with your President. Get that disgusting idea out of your head."

I wasn't so hungry suddenly. Leaving the ham and cheese on the counter, I stomped out the kitchen and went to find Ghost, ignoring Sticks' panicked apologies. The sooner I got out of here, the better. I was pissed off, I needed to shower and I needed to sleep.

Ghost's office was on the ground floor, the furthest door from the enormous living-room-slash-den. He actually had a plaque on the door that read 'OFFICE' in big, bold letters. I knocked once and waited to hear his voice telling me to come in.

I closed the door behind me, leaning against it. I had never been inside Ghost's office. It wasn't anything like I'd expected. It looked like an...office. Dark wooden furniture and staid, neutral colors made up the décor. White curtains covered a wide window behind the high-backed black leather chair Ghost sat on. An LCD computer sat on the desk before him. He stood, gesturing at the chair opposite his.

I shook my head. "I'm fine."

He sighed. "Maya. It's just a chair."

He was right. It was just a chair. I was being highly unreasonable, so I took the seat he offered and placed my bag on my lap. Ghost sat back down, observing me from across his desk. I felt uncomfortable under his silver stare.

"So you been good? You know I've always thought of you as a kid sister."

"Yes, Ghost. I've been good." I chose to ignore the last part. It was true that Ghost had – inevitably – been a part of my life when Ella was alive, but once she died, he'd faded into a memory. Kid sister, my foot.

He nodded thoughtfully. "Ripper's been saying –"

"You talk to Jake about me?"

Ghost gave me a small smile. "Among other things."

"But...he left The Phantoms."

"Doesn't mean we ain't brothers no more, now does it?"

"I guess not." I took a deep breath. "What did you want to talk about again?"

"We'll get to that. Last time I saw you, you were gettin' ready for prom, so forgive me for wantin' to catch up."

Prom night. My date had been one of Luke's close guy friends, a guy called Nick Johnson. He'd actually booked a motel room for the night and had ended up dumping me there after I'd refused to sleep with him. Suffice it to say, Luke was not happy and their friendship had ended with Nick receiving a broken nose and black eye.

"I loved your cousin," Ghost said suddenly, getting a faraway look in his eyes that told me he was remembering something about her. "Not afraid to admit it. Wish I'd been smart enough to admit it to her, but you know how stubborn a man can be."

I didn't know if Ella had loved Ghost, but I knew that she'd definitely been infatuated by him. She would've done anything he wanted; she had done anything he'd wanted.

"Where is this going?" I asked, my voice quiet.

"I just wanted to apologize, Maya. I never said how sorry I was at the funeral. Never said how I wished it was me in that casket, and not Ella." His face twisted into a grimace. "Ripper dated her first. She left him for me, and yet there were no hard feelings. He didn't love her. Not really. So the night she died, we'd had a fight. A really bad one..." His voice trailed off and he looked away.

"I never knew that part," I whispered, willing him to continue.

"No one but Ripper knows." He cleared his throat. "She went to him. Called me all kinds of names. She knew Ripper would listen. And he did."

My vision was suddenly blurry. "But then he got her killed."

"Is that what you think?"

I snorted. "I'm not an idiot," I informed him. "I know you guys were and are involved in illegal dealings. It's inevitable that you'd make enemies. So Ella was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because of Jake."

"Maya, she died because of me. Those men were after me, not her. And not Ripper," said Ghost, his voice soft. "I did some stupid shįt back in the day, rubbed another MC the wrong way. Their Prez was all about warnings, so they took something from me, something I cared about more than my own life. That something was Ella, and not a day goes by that I don't regret what happened."

I swallowed, fisting my hands into the denim fabric of my bag. "You didn't think to tell this to the police?"

Ghost's eyes hardened. "Cops? Half of those pigs can be bought off, and the other half are pussies in uniform," he said in a low voice. "No, Maya, real justice is found on the streets. That's why Ripper went to jail."

My mind whirred. "Those men he nearly killed..."

"I finished his job."

I could feel sweat prickling my brow. This man had just admitted to murder. He sat there in his chair, looking hardened and menacing, and I was supposed to... To what? Thank him for killing the men that had killed my cousin? Thank him for finally deigning to let me know the truth of her death? That he was responsible?

"I need to...go," I said on an exhale, standing abruptly.

"Maya –"

"No. Please. I need to process this. Just let me leave. Please."

"I can have someone drive you home. You don't look so –"

"I'll be fine," I snapped, already heading for the door.

I wrenched it open, heading down the hallway, eyes open but unseeing. I could hear loud voices in one room, a man's and a woman's. Someone else was laughing from somewhere in the house. I wished I could laugh like that, without a care in the world.

I walked past the living room, giving it a passing glance, and spotted Jake sitting on a couch with a woman on his lap. I caught the look of surprise in his eyes at seeing me there before I opened the front door and stepped out into the cool night.

How long have I been here? I wondered to myself, whipping my phone out and finding four missed calls from Seb and two from Kira. He'd probably called her, wondering where I was, since my vague "Something came up" probably hadn't been enough.

I switched my phone off and shoved it back into my bag, scanning the various trucks and bikes outside, looking for mine.

"Maya!" Jake called. Feet pounded on the gravel behind me but I headed for my car anyway, not looking forward to talking to him. "Hey, I'm talking to you."

"I know that, but I don't want to talk to you. Not right now." I slid into my car, slamming and locking it right after.

Jake tapped on my window after three minutes of listening to me trying to get Old Betsy to start. I wanted to scream at the unfairness of it all. She just had to stall at the moment I needed her to run smoothly, didn't she?

I reluctantly got out the car, banging the car door shut harder than was warranted.

"When're you gonna let me look at this pile of scrap?" asked Jake, his voice solemn.

I couldn't even defend Betsy. Instead, I laughed a high-pitched laugh that quickly became a sob. Ghost had loved Ella? Well, so had I. She had been the last of my family, the last of my blood. There's no greater pain on earth than realizing that you're completely alone. Billions of people on this planet – and you feel like you're stuck in an empty wasteland.

The tears were coming pretty fast, so fast that Jake's movements were a blur as he put his arms around me and hugged me to his hard body. My arms came around him of their own accord and I buried my nose into the crook of his neck. He smelled of leather and something spicy, and when he nuzzled his nose into my hair, I cried even harder.

"All I ever do is think of you" –Majid Jordan, All I Do

********************************

The rest of my week off flew by without any incident.

I didn't see Kira.

I didn't see Luke.

I didn't see Jake.

Before I knew it, I was back on day shift at the Haven.

"How was everybody's week off?" Sister Brady asked, like she did every Monday when we got back.

Everyone chattered excitedly, as if it wasn't six o'clock in the freaking morning and we weren't about to be faced with a bunch of adult diapers to change.

Me? I didn't have any exciting stories to tell about hooking up with a bartender who bore a strong resemblance to the late James Dean. And this story was told by Sister Brady, who was probably three decades older than me, give or take a few years. 

"You're looking good," remarked Moira, a pretty Nigerian nurse who worked in my ward. We'd gone to the same nursing school, had both done our practicals at the Haven. Now, she looked me over as we headed for the tea room, smiling appreciatively.

"Um, thanks?" I had bags under my eyes and a pimple on my chin that definitely indicated my impending period.

"Yup. You look like your boyfriend put it down on you last night. Way down, if you catch my drift."

I could feel my cheeks flame. "I spent the night at a girlfriend's place."

"Let me guess: The blonde?"

Sad that she knew my one and only close girlfriend outside work.

"Yes. Kira."

"So much for a wild night of hot sex, then."

I let out a groan of frustration as we entered the small, cozy tea room. Our colleagues were already inside, chatting animatedly over cups of coffee from the machine. Someone had picked up croissants – no doubt from The Coffee Maker, which opened at five-thirty – and the box sat on a table in one corner.

I grabbed one before they finished, then poured myself a cup of strong black coffee. My colleagues were animals.

"Ready for the week?" Iris, yet another former classmate of mine, asked me when I stood beside her by the coffee machine. She pushed her spectacles up the bridge of her nose, something she did frequently, alternating between that and tucking errant strands of curly brown hair behind her ears.

"I guess so. Hopefully it won't be as draining as the last week."

Burnout was almost always unavoidable in this line of work.

"I don't think Mrs. Harrison will make it through this week," Moira remarked, her voice quiet. "The Sister told me that she isn't eating much. The woman's over a hundred. She must be tired."

I bit into my croissant, stifling the moan that threatened to escape when I discovered that it was chocolate-filled. "I like Mrs. Harrison. Sometimes she thinks I'm her granddaughter," I said, which was pretty funny when you thought about it, because the woman was white as an A4 piece of paper.

"Better than her thinking you're her husband," Joel grumbled. He was a lanky, sandy-haired guy who worked in the men's ward and had a penchant for keeping M&Ms in the pockets of his scrub pants to distribute to patients. "The older women become, the hornier they get. Dr. Cartwright should do a study on that."

Dr. Cartwright was the managing director of the rest home. He certainly wouldn't have approved of a suggestion to deviate from his study of Alzheimer's to a study of libido in geriatrics.

"Are you trying to make me nauseous?" I muttered, throwing Joel a dirty look.

He gave me a mischievous grin. "Like how nauseous you were at The Wreck last week?"

Moira's wide-eyed stare met mine. "You were at The Wreck?"

"Oh, yes, she was. All over that deranged biker that got locked up a few years ago," Joel confirmed. "I forget his name."

"All over him?" I squeaked, racking my brain to decide if there was some truth to his words. The details of that night were foggy, save for the part where I ended up naked in front of Jake. That was clear as day to my mind's eye, as much as I tried to forget it.

"Did you and Seb break up?" Iris questioned, staring at me expectantly.

"No! We're still together, OK? Joel's exaggerating."

The gossipmonger arched a brow. "Whatever you say, Maya," he said, in a tone that said he didn't buy it. "If I were Seb, I wouldn't be okay with my girlfriend draped all over another man the way you were draped over that dude. No self-respecting guy would."

"Joel, shut up and get to your ward," Moira chided, and he held his hands up in surrender.

"Ease up on me. I'm just saying."

"Go," said Iris, and he shook his head, walking out with a few other nurses who were giving me curious glances that said Maya Fenton actually has a secret, naughty life, in which she's a cheating slut and biker groupie?

Ugh.

"So...you wanna tell us what that was about?"

"Doesn't anyone want to know what Joel was doing at that club?" I mumbled, finishing my croissant in two bites.

"I'm more interested in what you were doing there, actually," said Iris, nudging me conspiratorially.

"Making bad choices," I stated in a flat voice.

They both looked at me, wearing twin looks of confusion.

***

The sun was dipping low by the time my shift was over and I could get out of the building. I'd parked far from the entrance and now, with my feet hurting as I picked my way through the still-full parking lot, I mentally cursed my stupidity.

I paused when I saw that someone was leaning against Old Betsy.

Yeah, my day was not going to end well.

"Maya Fenton," greeted Ghost, arms folded across his broad, leather-covered chest. He pushed off my car, standing straight. "Been a while, huh?"

"What are you doing here?" Entertaining yet another of my dead cousin's biker ex-boyfriends wasn't my idea of a fun evening.

"Sayin' hello," he said, trying and failing to sound amiable.

Men like Ghost just didn't make niceties sound...nice. He was big and shaggy-haired, with a myriad of tattoos on every inch of visible skin. His eyes were a cold, hard grey set in a face lined with age and stress. An eyebrow piercing glinted in his right brow, and there was a stud in his chin. Those were new.

"OK. You've said hello. Now goodbye." I made a move for the driver's side. Ghost stepped in my way. I just...didn't need this.

"Maya, I wanted to see you, OK?" He scrubbed a big hand down his face. "Just to talk. See if you were doin' fine. Catch up."

I squinted at him. "Catch up?"

"Come over to the clubhouse tonight."

I backed away, already feeling goosebumps prickling my skin. Already, bad memories flooded my mind at the mention of The Phantoms' clubhouse. It was a large estate that had been passed from generation to generation of MC Presidents, and it housed rooms for the club's members. In reality, it was a location for orgies. Drugs were passed around like candy and booze flowed from the faucets.

And Ghost wanted me to voluntarily go there?

"No, thanks," I told him.

He rolled his eyes at me. "You're lookin' at me like I just suggested we get naked and fuck on my bike."

I made a strange choking sound in my throat, and before I could compose myself, my phone was ringing. I sent Ghost a glare, digging into my tote bag for my cell. Sebastian's name flashed across my screen and I answered, grateful for the disturbance.

"Hey, what's up?" I said breathlessly, expecting Ghost to shrug and go away. Instead, he stood rooted the spot, listening.

"Chinese or Indian?" Seb asked, wasting no time.

"Both."

He chuckled. "Knew you'd say that. I'll pick it up. ETA is 19:45."

"Great. Awesome."

"You sound a little off. Everything OK?"

I glanced at Ghost, who still had his arms across his chest. "Yeah. Just tired, you know?"

"You should expect a massage, then. See you later, M."

"Later."

He clicked off.

"The boyfriend?" Ghost wanted to know.

"Uh-huh. So I really need to get going."

He stepped out of my way. "We'll be talkin' soon, Maya."

"Did you just wake up and decide Hey, Maya and I have barely said three syllables to each other, but I really need to have a heart-to-heart with her today?" I snapped, losing my cool. This unwelcome, unprecedented visit was doing nothing for my already-frayed fuse.

One corner of his mouth lifted into a half-smile. "Nah. I woke up and decided that I been puttin' off talkin' to you for too fucķin' long about what went down the night Ella died."

*~*~*

Seb wasn't happy about being stood up but I had no choice. Ghost had dangled a very juicy carrot in front of me and I was powerless to resist it.

Once the gates of the clubhouse closed behind my car, my fate was sealed. I was going in. No take-backs.

I parked behind Ghost's bike and watched him gracefully descend it, a strong sense of déjà vu blanketing me. When Ella had wanted to spend more time here, she'd brought me along. She'd tried her best to completely shield me from the debauchery that went on within the house, but of course, that was impossible. I'd seen my first penis in this very house, after walking in on a Phantom using the toilet. My fifteen-year-old eyes had been scarred for life. Suffice it to say, I'd refrained from going anywhere near the ablutions in this house.

"You hungry?" Ghost asked me, pushing open the large front door. The sound of music and laughter immediately assailed us, seeming to originate from all corners of the house.

I thought of the Chinese and Indian that Seb had gone to pick up and my stomach groaned. Loudly.

Ghost let out a loud, raucous laugh. "I'll take that as a yes. Follow me."

I did as he asked, walking past a group of women clad in standard leather jackets and denim shorts or skirts. They eyed me, probably puzzled by my scrubs. I hadn't thought to change into street wear before I came here. Oh, well.

Ghost led me to the spacious kitchen, a room I remembered from years ago. I'd sat on a bar stool in front of the island to do my homework on many a night with my iPod in hand, while I tried to ignore the racket going on in the other rooms.

A guy I didn't recognize was grabbing a beer from the well-stocked refrigerator. He was tall and skinny, with a buzz cut and silver hoops in his ears. He gave me a mock-salute before greeting Ghost with a raspy, "Hello, Prez."

"Sticks," grunted Ghost.

"Excuse me?" My brow creased.

"My name," the other man clarified, grinning. When he smiled, he looked like a little boy.

"Oh. Hi...Sticks. I'm Maya."

"I know."

"Help yourself to anythin'," said Ghost, gesturing at the fridge. "I'll be in my office. You remember where that is, don't'cha?"

Unfortunately, I did, so I nodded.

"Good. Eat. Then come find me."

He disappeared, leaving me alone with Sticks, who drank his beer in silence as he watched me raid the fridge.

"You a nurse?" he asked after a while.

"Yeah. Um, how about you?" I found cold meat and cheese and decided to make myself a sandwich. Truthfully, it was all I could stomach right then. Being here made my stomach turn.

"I'm a Candidate."

"Candidate?"

"Yeah. You know, I'm gonna join this MC. Become a brother. But first I gotta be initiated. Have to get a majority vote from the other brothers when decision time comes."

"So...that's kind of like wanting to join a fraternity?"

Sticks' blue eyes narrowed at me. "Like in college? Hell, no. This kinda brotherhood is the real deal. Ride-or-die shįt." He paused to consider his beer bottle. "If I don't become a brother, I don't know what I'll do. Wearing The Phantoms' patch on my jacket – that's always been my dream."

I chewed on my lower lip to stop myself from asking what exactly he had to do to become a member – brother.

"You'll get in," I offered, finding a loaf of whole-wheat bread in the steel bread bin.

"If you're fucķin' Ghost, don't ask him to make sure I get in. I wanna do this myself."

I slammed the cover of the bin down and turned to face the idiotic youth. "I'm not sleeping with your President. Get that disgusting idea out of your head."

I wasn't so hungry suddenly. Leaving the ham and cheese on the counter, I stomped out the kitchen and went to find Ghost, ignoring Sticks' panicked apologies. The sooner I got out of here, the better. I was pissed off, I needed to shower and I needed to sleep.

Ghost's office was on the ground floor, the furthest door from the enormous living-room-slash-den. He actually had a plaque on the door that read 'OFFICE' in big, bold letters. I knocked once and waited to hear his voice telling me to come in.

I closed the door behind me, leaning against it. I had never been inside Ghost's office. It wasn't anything like I'd expected. It looked like an...office. Dark wooden furniture and staid, neutral colors made up the décor. White curtains covered a wide window behind the high-backed black leather chair Ghost sat on. An LCD computer sat on the desk before him. He stood, gesturing at the chair opposite his.

I shook my head. "I'm fine."

He sighed. "Maya. It's just a chair."

He was right. It was just a chair. I was being highly unreasonable, so I took the seat he offered and placed my bag on my lap. Ghost sat back down, observing me from across his desk. I felt uncomfortable under his silver stare.

"So you been good? You know I've always thought of you as a kid sister."

"Yes, Ghost. I've been good." I chose to ignore the last part. It was true that Ghost had – inevitably – been a part of my life when Ella was alive, but once she died, he'd faded into a memory. Kid sister, my foot.

He nodded thoughtfully. "Ripper's been saying –"

"You talk to Jake about me?"

Ghost gave me a small smile. "Among other things."

"But...he left The Phantoms."

"Doesn't mean we ain't brothers no more, now does it?"

"I guess not." I took a deep breath. "What did you want to talk about again?"

"We'll get to that. Last time I saw you, you were gettin' ready for prom, so forgive me for wantin' to catch up."

Prom night. My date had been one of Luke's close guy friends, a guy called Nick Johnson. He'd actually booked a motel room for the night and had ended up dumping me there after I'd refused to sleep with him. Suffice it to say, Luke was not happy and their friendship had ended with Nick receiving a broken nose and black eye.

"I loved your cousin," Ghost said suddenly, getting a faraway look in his eyes that told me he was remembering something about her. "Not afraid to admit it. Wish I'd been smart enough to admit it to her, but you know how stubborn a man can be."

I didn't know if Ella had loved Ghost, but I knew that she'd definitely been infatuated by him. She would've done anything he wanted; she had done anything he'd wanted.

"Where is this going?" I asked, my voice quiet.

"I just wanted to apologize, Maya. I never said how sorry I was at the funeral. Never said how I wished it was me in that casket, and not Ella." His face twisted into a grimace. "Ripper dated her first. She left him for me, and yet there were no hard feelings. He didn't love her. Not really. So the night she died, we'd had a fight. A really bad one..." His voice trailed off and he looked away.

"I never knew that part," I whispered, willing him to continue.

"No one but Ripper knows." He cleared his throat. "She went to him. Called me all kinds of names. She knew Ripper would listen. And he did."

My vision was suddenly blurry. "But then he got her killed."

"Is that what you think?"

I snorted. "I'm not an idiot," I informed him. "I know you guys were and are involved in illegal dealings. It's inevitable that you'd make enemies. So Ella was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because of Jake."

"Maya, she died because of me. Those men were after me, not her. And not Ripper," said Ghost, his voice soft. "I did some stupid shįt back in the day, rubbed another MC the wrong way. Their Prez was all about warnings, so they took something from me, something I cared about more than my own life. That something was Ella, and not a day goes by that I don't regret what happened."

I swallowed, fisting my hands into the denim fabric of my bag. "You didn't think to tell this to the police?"

Ghost's eyes hardened. "Cops? Half of those pigs can be bought off, and the other half are pussies in uniform," he said in a low voice. "No, Maya, real justice is found on the streets. That's why Ripper went to jail."

My mind whirred. "Those men he nearly killed..."

"I finished his job."

I could feel sweat prickling my brow. This man had just admitted to murder. He sat there in his chair, looking hardened and menacing, and I was supposed to... To what? Thank him for killing the men that had killed my cousin? Thank him for finally deigning to let me know the truth of her death? That he was responsible?

"I need to...go," I said on an exhale, standing abruptly.

"Maya –"

"No. Please. I need to process this. Just let me leave. Please."

"I can have someone drive you home. You don't look so –"

"I'll be fine," I snapped, already heading for the door.

I wrenched it open, heading down the hallway, eyes open but unseeing. I could hear loud voices in one room, a man's and a woman's. Someone else was laughing from somewhere in the house. I wished I could laugh like that, without a care in the world.

I walked past the living room, giving it a passing glance, and spotted Jake sitting on a couch with a woman on his lap. I caught the look of surprise in his eyes at seeing me there before I opened the front door and stepped out into the cool night.

How long have I been here? I wondered to myself, whipping my phone out and finding four missed calls from Seb and two from Kira. He'd probably called her, wondering where I was, since my vague "Something came up" probably hadn't been enough.

I switched my phone off and shoved it back into my bag, scanning the various trucks and bikes outside, looking for mine.

"Maya!" Jake called. Feet pounded on the gravel behind me but I headed for my car anyway, not looking forward to talking to him. "Hey, I'm talking to you."

"I know that, but I don't want to talk to you. Not right now." I slid into my car, slamming and locking it right after.

Jake tapped on my window after three minutes of listening to me trying to get Old Betsy to start. I wanted to scream at the unfairness of it all. She just had to stall at the moment I needed her to run smoothly, didn't she?

I reluctantly got out the car, banging the car door shut harder than was warranted.

"When're you gonna let me look at this pile of scrap?" asked Jake, his voice solemn.

I couldn't even defend Betsy. Instead, I laughed a high-pitched laugh that quickly became a sob. Ghost had loved Ella? Well, so had I. She had been the last of my family, the last of my blood. There's no greater pain on earth than realizing that you're completely alone. Billions of people on this planet – and you feel like you're stuck in an empty wasteland.

The tears were coming pretty fast, so fast that Jake's movements were a blur as he put his arms around me and hugged me to his hard body. My arms came around him of their own accord and I buried my nose into the crook of his neck. He smelled of leather and something spicy, and when he nuzzled his nose into my hair, I cried even harder.