Chapter 6 - GHOSTS OF THE PAST
The snow was coming down in thick, blinding sheets as I navigated the treacherous backroads outside Chicago. Dominic was drifting in and out of consciousness in the passenger seat, pressing a torn piece of his shirt against his bleeding shoulder. In the back, Audrey was curled into a ball, terrified but unharmed.
"We need a doctor," I muttered, gripping the steering wheel. "A real one. Where is your secondary safehouse?"
"Compromised," Dominic choked out, coughing. "If Silas betrayed me, he knew about all the fallback locations. We have nowhere."
"Everyone has somewhere," I said, a dangerous plan forming in my mind.
I took a sharp left, heading back toward the industrial underbelly of the city. There was a place. A place I hadn't been to in five years. A place strictly forbidden by my father's dying breath, but desperation makes a mockery of old promises.
We arrived at an abandoned meatpacking plant on the edge of the river. The chain-link fence was rusted, and the building looked entirely derelict. I killed the headlights and drove the SUV around the back to a hidden loading dock.
"Stay here," I commanded softly.
I stepped out into the freezing wind, walking up to a heavy metal door. There was a rusted keypad hidden behind a loose brick. I punched in a sequence of numbers—a code I hadn't used since I was eighteen. The heavy deadbolts clicked open.
I pushed the door open, stepping into the darkness. "Jax! It's Claire. Put the gun down!"
A blinding spotlight snapped on, pinning me in its glare. The red dot of a laser sight rested squarely on my chest.
"Claire Mercer died in a fire five years ago," a gravelly, synthetic voice echoed from the rafters.
"She didn't," I called out, raising my hands. "She just learned how to hide. I need help, Jax. I have Dominic Vale bleeding out in my car, and the Volkovs are hunting us."
The laser dot flickered and vanished. The spotlight angled down, revealing a heavily scarred man with a mechanical prosthetic arm climbing down from a steel catwalk. Jax was a former military surgeon turned black-market arms dealer and doctor. He owed my father his life.
"You bring the reaper to my doorstep, little bird," Jax grumbled, opening the heavy bay doors to let the SUV inside.
Within minutes, we had Dominic on a metal gurney in Jax’s makeshift operating theater. Jax worked quickly, extracting the bullet and stitching the torn muscle. I sat with Audrey on a worn leather couch in the corner, gently stroking her hair until she finally fell into an exhausted sleep.
When Jax was finished, Dominic was pale but stable, hooked up to an IV.
"You're lucky, Vale," Jax said, wiping his bloody hands on a towel. "An inch to the right, and it would have shattered your collarbone and clipped the artery."
Dominic looked at me from the gurney, his eyes heavy with painkillers but sharp with determination. "We need gear, Jax. Weapons, explosives, untraceable comms. The Volkovs think they broke me tonight. I’m going to show them they only woke me up."
"I can give you the guns, Dominic," Jax said grimly. "But the Volkovs have put a five-million-dollar bounty on your head. Half the syndicates in the Midwest are going to be hunting you by sunrise. You can't fight a war with just you and the ghost of the Mercer family."
"I have men," Dominic countered.
"You don't know who is loyal," I interrupted, standing up. "Silas poisoned your ranks. You can't trust your own capos."
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Dominic looked at me, a muscle feathering in his jaw. "Then what do you suggest, Claire?"
"I suggest," I said, my voice as cold as the snow outside, "we stop running. We go on the offensive. We cut off the head of the snake."
