Plain.
Bare.
A couch sits in the living room facing a television that hardly ever gets turned on. The kitchen is barely more than a narrow counter, a refrigerator, and a stove that probably predates the building itself. There’s a small table with two chairs even though I’ve never had anyone over long enough to use both of them.
I’ve lived here for more than five years.
But anyone walking in would probably assume I moved in last week.
There aren't any pictures on the walls. No decorations. No clutter. Just the bare minimum required to exist comfortably without thinking about it too much.
I kick my boots off near the door and walk into the kitchen, opening the fridge and grabbing a beer before heading back toward the couch. The bottle cap clinks softly against the counter when I twist it off.
The apartment is quiet, and usually that’s exactly how I like it. Quiet means predictable. Quiet means the world has settled into something steady where nothing unexpected is waiting around the corner. It’s the kind of silence I’ve built my life around, the kind that lets a man breathe without constantly looking over his shoulder. But tonight the quiet feels different. It stretches too wide, settles too deep into the walls, leaving my brain with far too much room to wander wherever it wants.
And every time it drifts, it ends up circling right back to the same place. A small-town bar with neon lights buzzing over the door. A woman with messy space buns and a septum ring wholooks at the world like it’s a joke she’s already figured out. And a rescue farm full of animals with completely ridiculous names that somehow make perfect sense the second you meet them.
I drop onto the couch and lean my head back, staring at the ceiling while I take a slow drink from the bottle.
For a long moment I just sit there listening to the faint hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of traffic somewhere beyond the building.
Then I mutter quietly to the empty room.
“What the hell was that?”
The ceiling doesn’t answer.
But I already know.
Trouble.
I sit there for a while after saying that, staring at the ceiling and finishing the beer in my hand. The apartment is quiet except for the refrigerator running in the kitchen and the occasional car passing outside. Most nights I like it like this. I come home, take my boots off, have a beer, and the place stays quiet until I go to bed.
Tonight the quiet isn’t helping.
My brain keeps going back to the same thing.
Those three guys.
I lean forward and rest my elbows on my knees, looking down at the floor while I think through the night again from the beginning. Mason asked me to ride out to Harlan and check on Wayne and The Rust Nail. Dagger said someone had beenbothering him about protection, and Wayne isn’t the kind of guy who usually asks for help unless something is actually wrong.
Harlan isn’t far from Jackson. It’s a thirty-minute ride if traffic is light, which means anyone working in that town could easily be coming from somewhere else.
Those guys didn’t seem like locals.
And they didn’t seem nervous about being there either.
They’d been showing up all week, Rae said that herself. If that’s true, then they thought they could keep doing it without someone stepping in.
That usually means somebody bigger is backing them.
I reach over and grab my phone off the table.
If there’s one guy in the club who can figure out who those three were, it’s Riot. Roman Kovacs has access to more cameras and databases than anyone else I know, and he’s good at pulling information together fast.
I open the message thread and type.
Ghost:Need you to pull camera footage around The Rust Nail in Harlan.
