The bar smells like old wood, cheap whiskey, and the kind of regret that never quite leaves the walls.

Ghost hates it here.

Hates the way the bottles glow like confessionals. Hates the way laughter sticks to the air like grease. Hates the way the clink of glass sounds too much like nights he swore he’d buried with his father’s name.

He sits anyway.

Mask on. Hood up. Elbows on the scarred counter like he’s bracing for impact. The bartender doesn’t ask questions. Nobody does. They never do, not with him. That’s the problem.

He didn’t come to drink.

He came to think.

Which, for Ghost, is infinitely more dangerous.

Because thinking leads to remembering. Remembering leads to wanting. And wanting has always been the beginning of the end.

The team is his constant. His structure. His proof that loyalty doesn’t have to rot. He told himself that was enough. That it would always be enough. Brotherhood. Trust forged in fire. No expectations that could shatter him from the inside out.

And then there was you.

Not a wound. Not a weakness. A quiet ache he never accounted for.

You didn’t force your way in. You didn’t ask. You just existed in the spaces he never let anyone touch. In the pauses between missions. In the dry jokes traded at dawn. In the way his eyes always found you first in a room, even when he pretended they didn’t.

He downs the shot.

It burns. Good. Let it.

Because what he feels doesn’t fit in the tidy boxes he built to survive. It’s not brotherhood. It’s not duty. It’s not nostalgia for something he lost with blood and fire and betrayal.

It’s something worse.

It’s hope wearing the wrong name.

His father’s shadow looms in the amber glow. The man who taught him love could turn violent without warning. The man who taught him that trust is a trap door. That wanting someone is how you give them the weapon to destroy you.

Simon swore he’d never become that man.

Never need someone like that.

Never stand in a bar and realize the only thing scarier than losing everything again is never risking it at all.

Another drink. Slower this time.

The truth crawls up his spine, heavy and inevitable.

You are not a distraction. You are not a phase. You are not a threat to his loyalty.

You are what’s left of him.

The last soft thing in a world that taught him to be stone.

He doesn’t say your name.

He doesn’t have to.

It’s already carved into every silence he’s ever shared with you.

And for the first time since he learned how to disappear inside himself, Simon Riley understands something terrifying and holy:

If hell is the price of this feeling…

He’d walk into the fire without hesitation.

Just to stand beside you.