Page 27 of All Ghosts Aren’t Dead (The Forgotten #1)

SAMUEL

“ H e’s late.”

Amir didn’t turn from the window. “It’s been less than a minute, Samuel.”

“He’s never late.”

The library was dim, but not dark. Morning light slipped through the tall windows in sharp, deliberate slants, carving the room into neat, quiet pieces.

What a fucking joke.

Nothing broken ever stayed neat. Not in this house, and sure as fuck not in me.

I stood behind the table with my spine locked straight and a knot blooming behind my ribs. My pulse was loud in my ears, and my breath kept catching like it couldn’t quite find its way out.

My eyes kept flicking to the screen.

It hadn’t pinged yet, but I could feel it coming.

“For the love of God, Samuel.” Amir turned, arms folded across his chest. “Sit the hell down before you crack your spine in half.”

“Piss off.”

“Jonah is his brother?” Simon sat slumped in a chair, knees drawn in, gnawing at the skin around his thumbnail. “Blue mentioned him once, but he didn’t tell us they were brothers.”

Amir stepped away from the window and crossed the room.

The words he spoke next were meant for Simon, but his eyes remained pinned on me—watching for the moment I fell apart.

As if I hadn’t already.

“When a memory is that painful, it often stays buried until something breaks it loose. Admitting who Jonah was likely would’ve meant unpacking everything that comes with it, and I’m not so sure Blue was ready for that.”

Simon jerked his head toward me. “He told Sam.”

“Because Samuel makes him feel safe enough to remember.”

That shouldn’t have meant anything, but oh, it did. It hit low and deep, curling in my chest like it belonged there.

“I sent Midnight Jonah’s name and everything I remembered Blue saying.”

Simon shifted, leaning forward slightly. “What exactly did you ask him to find?”

“Anything. A record. A file. A grave.”

My hands were flat against the edge of the desk now, pressure biting into my palms. I couldn’t sit, couldn’t pace anymore. All I could do was stand there and wait to be told whether Blue still had a brother or just another ghost.

“And we’re here because he found something?” he asked.

“How the fuck should I know? He’s late.”

Too late.

Midnight didn’t miss check-ins, not unless the news were bad or whatever he found was big enough to stall him mid-transmission.

Christ.

“It’s been three and a half minutes,” Amir said, adjusting the cuff of his sleeve. “Maybe he’s late because he found something, and if he did, I’d rather he come back with answers rather than assumptions.”

“Thanks for the insight, Doc,” I muttered. “Let me know when you start charging by the minute.”

Simon glanced between us, brow furrowing. “Why are we the only ones here?”

I exhaled through my nose. “This isn’t a meeting.”

“O… kay.” Simon hesitated. “Then what is it?”

“We’re not discussing Blue as a student or an asset. We’re discussing him as a human—someone who bleeds, and remembers, and matters.”

Simon shifted in his chair like the weight of that landed somewhere it hadn’t before. His hands dropped to his lap, fingers curling inward, the skin around his nails bloody and raw.

“And you’re both here,” I cleared my throat, “because you know who he is to me and what I’ll do to keep him.”

Simon swallowed hard, his gaze falling to the floor like he didn’t trust it to stay still. Amir didn’t speak, but his attention never wavered. The weight of it filled the space between us.

I narrowed my eyes at the black slab of glass in front of me, willing it to flicker. It didn’t, just fed back my own goddamn reflection.

I was getting real fucking tired of looking at it.

A crackle broke through the speakers, just static at first, then a faint but unmistakable hitch of breath.

The screen shifted half a second later, blue light washing over the desk as Midnight’s face came into view—off-center, too close, hair falling across one eye like he hadn’t bothered to push it back.

“You’re late!” I barked.

Midnight didn’t look up. His fingers moved fast, still typing in another window. Bottom lip pinched red between his teeth, his skin looked paler than usual, like it hadn’t seen sunlight since the moment I gave him Jonah’s name.

“I found something,” he finally said, peeking at the screen just long enough to confirm I was listening.

“I wasn’t sure I would. Ezekiel doesn’t use typical tech.

No security cameras, no open networks. The entire setup is air-gapped, but they still sync quarterly for financial compliance.

Last week, I slipped a payload into their donation site—a mirror script.

When the sync triggered, it dumped their local storage to an external echo node. I tagged it to?—”

Goddamn it .

“Pretend for one fucking second that I don’t speak cryptic hacker bullshit and just tell me what you found.”

“Jonah.” He blinked. “I found Jonah.”

The words landed hard, and for a moment, there was nothing but the rush of my pulse in my ears.

Simon surged to his feet, the legs of his chair scraping against the floor.

Amir stepped in closer, the edge of his sleeve brushing mine as we both stared down at the monitor, trying to keep up with the flood of documents flashing across it.

“Tell me everything,” I demanded.

Midnight nodded once, fingers flying over the keyboard as a cluster of windows shrank and reorganized.

“I didn’t find him in any active personnel files,” he said. “They’ve scrubbed those, but I cross-referenced their internal financial records against a secondary node they use for sacramental inventory.”

He paused, eyes flicking toward the camera. “Think storage logs, but for people.”

“Jesus Christ,” Amir murmured.

Something burned in the back of my throat. Not heat, just the sour taste of knowing exactly what those bastards thought he was worth.

“I found him in a ledger entry tagged B-001, male, age twenty-three, registered under the name Jonah Jack Benson. It was last updated six days ago. The file is marked ‘ritual asset—restricted use only.’”

A grainy image loaded onto the screen—a still frame from what looked like a scanned document. It was some kind of inventory tag that listed Jonah’s name, age, and a fucking barcode like he was inventory.

My hands clenched against the edge of the desk, pressure biting into the skin until I could feel the shake in my forearms.

Midnight tapped a key. The screen changed. A file with Jonah’s name and a grainy black-and-white photo filled the monitor. He was shirtless, scarred, eyes flat and haunting. A burn mark curled over his collarbone like a twisted brand.

“There’s a detailed internal note attached to his photo,” Midnight said. “It confirms he’s being held in a substructure called the Sanctum—deep underground, beneath the original compound Ezekiel used for his core disciples. Remote, isolated.”

Another few keystrokes, and a digital map appeared beside Jonah’s file. Midnight zoomed in on a stretch of unmarked land about ninety minutes from where Blue grew up.

“That compound was registered under one of Ezekiel’s shell companies a few years ago,” Midnight continued. “No cameras. No open signal. But I tracked the utility spikes. They’re still running power to the lowest level. That’s where he is.”

Amir didn’t speak at first. His eyes were locked on the screen, but his attention drifted somewhere deeper—past the map, past the file, to whatever image he was building in his mind.

“He’s not just being held. There’s intention in it.

Why keep someone like that alive unless they think he serves a purpose? ”

“According to the note, he’s classified as a ritual asset. It says he’s brought out during public punishments and ‘pain demonstrations.’” Midnight’s mouth twisted around the words like they tasted wrong. “They call it obedience training.”

Simon muttered something under his breath.

“There’s more.” Midnight flipped to another tab. “No real-time video, but they log rituals with archival stills, proof for senior clergy. These are from the last few months.”

Jonah appeared again, standing with his arms bound in front of him. Blood streaked down his side. Two masked figures flanked him.

His face was blank, almost lifeless, but somehow I saw it.

The resemblance.

Not so much in the details, but in the shape of him—the way his shoulders locked like he’d been bracing for pain. His hair wasn’t white like Blue’s, but more honey-colored and sweat-darkened at the temples.

Jonah was bigger.

Sharper.

Everything Blue might’ve become if no one had pulled him out.

The pressure behind my sternum grew sharp. Hell. My skin felt too tight all of a sudden, like it didn’t fucking belong to me anymore.

I wanted to be calm and useful, but instead I stood there, shattering.

Midnight let the image of Jonah linger. “Based on the timestamps, he’s been there since just after his eighteenth birthday.”

Five goddamn years.

The math shouldn’t have surprised me, but it landed like a crack to the ribs.

“He’s the same age as me,” Simon muttered, shoving both hands through his hair like he was trying to shake something loose.

“We have to go, Sam. We can’t just sit here while he’s—” Fists clenched, Simon’s chest rose and fell in uneven beats. He was struggling, and he wasn’t fucking sure whether he should throw a punch or come apart.

I felt the fucking same.

“We’re getting him out,” I swore. “But we can’t rush in blind and get ourselves killed.”

Simon bit his lip, eyes glassy as they fixated on the photo of Jonah.

“He’s been alone in that hellhole…”

“There’s another thing.” Midnight’s fingers hovered over the keyboard, and with a single click, a new document filled the screen.

My eyes strained to read the blocky, clinical text. “Tell me what I’m looking at.”

“It’s a transcript,” he said. “One of the clergy was interrogating Jonah after he broke formation during a ritual. They chained him in the dark for three days.”

My heart was already braced, but the next words managed to break it apart.

“They told him Blue was dead.”

I didn’t even realize I’d moved until my hand slammed the desk.

Midnight swallowed, the glow of the monitor painting his face in blue light.

“They told him Blue’s impurity was too deep and too dangerous to risk spreading. They made it sound like a mercy, and then conditioned Jonah to believe it was his fault.”

“How the fuck would it be his fault?” Simon growled. “For fuck’s sake.”

“It all comes back to the bloodline,” Midnight muttered, scratching at the inside of his wrist. “Ezekiel told him the mark Jonah was born with had passed to Blue. He’d infected his baby brother because the rot started with him.”

“Jesus Christ,” Amir breathed. “We need to get him out of there.”

My breath flared through my nose, trying to shove the heat down before it burned clean through me. The chair behind me caught the full swing of my leg. It crashed into the wall, the cheap wood splitting with a sharp, splintering crack that echoed through the library like a warning shot.

“Give me everything,” I demanded. “Every document. Every record. Every pattern.”

The screen flickered to an internal floor plan overlaid with colored zones. Midnight used his mouse to gesture toward the bottom corner, where several rooms had been blacked out.

“The Sanctum doesn’t just house Jonah. It’s where they keep women and children.

Pregnant ones, mostly. Women impregnated by Ezekiel or his senior clergy, part of some twisted effort to ‘purify’ the bloodline.

They believe those babies might carry the blessed gene, some kind of rectification for impure descent. ”

Amir’s hand flexed where it rested on Simon’s shoulder.

Simon was staring again, lips parted, thumb between them. He bit down hard enough that blood welled at the knuckle and dripped onto his palm.

“Last month, a child was found outside the perimeter wall. No breach. The guard flagged internal aid.”

Midnight tapped the keyboard, pulling up a scanned guard report written in harsh, slanted handwriting.

“Jonah was reassigned to grounds maintenance that same day, only two hours before the child disappeared. There’s no footage or direct proof, but the timeline matches. And it’s not the only time.”

He tabbed through a rapid sequence of documents, each tagged with a different date.

“Three more incidents—same pattern. Jonah’s location shifts, someone vanishes.”

Christ.

“He’s helping them,” Amir whispered.

Midnight nodded. “Nothing on record says it outright, but the signals are there. I think he’s been smuggling kids out.”

Simon pushed away from the table, pacing a tight line near the fireplace. His hands flexed open and shut at his sides, like he was trying to hold something that kept slipping. “He’s been saving them.”

“Risking punishment.” Amir rubbed his jaw, then let his hand fall to his side. “ Daily .”

My lips parted, but I couldn’t summon any words. There wasn’t one big enough to hold what I felt.

Somewhere behind us, the floor creaked.

I turned toward the door.

Blue stood there, half-shadowed in the hallway, barefoot on the hardwood. His shirt was twisted at the hem, one sleeve half-pulled inside out like he hadn’t finished getting dressed. Water dripped from his hair and trailed down his neck.

His mouth moved before any sound came. “What—what are you talking about?”