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“ I ndefinite leave?!”

Ethan Roan stared in shock at his father’s stern, unyielding glare.

This isn’t right, he thought desperately. This can’t be happening.

At the back of his mind, his pegasus flared its nostrils in outrage. Us? Indefinite leave? It cannot be possible!

As much as Ethan agreed with it – and might have been tempted to flare his nostrils a little himself – he forced the pegasus’s rage down. Right now, it was only going to make a bad situation worse.

His father nodded, eyes hard. “This isn’t just a small mistake that can be waved off, Ethan. You’ve created one hell of a mess – one which I now have to clean up. You do realize that this firm could lose Swynford Industries as a client over this, don’t you?”

“But I –”

Ethan cut himself off, rubbing at his eyes and releasing a slow breath as he tried to think of a way to smooth things over. But really, there wasn’t one.

Because there was no explanation he could give besides the truth. And he didn’t think that his father would be particularly responsive to that .

Despite being a pegasus shifter himself, Ethan’s father was not given to flights of fancy, preferring to keep his feet firmly planted on the ground…

except for during his monthly scheduled pegasus time, every third Saturday of the month from two p.m. until four p.m., carefully sandwiched between his midday pickleball match and his evening boozy schmooze.

For two hours a month, he would gather with Ethan and his brothers, Patrick and Dennis, at Ethan’s cousin’s ranch, at which point they would shift, fly around for a bit to keep their pegasi from getting too cranky, and then shift back into human form and head back to the city in time for their next appointment.

Pragmatism was the name of the game for pegasus shifters, and doubly so for his father.

Ethan was pretty sure that his father would not accept A ghost sabotaged my Zoom meeting by playing YouTube clips of abandoned Japanese train stations whenever I tried to share my PowerPoint presentation as an excuse for the Swynford debacle.

Even though it was completely, entirely, one hundred percent the truth .

Pegasi shifters didn’t believe in ghosts. Hell, Ethan hadn’t believed in them until this one had come along a couple of months back and decided to ruin his life.

Nothing could have prepared him for looking into his mirror as he shaved in the morning, only to find a ghostly, transparent man standing behind him.

It had scared the hell out of him, to be precise – he’d leapt about a foot in the air and whirled on the spot, razor blade raised in self-defense against this intruder, only to find there was nothing behind him but thin air.

Well, he’d told himself at the time, he had been working some long hours. Maybe he just needed to get some sleep. He’d have to make sure he was home no later than eleven p.m. Hit the gym a little harder to work off some stress.

But then it had just kept happening.

Why? He had no idea. He’d never done anything that could cause a restless spirit to come and seek vengeance against him.

Ethan started seeing it more and more often: a vision of a man wearing what he could only term old-timey clothing standing there, staring at him and moving its mouth, like it was trying to tell him something.

And no matter where he was – at his five a.m. gym sessions, in the lunchroom, in a meeting – it was clear that no one could see this ghostly apparition but him.

He’d tried asking his secretary once if she could see the man who was pretty obviously – to Ethan at least – sitting on the couch by the potted palm outside his office, but she’d simply smiled in a slightly confused way and said his three o’clock wasn’t here yet.

It gave Ethan the creeps of course, but after that, he’d resolved to ignore it as best he could. He had a job to do, after all. He didn’t have time to be haunted.

And ignoring it had worked – at least for a while.

In fact, before today’s disaster, he hadn’t seen it around for a while. He’d even dared to hope it’d gotten bored with haunting him and had wandered off to find someone who’d scream or cry or cower a little more whenever it showed up.

But no – clearly, it had just been gathering its wits to get more intrusive in its haunting attempts.

Which apparently meant hijacking his electronic devices and bending them to its whims, utterly ruining the meeting he’d been having with the famously stern and humorless CEO of Swynford Industries, just as Ethan was trying to explain why they should extend their contract with the law firm his grandfather, Chester Roan, had built from the ground up.

Needless to say, once the third YouTube video had popped up instead of Ethan’s painstakingly prepared infographic, the CEO of Swynford Industries had snapped rather angrily that he didn’t have time for this, and that maybe Ethan should come back once he was prepared to be serious, before abruptly ending the call.

Maybe most people wouldn’t consider the ghost’s actions vengeful or threatening , Ethan thought glumly – but that was almost worse, somehow.

Horrendous ghostly retribution, he could deal with – it might even give him an excuse to shift into his pegasus form.

The destruction of his career, on the other hand… that was the one thing that truly did terrify him.

Ethan forced himself to look back up. His father was still staring at him, jaw set, mouth twisted in a grimace.

It was clear he was still expecting an explanation for this, and Ethan had none to give him.

There was nothing for it at this point – he would have to suck it up and take responsibility for his mistakes, even if they weren’t actually his mistakes at all.

“I understand,” Ethan muttered, trying his best to sound professional. “My conduct has been unacceptable.”

His father nodded, obviously still deeply unhappy, but mollified enough to see that Ethan was at least contrite about it. As long as Ethan wasn’t arguing with him, he could quickly move on to the task of fixing the mess that Ethan had created.

That the ghost had created.

“Well, then,” his father said. “I’m going to go talk to Swynford, see if I can spin this as a technical glitch of some kind. You are going to go somewhere else and get your head on straight. And if you can’t, well…”

He left the words hanging, but his meaning was clear as crystal.

“Understood,” Ethan said, lowering his head.

“Good.”

With that, his father turned his enormous leather chair around to face the window, clearly signaling an end to their meeting, and, possibly, the fact that he truly didn’t want to be looking at Ethan right now.

Ethan stood mutely in the middle of the room for a moment, before turning smartly on his heel and heading for the door.

Really, he couldn’t blame his father for his anger. He’d always made his expectations completely clear. Ethan and his brothers were expected to succeed – or else.

His pegasus tossed its head as he opened the door to his father’s office, emerging into the bustling corridor.

You are unbelievable. You let a delusion ruin our career.

Ethan snarled at it, even as he tried to keep his face inscrutable to the people swirling around him. You know full well that it’s not a delusion.

The pegasus rolled its eyes, though Ethan detected a slight tremble in its voice. Ghosts are not real.

You just keep telling yourself that.

He knew that ghosts were one of the few things that the pegasus was actually scared of – why, he wasn’t sure – and so he didn’t push it too hard. His pegasus had an attitude problem, but in this case it was mostly bluster, so he let it go. He had far bigger problems to deal with.

Like the fact that he was clearly providing an obstacle to his colleagues, loitering in the middle of the corridor as he was.

He was starting to garner a few strange looks, and the last thing he needed right now was to give anyone any more ammunition to use against him – and so he strode back toward his office, hoping that he was projecting confident go-getter rather than conference call disaster area .

It was with a near-inaudible sigh of relief that he finally stepped into his office and closed the door behind him, the soundproofed walls cocooning him in silence.

Ethan had never felt out of place or overwhelmed at work before – he was practically raised in this building, tagging dutifully after his father on evenings and weekends – but he had to admit, if only to himself, that he was feeling a bit rattled.

Things had been absolutely fine a couple of months ago. His career was exactly on track to where he’d had planned.

But now…?

Ethan flopped down in his chair with a sigh, turning around so that he could stare out of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

The view from up here was spectacular, and it had always made him feel like he was on top of the world, but now it just felt…

precarious. Like he could topple and fall at any moment.

No.

Standing up, Ethan clenched his hands into fists.

He wasn’t about to let that happen.

He had no idea why this ghost had attached itself to him, but it was clear it wasn’t going to go away of its own accord.

He’d have to do something about this, or else let the career he’d built to his father’s exacting standards go down the drain.

And I won’t let that happen!

He’d worked his whole life for this, pushing aside everything that wasn’t work. Hell, he hadn’t even been on a date since law school.

And if some old-school apparition thinks it can ruin my career, then it’d better think again.

He didn’t care what he had to do – find a priest, an exorcist, whoever or what ever could deal with this – he’d do it.

Determined, he turned away from the window – and nearly jumped out of his skin before stumbling backwards, sending the chair clattering and his butt colliding painfully with the floor.

“Ow,” he muttered, rubbing at his back – before he remembered why he’d fallen over in the first place, and scrambled back to his feet.