Page 17 of Reaper

The calculation ran behind my face. I could feel it like something physical—the variables arranging themselves, the probabilities stacking, the cost of each option landing with a weight I’d carried too many times to mistake for anything else.

Lila watched me. The older member watched his bolt. The prospect watched his radio. The kitchen held its breath, diesel-thick and silent.

I looked at the door. Looked at Lila. Looked at the door again.

The vehicle had been there six hours.

We had less than that to decide what happened next.

LILA

Six hours minimum. The prospect’s voice through the radio kept looping in my head, flattened out by the little speaker, matter-of-fact in a way that made it worse. Six hours of somebody sitting cold and patient two blocks from where I’d slept, and I hadn’t felt a single one of them pass.

I stood by the sink where Reaper had left me, my wrist still warm where his thumb had been, and watched him do the thing I was starting to recognize — the stillness that wasn’t calm, just control wearing calm’s clothes. He crossed to the wall. Studied the paint like it owed him an answer. I let him have the silence because I needed it too.

Six hours. That put the vehicle in place before I’d even woken up on that cot with my keys and my phone laid out beside me like a surrender.

Which meant somebody had known where to park before anyone but Reaper’s own club should have known this building existed.

I turned the thought over slowly, the way you turn over a rock in your yard you’ve stepped past a hundred times without noticing the color underneath. Ethan didn’t know bikers. Not really. He’d never so much as mentioned a club, not before three weeks ago, not before his voice started sounding like a stranger’s. But somewhere in that last real conversation we’d had — the one from two months back, before the calls got short and strange — he’d said a name. Just once. Dropped into a sentence about a guy who could get him “square” with somebody, a guy who used to ride, a guy who knew how these things worked because he’d been on the other side of them.

Teller. I was almost sure that was the name. Almost. The kind of almost that comes from a memory you didn’t know you’d need to keep.

I hadn’t thought about it again until this morning. Now I had a black SUV and a coincidence too specific to be a coincidence, and what I’d told Reaper last night—that I already had an idea, just not a name I was ready to say—felt more solid than it had twelve hours ago.

I still didn’t say it. Not yet. I told myself it was because I wasn’t sure. That was half true. The other half was that saying Ethan’s name in this kitchen, in this club, with a man on the other side of the room whose knuckles were already split from protecting me from strangers, felt like handing my brother over to something I couldn’t take back.

There’d been a second name too, once. Longer ago. Before all of it, back when Ethan still called just to talk and not because he needed something. A detective, he’d said, not unkindly — some guy who kept trying to get him to “do the smart thing.” I hadn’t paid attention. I’d been annoyed, actually, that some cop was leaning on my little brother about people he ran with, and I’d told Ethan to be careful and left it there, the way you leave a lot of things there when you don’t yet know which ones are going to matter.

Detective A. Reyes. The card was still in my pocket. I hadn’t connected the two threads until just now, standing at a stranger’s sink with cold water still on my hands — the detective who’d been watching me at the festival, and the detective Ethan had once complained about over the phone, might not be a coincidence either.

I didn’t have proof of anything. I had a name half-remembered from a conversation I’d been too irritated to really hear, a business card gone soft in my pocket, and a growing, ugly certainty that everyone in this building was working with half the picture, and I was the only one holding the other half, but I still wasn’t ready to put them together out loud.

Reaper crossed back to me, close enough that the diesel and gun oil smell of him had started to feel less like a warning and more like a fact of the room.

“You went somewhere,” he said. Not a question.

“I do that.”

“I noticed.” He didn’t push. That, I was starting to understand, was its own kind of pressure — the specific patience of a man who’d rather wait you out than pry you open. “When you’re ready to come back, I’ll still be here.”

I almost told him then. The name sat right behind my teeth, Teller, and the detective’s name behind it, and a theory I didn’t want to be right about. But six hours of a cold engine and a man’s face I’d trusted enough to fall asleep near were not the same thing as certainty, and I’d spent three weeks learning exactly how much damage a half-formed truth could do once you said it out loud and couldn’t take it back.

“Not yet,” I said. “But soon.”

He nodded. Once. Like he’d expected that answer and had already decided he could live with it a little longer.

I didn’t know yet that soon wasn’t going to be soon enough. Nobody in that kitchen did.

Chapter 6

REAPER

The war room smelled the way it always smelled: diesel, old leather and the Jim Beam bottle sitting half-empty on the scarred workbench where Dox had left it three nights ago. I stood at the head of the table with my arms crossed and my eyes moving between the intel laid flat under the overhead bulb and the door at the far end of the corridor.

The overhead bulb swung on its frayed cord, throwing our shadows in slow arcs across the concrete floor. Every time it swung east, the light caught the printed photo of the watcher and turned the grayscale into something harder, the angles of his face sharpening under the harsh white glow. Every time it swung west, the hand-drawn map of the festival grounds went dark for half a second before the light found it again, the red X marking the hayride queue standing out like a wound on the paper.

Gauge sat to my left, forearms on the table, one finger tracing the money trail I’d laid out in black marker across a sheet of printer paper. Fifty-three years old. Gray threaded through his beard, knuckles scarred from three decades of work that had nothing to do with engines. The club’s treasurer. The man who followed money the way I followed blood.