Page 20 of Reaper

I stepped back. One foot. Then the other. The distance opened between us — two feet, then three — and the cool air rushed into the space where our body heat had been mingling, sharp against my skin.

I turned. Walked the length of the hallway without looking back. Each step measured and even, the way they always were when I wasn’t running.

At the far end, where the corridor opened into the front room, I braced one hand against the doorframe. Palm flat against the painted wood, fingers spread, the pressure steadying something in my chest that had been loose since the words left my mouth.

Behind me, I could feel her still standing there. Could picture it without turning: her hand pressed flat against the wall, her eyes on the set of my shoulders, watching me walk away the way she’d watched everything since the fence — steady, measuring, cutting through the surface to whatever lived underneath.

The monitor in the front room showed the roof of the black SUV. Still there. Two blocks out on Miller and Cedar, engine cold, windows tinted past legal. No movement. No change. Just sitting in the dark the way it had been sitting for hours, patient, waiting for a window that hadn’t opened yet.

I stood at the doorframe with my hand braced against the wood and my back to the corridor, as I watched the monitor feed, and I waited.

Chapter 7

REAPER

Gauge’s voice hit the radio like something broken. Crackling, compressed, the words fighting through static before they found shape. I stood at the folding table with one hand flat on the surface, fingers spread wide enough to cover two of the surveillance stills, and listened to the only man in the club who could read money the way I read blood.

“Watcher was a freelancer,” Gauge said. His voice was flat, matter-of-fact. “Contract through the Hollow Kings. Clean channel, clean money, routed through three shells before it hit his account.”

The back room was smaller than the war room, concrete floors unpainted since the building went up, a single bulb hanging from a wire that disappeared through a hole in the mortar. The folding table took up most of the floor space, stained and bowed in the middle from too many forearms over too many years. I’d laid out the surveillance stills in a loose grid: the watcher’s face from three angles, the festival grounds mapped in red marker, the parking lot exit road circled where the SUV had idled.

“Hollow Kings have been bleeding into our territory for close to a year,” Gauge continued. “Quiet. Methodical. Started with the north strip, worked south. Gas stations, liquor stores, small-time protection that doesn’t register until you look at the map.”

I swept a loose paper off the table. A printout of the watcher’s burner call log, the numbers highlighted in yellow marker. It hit the concrete with a soft slap and stayed there, one corner lifting in the draft from the vent grate.

Across the room, Lila sat on a metal chair pushed against the far wall. Both hands wrapped around a chipped mug of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. She’d been watching my face since Gauge started talking, eyes tracking every shift in my expression like she was reading a language she was still learning. She wouldn’t get anything. I’d spent fourteen years making sure of that.

“Hitter was a specialist,” Gauge said. “Clean record under that name. Too clean. The kind of clean that costs money to maintain. Hollow Kings don’t run specialists. They hire them when they need something specific done by someone who doesn’t trace back.”

I turned from the table. The chair scraped concrete as I pivoted to face her. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t set the mug down. Just held it there, knuckles white against the ceramic, her eyes steady on mine in that way that still caught me off guard when I wasn’t braced for it.

“The Hollow Kings are a crew out of Reno,” I said. “They move product. Run protection on small businesses. Low-level shit until about a year ago, when they started pushing south. We’ve had friction. Nothing that needed club response. Until now.”

She nodded. Once. Sharp. The same nod she’d given me in the gravel lot, in the clubhouse, every time the situation demanded something she hadn’t known she had.

“Someone put a contract on you. Professional grade. The hitter was positioned before you arrived. He had the festival layout, the crowd patterns, the exact window to move when the noise would cover it. That’s not random. That’s specific.”

Her jaw set. I could see the muscle working along the angle of it, tight enough that the tendon stood out beneath her skin. The mug didn’t move. Her knuckles had gone bone-white where they gripped the ceramic.

“The thread that ties it together is you,” I said. “Specifically you. Someone connected to you is the reason the Hollow Kings are running a contract instead of a robbery. Someone connected to you is the reason a specialist got hired instead of some thug with a baseball bat. That’s not a guess. That’s the math.”

Something moved across her face.

Fast. Controlled. Shut down before it fully surfaced—a flash of recognition so brief I almost missed it, there and gone in the space between heartbeats. Her eyes didn’t change. Her mouth didn’t change. But something behind both of them shifted, the way a landscape shifts when the light hits it from a different angle, and then it was gone, folded back into the steadiness she’d been carrying since the fence.

I waited.

She set the mug down on the concrete floor. Not a slam. Not a drop. She placed it there with deliberate care, like she was setting down something fragile that mattered to her, and then she stared at the dark ring of coffee left in the bottom. Her thumbnail found the meat of her palm. I watched the skin fold under the pressure, the crescent moon of her nail biting into the soft tissue, deepening until the blood vessels showed blue through the stretched skin.

“My brother,” she said.

Her voice stayed flat. Even. The kind of flat that comes from holding something down so hard it can’t move, not because you’re calm but because the alternative is letting it out, and once it’s out you can’t put it back.

“He’s been running with bad company for eight months. I don’t know the names. He wouldn’t tell me. Said it was better if I didn’t know. Started with small stuff—deliveries, lookouts, work that pays cash and doesn’t ask questions. Then it got heavier. He stopped coming by. Stopped calling. When he did call, he was different. Talked faster. Said less.”

Her shadow stretched thin against the wall, the outline of her shoulders sharp in the uneven light.

“He called me three days ago. Said to meet someone at the festival. Didn’t say who. Didn’t say why. Just told me to be there, alone, near the hayride. Said it was important. Said it was the only way to help him.”