Page 23 of Reaper

I told myself it was because I still wasn’t sure — that “he knew a guy who used to ride” wasn’t the same as proof, that a name half-remembered from an annoyed phone call two months back wasn’t evidence. That was true. It was also, I knew even as I told it to myself, a coward’s kind of true, and I’d spent three weeks learning exactly how much a silence like that could end up costing people who weren’t me.

A black SUV had been sitting two blocks out for six hours, engine cold, windows tinted, waiting for a window, because a man I hadn’t named yet knew exactly how patient to be.

That was the thing that got me on my feet.

Reaper set the radio down on the table just as I crossed the room, and he turned at the sound of my boots, and whatever he saw on my face made him go still in that way of his — waiting, not pushing.

“There’s more,” I said. “Sit down for it, or don’t. But there’s more.”

I told him. Ethan’s name, out loud, finally, where it could do some good instead of sitting locked behind my teeth. The phone call about the festival, the one I’d already half confessed to in this room days ago. The name Ethan had said once, easy and trusting, two months before any of this made sense — Teller. And the card still folded soft in my jacket pocket, a detective named Reyes who’d been asking about my brother since before any of us knew there was a Hollow Kings, a hayride fence, or a mark with my name on it.

Reaper didn’t interrupt. Didn’t reach for his weapon or his temper or any of the things I’d half expected. He just listened, the way he listened to everything, like each word was evidence he was filing in a case he’d already started building the moment he found me at that dartboard with a three-year-old newspaper clipping in my hands.

When I finished, the room had gone quiet enough that I could hear my own pulse.

“That’s what you’ve been sitting on,” he said. Not a question. Not angry, either — or if it was anger, it wasn’t aimed at me. “Since when?”

“The card, since the coffee shop, weeks ago. Teller’s name — really sure of it — since the radio, twenty minutes ago.”

He nodded, once, the way he did when something he’d been missing finally clicked into place. “Won’t lie to you. Would’ve been better an hour ago.” His eyes held mine, steady, no heat in them. “But you told me. That’s the part that matters now.”

It wasn’t absolution. I hadn’t asked for it. But something in my chest loosened anyway, the relief of a weight finally shared instead of carried, and for the first time since the hayride fence, I wasn’t the only one holding it anymore.

REAPER

“The brother’s address is cleared out.”

The prospect’s voice came through the radio flat. Clipped. No editorializing, no hesitation, the words delivered the way you deliver bad news when you haven’t been doing it long enough to develop a style. Young. The same one from the corridor, his voice carrying the tightness of a man reading from notes he didn’t want to be holding.

I didn’t reach for the radio. Left it where it sat on the scarred wood of the table, the plastic casing catching the light.

“Apartment’s empty. Furniture still there. Clothes gone. Refrigerator running. Mail in the box dated three days back, nothing since. Neighbor says he hasn’t seen movement in forty-eight hours. Last confirmed sighting was the night before the festival.”

Static filled the spaces between the prospect’s words, thin and constant.

“Two nights ago, someone matching the brother’s description was spotted getting into a vehicle on Cedar Street. Black sedan. Hollow Kings plates, confirmed. Driver unknown. Vehicle headed north, toward the county line. Lost visual at the junction.”

The room held the weight of what he wasn’t saying. The prospect knew the protocol. Knew better than to speculate on an open channel. Knew that the three possibilities—ran, taken, walked in willingly—carried three different weights, and assigning one without evidence was the kind of mistake that got people killed.

So, he didn’t assign one. Just laid out the facts in the order they’d arrived and left the math where it sat.

“Copy,” I said.

I set the radio down. The plastic hit the wood with the same soft click it had made before, but the sound felt different this time. Heavier. Final, in a way that the first click hadn’t been.

Across the room, Lila hadn’t moved since she returned to the wall.

She sat against the cinder block wall, the chipped mug cradled in her lap. Through the thin gray sweater I could see the bruise along her ribs, darker now. Her right hand still gripped her left arm, knuckles white against the fabric.

She didn’t ask.

That was the thing. She didn’t look at me. Didn’t open her mouth.

She already knew. The fact that she didn’t ask told me she’d been sitting with exactly this possibility for longer than she’d let on. Long enough that hearing it confirmed didn’t land like news. It landed like something she’d already made room for, already folded into the architecture of whatever she’d been carrying since her brother’s voice had changed on the phone eight months ago.

Her face didn’t break. No tears, no tremor—no visible crack in the composure she’d been holding since the prospect’s voice first hit the radio.

I watched her for a beat.