Page 42 of Reaper

“Teller’s crew — the debt, all of it. That’s done now. Dead or in custody, Gauge said, all the way up whatever chain fed the Kings your name in the first place.” I watched that land on him, watched some of the tension he’d been carrying since the trailer ease out of his shoulders by a fraction. “You don’t owe anyone but the club anymore. Just the club, and just for two years. Whatever this turns into after that — that part’s still yours to write.”

I didn’t wait to see what he did with that. I walked back out into the compound, into the cold and the diesel smell and the sound of bikes idling somewhere near the front lot, and found Reaper leaning against the corridor wall exactly where I’d known he’d be, close enough to have given me the room to do this alone and close enough to be the first thing I saw when I was done.

He didn’t ask how it went. Just held out his hand, palm up, the same offer he’d been making since a concrete room with a deadbolt between us and the world, and I took it, and for the first time since a hayride wagon had carried me into the dark and back out again, the weight I’d been holding by myself didn’t feel like mine to hold alone anymore.

“Okay?” he said.

“Getting there,” I said, and meant it.

Chapter 14

REAPER

I found her in the kitchen before first light.

The fluorescent tube overhead buzzed the way it always buzzed, throwing that flat, sick light across the scarred linoleum and the metal table and the woman sitting at the far end with both hands wrapped around a chipped ceramic mug. Steam rose from the coffee in thin white curls that caught the light and disappeared before they reached the ceiling. She had my cut on. The leather was too wide for her shoulders, the sleeves hanging past her wrists, the Reaper patch on the back sitting lower on her spine than it ever sat on mine. The weight of it swallowed her frame the way the dark swallowed the yard at night—completely, without effort, like it had always been there, and she’d just now noticed.

She looked up when the door swung shut behind me. Didn’t take it off. Didn’t make a thing of it. Just held my eyes for a beat, her fingers tightening on the mug, and then her gaze dropped back to the coffee like the eye contact had been all the greeting she’d needed.

I moved to the counter. The coffee pot was half-full, the glass still warm from the burner underneath. I poured without speaking, the liquid hitting the mug with a sound that filled the silence because the silence was the only thing in the room that needed filling. The smell hit me—burnt, bitter, the funk of coffee that had been sitting too long on a hot plate—and I breathed it in and let it sit in my lungs like something I was trying to memorize.

I leaned back against the sink. One hip against the edge, boots planted on the linoleum, the mug warming my palms through the ceramic. The vinyl was playing somewhere down the hall—something low and old, a guitar line I couldn’t name threading through the walls in a rhythm that felt like it had been recorded in a room smaller than this one. A prospect was scrubbing a table in the next room. I could hear the wet scrape of the brush against wood, the intermittent splash of water hitting a bucket, the low grunt he made every time he switched angles. A senior member’s voice cut through from the corridor—half-hearted orders about something I didn’t catch, the words compressed by distance into a tone rather than language.

My forearm was visible where my sleeve had rolled up. The cut from the fairgrounds ran pink and tight along the skin, not fully healed, the edges pulling when I flexed my wrist to adjust my grip on the mug. I’d left the bandage off. The tape had been pulling at the edges when it got wet, and wet happened in a kitchen, and I’d decided the air was better than the tape. The cut looked worse than it was. Clean. Straight. The kind of mark that would fade to white in a few months and join the collection on my forearm like something that had always been there.

“You up?” I said.

She took a sip. Held the mug at her lips for a second longer than she needed to, and I watched the steam fog the lower half of her face before she set it down.

“Been up.”

Her voice was rough. Morning-rough, the rough quality of a throat that hasn’t found its range yet. She’d tied her hair back. Not all of it—strands had escaped around her temples and along the nape of her neck, curling in the damp heat from the coffee. The bruise along her ribs was hidden under the cut, but I could see the careful way she held herself when she shifted her weight on the metal chair—that slight hesitation before the movement finished, the economy of someone who knew exactly where the damage lived and was working around it.

Boots thudded past the kitchen doorway. Heavy, measured, the rhythm of someone moving with purpose through a building that hadn’t fully woken up yet. Lila’s fingers curled tighter around the mug. Not white-knuckle. Just a slight compression, the tendons standing a little straighter under the skin, and then they eased when the footsteps faded down the corridor. Her eyes didn’t leave the coffee. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t tense. Just registered the sound and absorbed it and kept breathing the way she’d been breathing since the fence.

I watched the cut on her shoulders. The leather was dark where it caught the fluorescent light, the club’s colors dull against the black, and the way it draped across her frame looked wrong and right in equal measure. Too big. Too heavy. The sleeves pooled around her wrists where her hands came out to hold the mug, and the contrast of it—the softness of her fingers against the hardness of the leather—sat in the room like something neither of us was going to name.

Neither of us filled the silence.

The vinyl kept playing. The prospect kept scrubbing. The coffee in my mug cooled by degrees, and I didn’t drink it fast enough to keep it hot and didn’t care that it was going cold because the temperature of the coffee was the least important thing happening in the room. Outside, a bike rumbled to life in the lot. The sound built from a cough to a growl, someone warming an engine that had sat overnight in the cold, and the vibration carried through the foundation and into the soles of my boots the way it always did. Then another bike. Then a third. The compound waking up the way it woke up every morning—metal first, then men, then the rhythm of a building finding its pulse after hours of standing still.

The motor oil smell bled through the walls. Always did. Baked into the concrete, layered under the coffee and the vinyl and the wet-dog funk of the mop bucket in the next room. I breathed it. Had been breathing it for fifteen years. Had stopped noticing it was there until I watched Lila take a slow pull from her mug and her nose crinkle slightly at the edges, the way it always did when something hit her that she wasn’t expecting, and I realized she was smelling it for the first time or the hundredth time and either way it was new to her in a way it would never be new to me again.

She set her mug down. The ceramic made a soft click against the metal table, and the sound was small in the quiet and both of us heard it.

“You want more?” I asked.

She shook her head. Once. Not looking at me. Looking at the cut on my forearm instead, her eyes tracing the line of it the way they traced everything—reading the damage, cataloging it, filing it under handled or not handled based on criteria I hadn’t figured out yet.

“It’s fine,” she said.

I drank what was left in my mug. Cold now, the bitterness sitting at the back of my tongue like something that had given up trying to be anything else. The vinyl shifted to something slower. The guitar line dropped to a lower register, the notes coming farther apart, and the space between them filled with the sound of the prospect’s brush against the table and the distant rev of an engine in the lot, and neither of us felt the need to fill it with anything else.

Lila’s hands stayed on the mug. Her thumbs traced the chip in the rim—a small crescent missing near the handle, the ceramic worn smooth from years of the same motion—and I watched her fingers move and didn’t say anything because there wasn’t anything to say. The cut was on her shoulders. My cut. The one with the patch that meant something in territory that ran on rules like ours, and she was wearing it in the kitchen at five in the morning with coffee going cold in a chipped mug and her hair coming loose around her face, and the domesticity of it sat so strange against the compound backdrop that for a moment I couldn’t find the angle.

Then I stopped looking for one. The cut was where it was. She was where she was. The kitchen hummed around us with its ordinary noise, and neither of us moved to break whatever was holding because breaking it would have cost more than holding it did.

So we held it. Her in the cut. Me against the sink. The vinyl playing through the walls and the bikes rumbling in the lot and the motor oil smell baking through the concrete, and the quiet between us ran long enough that it stopped being absence and started being its own kind of answer.