Page 5 of Reaper

My free hand found the radio clipped at my shoulder. Two short clicks. The response came back two seconds later: two clicks. Clean. The perimeter was holding. Nobody following.

Her boots scraped the concrete as she matched my stride. Not a scrape from hesitation. From effort. The heel on those boots was just high enough to throw her balance off on uneven ground, and the corridor wasn’t built for walking in anything but work boots. She compensated. Adjusted. Kept up.

About halfway down, where the bass thump from the main stage wall was loudest, she pulled enough breath to speak.

“Who was he?”

Three words. Voice steadier than it had any right to be. Low enough that I almost didn’t catch it over the thump of the bass.

I didn’t answer. Didn’t look at her. My eyes were on the far end of the corridor, where the second door waited—heavy aluminum, propped open by another cinder block, another of my guys standing sentry. Younger than Tank. Leaner. I couldn’t read his road name from here, but I knew the cut. Knew the posture. Club. That was enough.

We reached the stack of folded event tables piled against the shed wall. Twenty of them, maybe more, metal legs tangled, tabletops layered like playing cards. I steered her around them with a slight pressure on her arm, guiding her through the narrow gap between table edges and concrete. She didn’t complain. Didn’t ask again. Just followed the pressure and kept moving.

The guy at the second door stepped aside without a word. Same nod. Same assessment. His eyes tracked the woman for half a second longer than they needed to, and I filed that away without changing expression. Not my problem right now.

We came out into the gravel lot behind the festival perimeter, and the cold hit full-force. No bonfires here. No bodies. No orange light turning everything into something softer than it was. Just work trucks parked in an uneven row, a dumpster overflowing with cardboard and empty cups, and a single floodlight on a pole throwing hard white light across fifty feet of gravel and packed dirt.

I stopped.

Released her arm.

Turned to face her fully for the first time since the fence.

Her skeleton hoodie caught the floodlight and threw it back, the cheap glitter catching in harsh lines across her shoulders. Up close, I could see the pattern better—black fabric with white bone outlines, something mass-produced and forgettable. A costume for not standing out. Her dark hair had come loose from whatever she’d tied it back with, strands pushed against her cheeks by the wind.

I keyed the radio.

“Package clear.”

The response came back immediate. One click. Acknowledged.

I looked past her, mapping the lot. Two exits: the service road we’d just come through, and the main access drive twenty yards to our left, gravel giving way to asphalt where it met the county road. No vehicles moving on either one. No headlights. No sound except the distant festival thump and the low hum of the floodlight’s transformer.

The calculation landed while I was still looking at the access drive.

Someone had sent that man. Not to a festival. To her.

The skeleton hoodie was too generic to be coincidence. The burner phone with its dark screen. The surgical timing—moving only when the crowd noise peaked, closing distance with patience that came from rehearsal. He hadn’t been hunting a random woman in a Halloween crowd. He’d been hunting her. Specifically her. He knew she’d be here. Knew the festival layout well enough to use the hayride queue as cover. Knew the crowd patterns, the noise cycles, the blind spots where a man could get close without being seen.

He’d been sent.

Which meant she had enemies. The kind that send men with no IDs and matte-finish nines to public events.

I looked back at her face. The question was there, sitting behind my teeth, heavy enough that I could feel the shape of it against my tongue. Not “Who was he?” The real question. The one that started with “Who are you?” and ended with “Who wants you dead badly enough to risk a hit at a county festival with two hundred witnesses?”

She was still waiting for an answer, standing in the cold gravel with her glitter skeleton hoodie and her phone clutched in one white-knuckled hand.

I didn’t give her one.

The floodlight hummed. The festival thumped. Somewhere beyond the tree line, the hayride wagon made another slow circuit through the dark, carrying its load of costumed families and drunk couples and kids who hadn’t seen what happened behind the fence.

She’d seen it.

And now she was standing in a gravel lot with a man who’d put another man on the ground without making a sound, and the only thing between her and whatever came next was the question I hadn’t asked yet and the answer she hadn’t given.

Her chest rose. Fell. Rose again.

I watched her breathe, and I waited.