Page 9 of Reaper

He’d left it on my counter at the coffee shop, ordered a black coffee he never drank, and asked if I’d heard from my brother, Ethan. I’d said no. That had even been mostly true. Detective Reyes had said call me if you do, and I’d nodded, and I’d told myself it was nothing, the way you tell yourself the check-engine light is nothing right up until the engine stops.

I hadn’t called. Three weeks of silence from Ethan, broken only by one call three days ago that hadn’t sounded like him at all, and I still hadn’t called the number on that card, because calling it felt like admitting something was actually wrong instead of just quiet, and quiet I could live with. Wrong I couldn’t.

Now there was blood dried into a stranger’s knuckles four feet away, and a mark on my name that six armed men had just watched get declared like scripture, and the man who’d have to explain why a Sheriff’s detective had a woman’s name written into whatever file this was going to become — Ethan — was somewhere out there in the same dark that had sent a man with a matte-finish nine to a hayride queue.

I didn’t take the card out. Didn’t look at it. Just felt the corner of it through the denim of my pocket, soft and present, and made myself a promise I already suspected I wouldn’t be allowed to keep: I wasn’t going to be the reason my brother’s name came up in this room. Not until I understood what he’d done. Not until I had to.

Dox was watching me from the head of the workbench. Not unkindly. The way you watch someone you haven’t figured out yet.

“You gonna stand there all night?” he said.

I looked at the empty glass in my hand. Set it down on the bench next to the Jim Beam, the way you set down something you’ve decided to stop needing.

“No,” I said.

I didn’t know yet what I was going to do instead. But I knew it wasn’t going to involve that card, and it wasn’t going to involve telling the man who’d just declared me his club’s problem that I already had a very good idea who might have sent the man to the hayride fence.

Not yet.

Chapter 4

REAPER

I woke up with my hand on my belt. Habit. The room came back in pieces: low ceiling, block walls, single caged bulb throwing a weak yellow light across concrete that hadn’t been swept in longer than I’d been alive. Diesel smell bleeding through the vent grate, thick enough to taste.

Lila was already on her feet.

She stood in the center of the room with her keys bunched in her right fist, the metal edges digging into her palm hard enough that I could see the tendons standing out along her wrist. Her shoes scuffed against the floor as she shifted her weight, back and forth, like she was working up to something. No glitter skeleton hoodie anymore. She wore the same dark jeans from the festival, a plain gray sweater that might have been clean yesterday, hair pulled back in that same messy knot that kept coming loose. Her face was set. Chin up. Eyes clear.

“I have a job,” she said. The words came out steady, measured. Not a plea. A statement of fact. “I have an apartment. Rent due on the first. People who will notice if I don’t show up. My boss, for starters. My neighbor feeds my cat when I’m gone overnight, and she’ll call the landlord if I’m not back by tomorrow. That’s how it works.”

I stayed by the door. Arms loose at my sides, weight balanced evenly, the way I stand when I’m not standing anywhere in particular. The split skin across my knuckles had dried overnight, the blood turned dark and crusted into the creases of my fingers. I hadn’t washed it off. There hadn’t been time.

“I don’t need a motorcycle club standing between me and my own life,” she said. “I appreciate what you did. I do. But whatever that was at the festival—mugger, stalker, I don’t know—it doesn’t mean I disappear into some concrete box and let you people decide what happens next.”

She kept talking. Listed her reasons one after another, each one practical, each one rooted in the ordinary machinery of a life that had been running just fine until last night. A Tuesday shift at the coffee shop downtown. A yoga class she’d already paid for. A library book due back on Friday. Small things. The kind of things that hold a person’s world together when nothing else does.

I let her finish. Every word. Didn’t interrupt. Didn’t move. Just watched her mouth shape each sentence and her eyes hold mine while she did it, and the part of me that wasn’t listening to the words was listening to the room instead: the low hum of the generator somewhere beyond the wall, the distant creak of the building’s frame settling into morning cold, the sound of her breathing between sentences.

When she stopped, the silence felt earned.

“That wasn’t a mugger,” I said.

She held her ground. Keys still tight in her fist.

“That man knew where you’d be before the crowd peaked. Knew how to dress to disappear into Halloween noise. Knew the exact window to move, when the PA system was loudest and the drunkest people were between him and every exit. That’s not desperation. That’s rehearsal.”

I took one step forward. Not toward her. Just into the room, enough to close the distance without crowding.

“He had a burner phone with no recent calls. A weapon with the serial number filed off. The way he stood—weight balanced, hand ready, eyes never blinking—that’s trained behavior. Contract work. The kind that gets paid whether the target walks away or not.”

Her grip tightened, keys clicking against each other.

“Running without knowing who holds the contract gets you killed faster,” I said. “Not eventually. Faster.”

She didn’t like it. I could see it in the way her shoulders drew inward, just a fraction, like she was bracing against the words. But her chin stayed up. Her mouth closed. She absorbed it the way she’d absorbed everything since the fence: quiet, controlled, the fear sitting somewhere behind her eyes but not driving.

“No outside calls on your phone,” I said. “Not to your boss, not to your neighbor, not to anyone. They track calls. They track patterns. One call from a number they’ve got flagged, and this location is compromised. You want to send a message, you give it to me. I decide how it gets delivered.”