Page 13 of Reaper

Once. She didn’t make it.

Two sentences. He’d said them like a man passing over a stone he’d been carrying so long the shape of it had become part of his hand. I hadn’t asked what happened to her. Hadn’t asked her name, or how long ago, or whether the mark he’d put on me tonight was the same mark he’d put on her once, in some other room like this one, before whatever came for her arrived faster than his hand could reach the grip at his hip.

I’d seen it before, on my own face, in mirrors I stopped looking at too closely. The kind of grief that doesn’t announce itself—it just sits in a person’s jaw and waits to be noticed.

I lay on the cot after he went quiet, staring at the ceiling, and I thought about Ethan.

Three weeks. That’s how long it had been since his voice had sounded like his own voice on the phone instead of someone else wearing it. I kept coming back to that the way you keep pressing a bruise to see if it still hurts — three weeks of silence, and then a call three days ago that hadn’t sounded like a request. Meet someone at the festival. Alone. Near the hayride. It’s the only way to help me.

I’d gone because he was my brother and because some part of me, the part that had been raising him more than our mother ever had since I was nineteen and he was twelve, still believed that if I just did the thing he asked, whatever storm he’d walked into would finally have a door out of it.

I hadn’t known the storm had a name. Hollow Kings. I hadn’t known it had a weapon with the serial number filed off, or a man who’d rehearsed the exact width of a hayride crowd well enough to disappear into it.

I had known, somewhere under the place where I kept the things I wasn’t ready to look at, that Ethan wouldn’t ask me to meet a stranger alone unless the alternative was worse than whatever he was sending me into. That was the part I couldn’t forgive myself for yet. Not that I’d gone. That I’d known, in the specific quiet way you know a thing without letting yourself say it out loud, and I’d gone anyway, because not going meant admitting how bad it had gotten, and I’d spent three weeks choosing not to admit that.

The man against the wall hadn’t moved in an hour. I could hear him breathing, slow and even—the control of someone guarding something he’d already decided he couldn’t lose twice.

“Reaper,” I said, into the dark, not sure until the word left my mouth whether I meant to say it.

“Yeah.”

“If I told you I already had an idea who sent that man. Not a name. Just — a guess. Something I’m not ready to say out loud yet.” I kept my eyes on the ceiling. Easier than looking at him. “Would you make me say it before I’m ready?”

The silence stretched long enough that I thought he wasn’t going to answer.

“No,” he said finally. “But I’d know you were holding it. And I’d watch you hold it, until you couldn’t anymore.”

That was fair. That was, I thought, probably the most honest thing anyone had said to me in three weeks.

“Okay,” I said.

I didn’t tell him about Ethan that night. Didn’t tell him about the card in my pocket with a detective’s name on it, or the four days of silence before the call, or the particular quality of dread that had been sitting in my chest since long before a man in a skeleton hoodie ever stepped into a hayride queue. I held it the way he’d said I would. Turned it over in the dark, testing its edges, waiting for the moment when holding it alone cost more than handing it to someone else.

I fell asleep before I found that moment. Somewhere in the last hour before dawn, exhaustion did what three weeks of vigilance hadn’t managed, and the counting finally stopped.

Chapter 5

REAPER

I woke up with the diesel still in my lungs and the taste of concrete on my tongue. The cot springs whined under me, loud in the quiet, and I lay there listening to the silence on the other side of the room where Lila should have been.

The empty mattress stared back. Cold. Undented.

I sat up. The clock on the wall said 5:47. Early. Too early for anyone to be moving in a building that ran on night hours, but the corridor outside was quiet in a way that meant empty, not asleep. I swung my boots to the floor and stood. The dried blood on my knuckles had cracked overnight, flaking into the lines of my palms. I wiped them against my jeans and didn’t look at the stain.

The safe house common area sat three doors down from the room I’d been holding. Nobody had come for her through the night. The fence-line incident had stayed what it was: a measurement. A feeler. Not the real move.

I pushed through the steel door and the kitchen smell hit me full.

Motor oil. Stale cigarettes ground into the linoleum. Diesel residue bleeding through the vent grate. Underneath it, the sourness of old beer and a refrigerator overdue for defrosting.

The room was small. Concrete block walls painted some color that had started out beige and ended up closer to the inside of a lung. A counter ran along the east wall, cluttered with takeout containers and a stack of paper plates gone soft at the edges. The range sat at the far end, burners crusted, the flex line behind it patched in two places with electrical tape gone brittle with heat. A scarred table occupied the center, four mismatched chairs pulled at odd angles.

The dartboard hung on the north wall.

Scarred cork, the kind that had seen ten thousand throws. The bullseye was punched through to the backing board, red paint flaked around the edges. Three darts stuck in the outer ring, flights bent from too many impacts. Beside it, a shelf held what passed for tools here: a socket set missing half its pieces, shop rags stiff with grease.

Weak morning light came through the slatted window above the sink, cutting pale strips across the floor.