Page 29 of Reaper

I turned.

Lila was behind the barrel.

Exactly where I’d told her to be. Crouched low, back against the curved steel, knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped around them. Dust on her face, in her hair—a smudge across her cheek where gravel or headlight glass had caught her. Her eyes were fixed on me. Not the bodies. Not the blood. On me.

Her hands were shaking.

I could see it from twenty feet away. The tremor in her fingers where they gripped her own arms, the vibration of a body that had just watched three men die in fifteen seconds and was trying to decide what to do with the information. Her breathing was shallow, each inhale short, held a beat too long before releasing.

I was not shaking.

My hands hung at my sides, blood on the right, split knuckles, the forearm cut already drying. My breathing was even, my pulse steady—the absence of shock so complete it felt like a fact, the way you feel the weight of a weapon in your hand.

She stood.

One smooth motion. Boots finding the gravel, weight shifting from crouch to standing in the time it took my lungs to empty, and she was moving. Across the yard. Twenty feet of packed dirt and scattered stone between the barrel and where I stood, and she covered it without running, without hurrying, each step measured and even the way her steps always were when the situation demanded something she hadn’t known she had.

She stopped in front of me.

Close enough that I could smell the dust in her hair. Close enough that the heat of her body reached me through the cold air, and I could see the pulse in her throat, slow and strong beneath the skin. Her eyes found mine. Held. No flinch. No step back. No recoil from the blood on my jacket or the dead man at my feet or the particular stillness of a body that had just killed without hesitation and wasn’t sorry about it.

She placed her palm flat against my chest.

Right hand. Fingers spread wide, the heel of her hand pressed directly over my sternum where my heart beat steady and strong beneath the muscle. No words. No sound. Just her hand on my chest, warm through the fabric of my shirt, and the contact was so immediate that I felt it in my jaw, in my temples, in the place behind my sternum where something had been tight since the radio crackled and hadn’t loosened until her palm found skin.

I went still.

Not the kind of still that comes from control. The kind that comes from surrender. My breath held. My hands stayed at my sides. I didn’t reach for her. Didn’t pull her in. Didn’t do anything but stand there with her hand on my chest and the yard around us holding its breath.

She let her hand stay there.

Five seconds. Ten. Her fingers didn’t move. Didn’t curl into the fabric. Didn’t trace the scars she could feel through the thin cotton. Just rested there, palm flat, feeling my heartbeat the way you feel something you’re trying to memorize, and the steadiness of it seemed to surprise her—not that it was steady, but that it was steady after what she’d just watched, and the implication of that sat between us in the silence.

The prospect groaned behind us.

Wet. Ragged. The sound of a young man trying not to scream while his shoulder bled onto gravel, and the noise broke whatever had been holding between Lila’s hand and my chest. She turned. Looked at the kid. Looked back at me. Her hand came away from my shirt, and the absence of it felt colder than the contact had felt warm.

“Someone needs to help him,” she said. Her voice was steady. Level. The steadiness that comes from deciding that fear is a luxury, and you don’t have time for it.

I nodded. Once. Sharp.

I keyed the radio. “Shoulder wound, deep, bleeding heavy. Get Doc rolling from the compound now.” Three miles. Twenty minutes if he pushed it, and he would.

She moved toward the prospect without waiting for permission. Boots on gravel, quick now, measured, and she dropped to her knees beside him, her hands already finding the wound, fingers pressing into the split flesh the way the kid had been trying to press into it himself, and the blood came through her fingers and she didn’t flinch.

I turned back to the gate.

The steel was ruined. The left hinge torn free, the crossbar bent inward at a forty-five-degree angle, the right post splintered where the truck’s grille had driven through it. Gravel sprayed in every direction. Glass from the shattered headlight glittered in the security light, sharp edges catching the yellow glow and throwing it back fractured. The truck sat half-through the gap, engine ticking as it cooled, the driver’s door still hanging open where the first man had cleared it.

Beyond the broken fence, the scrub pine stood dark and still, and a particular quiet felt wrong for what had just happened here.

The Hollow Kings had just walked onto Devil’s Mark ground.

Not a probe. Not a feeler. Not a cautious approach meant to test defenses. Three men through a gate at speed, weapons drawn, moving with the particular confidence of people who expected to be inside the building before anyone could stop them. The kind of move that doesn’t get made unless someone is very sure of their information or very desperate to prove a point.

Either way, the club would have to answer.

Not eventually. Not when the intel was clearer or the money trail was mapped or the brother’s location was confirmed. Now. The broken gate was a declaration written in steel and blood, and declarations like that only get answered one way in territory that runs on the kind of rules we run on.