Page 41 of Reaper

Not soft. Not tentative. Two people who’d been standing in the same air too long, until the air stopped being enough. His mouth was warm. His lower lip had that slight unevenness I’d noticed the first time, and I felt it against mine, the texture of a body I’d been cataloging without meaning to since the fence. His hand stayed on my jaw. His other arm came around my waist, careful around my ribs, the pressure gentle in a way that told me he was paying attention even when paying attention was the last thing his body wanted to do.

The kiss deepened. His tongue found mine, and the taste of him was coffee and something underneath it that was just him, just Reaper, the flavor of a man who’d spent the morning barking orders in a room full of blood and wasn’t sorry about any of it. I gripped his shirt. Knuckles pressing into the muscle underneath, and I felt his pulse through the fabric where my fingers dug in, fast and strong and absolutely fucking real.

He broke the kiss. Not pulling away. Just enough space that his forehead rested against mine, his breath warm on my lips, and the hand at my cheek didn’t move. Didn’t loosen. Held me there in the bad light with the drill whining down the corridor and the coffee maker hissing around the corner, neither of us in a hurry to break it.

Then he steered me by the hand into the common room.

His fingers laced through mine. Not gripping. Just there, contact, his palm warm against mine where the blood from the prospect’s shoulder had dried and washed off and dried again. We crossed the threshold together, and the two prospects by the mop bucket froze mid-motion. The one with the trash bag stopped walking. The patched member near the locked side door turned, saw us, and his hand went still on the padlock he’d been about to relock.

Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. The room held its breath the way rooms do when something shifts in the chemistry and everyone present knows they’re witnessing the shift and nobody’s sure yet what it means for what comes next.

Reaper stood there with me at his side. His hand was still at my cheek for one more beat—thumb tracing the line one last time, the tape rough against my skin—and then it dropped to his side and his fingers found mine again and squeezed once, hard, the kind of pressure that wasn’t a question.

The patched member looked at Reaper. Looked at me. Looked at our joined hands. His face did something complicated—not quite a smile, not quite a nod, an assessment and a confirmation delivered in the same expression. Then he gave a single nod, sharp, the nod of a man who’d seen enough to know what he was looking at, and turned back to the padlock. The metal clicked. The lock seated. He tested it once with his palm, felt the solid resistance, and walked away toward the kitchen without another glance.

The prospects followed. One after the other. The one with the mop went back to mopping. The one with the trash bag kept walking. Nobody looked at us directly. Nobody made a sound. They just went back to work the way men go back to work when the thing that interrupted them wasn’t an interruption at all but a fact being established, and facts don’t require commentary. They just are.

The claim landed in the room like a door being shut. Quiet. Uncontested. The finality of something that had been building since that room and the cot and the amber light and the woman sitting on the edge of the bed with her sweater off and her eyes dry and her brother’s blood on the trailer floor three miles east of a fairground that didn’t exist anymore.

Reaper didn’t announce anything. Didn’t need to. His hand in mine was announcement enough, and the room had heard it, and the hearing was its own kind of answer.

I stood beside him in the common room with the mop water turning pink in the bucket and the coffee maker hissing around the corner and the drill still whining down the corridor, and for the first time since the hayride fence, the bruise along my ribs didn’t pull when I breathed.

It just was. And I was. And the man beside me with the taped knuckles and the cut on his forearm and the particular set to his mouth that had finally, finally softened was exactly where he was supposed to be.

We stayed there. His hand in mine. The room working around us. The claim settling into the concrete the way blood settles into concrete—present, certain, absolutely fucking real.

They let me see him two days later, in a room that wasn’t a cell but wasn’t not one either — a spare bunk room at the back of the compound with a single window too high to reach and a chair someone had placed exactly six feet from the bed, like they’d measured the distance a sister needed to keep a conversation honest without letting it turn into something else.

Ethan looked smaller than I remembered him. That was the ribs talking, probably, and the bruising along his jaw that hadn’t finished yellowing, and the way a person shrinks when they’ve spent two days being told, in careful detail, exactly how close they came to costing someone their life. He didn’t stand when I came in. Didn’t reach for me. Just watched me cross the room and sit in the chair someone had measured out, and waited, the way you wait for a verdict you already suspect.

“They tell you the deal?” he asked. His voice still had the crack in it from the trailer.

“Dox told me.” I kept my hands folded in my lap, the way I’d learned to keep them when I needed somewhere safe to put the shaking. “Two years working it off. Under supervision. No contact with anyone connected to the Kings, ever, and no contact with Teller’s old crowd, not even to spit on them. Reyes gets what’s left of the case file, and in exchange the county doesn’t look too hard at what happened to a man who tried to have his own club’s protection killed.”

“And me and you?”

That was the real question. I’d known it was coming since Dox laid out the terms, and I still hadn’t found the answer, not fully, not until I was sitting six feet from him with two years of careful silence stretching out between us like a bridge neither of us had finished building.

“I’m not cutting you off,” I said. “I thought about it. I want you to know I thought about it seriously, because you scared me worse than anyone in a skeleton mask ever could, and it wasn’t a stranger who did it.” I made myself hold his eyes. “But you didn’t sell me. Not the way Teller did. Teller’s the one who gave them the safe house — his own memory from his own years in the club, nothing you told him and nothing you knew about. What you did was agree to send me somewhere you’d been promised was just a scare, a message, and you were wrong about how far they’d let it go. That’s not the same as handing them my address twice. Reyes was clear about that, and I believe him, because you had a hundred easier ways to save yourself, and you didn’t take any of them. You tried to thread something that couldn’t be threaded, and you got it wrong, and people almost died because of how wrong you got it. That’s not nothing. I’m not pretending it’s nothing.”

His jaw worked. The same tell I’d learned to read on someone else’s face this week, and seeing it on my brother’s instead landed strange, like finding a stranger’s habit worn by someone I thought I knew completely.

“So what is it,” he said, “if it’s not nothing?”

“It’s two years,” I said. “It’s you writing to me, if the club allows it, and me deciding each time whether I write back. It’s me not driving out here every visiting day like everything’s fine, because it isn’t fine, and it’s not going to be fine for a while, maybe a long while. But it’s not nothing, either. It’s not the door shutting all the way.” I took a breath that didn’t come easy with the tape still wrapped around my ribs. “You’re still my brother. You’re just not allowed near my life again until you’ve proven you understand what almost happened to it.”

He didn’t cry. I don’t think either of us had it in us left, not after everything the last few days had taken out of both our chests. He just nodded, slow, the nod of someone accepting a sentence they know is lighter than they deserve and heavier than they wanted.

“Okay,” he said.

I stood. My ribs pulled, the way they still did every time I moved too fast, and I let myself feel it instead of pushing past it, the way I was learning to let myself feel most things now instead of holding them behind my teeth until they turned into something worse.

At the door, I stopped.

“Ethan.”

He looked up.