Page 7 of Reaper
Heat crawls up my neck, burning my cheeks. I don't cover myself. I don't shrink into the seat. I hold his gaze until he finally turns his head and looks at me.
His eyes are dark, unreadable, but a muscle ticks tight in his jaw. He knows what I'm thinking. He knows exactly what he watched.
I break the eye contact first, turning my attention back to the road.
"Who was the man on my porch?"
"A man paid to kill you." His voice is flat. Clinical.
"A contractor."
"Yes."
The pieces click together. The threat. The surveillance. The impossibly perfect timing of a sniper taking a shot from a mile and a half away. He wasn't there to kill me. He was there to kill the man sent to kill me.
He's a guardian angel with a body count.
I don't ask the obvious question.Why were you watching me?
I don't ask because I already know the answer. He used me as bait. He sat on that ridge, watched me live my life, and waited until the contractor was standing on my front porch before he pulled the trigger.
I don't want to hear him confirm how close he let me get to dying.
The truck eats the miles. The sun climbs higher over the Bighorn Mountains, casting long, sharp shadows across the valley.
I pull the heavy canvas bag onto my lap. My hand rests over the bulge of the hardshell drive.
My audit.
Fourteen months of tracing offshore shell companies, encrypted crypto transfers, and phantom shipping manifests. I found the sanctions-evasion network.
I proved the crime.
And someone high up the food chain decided I needed to die before I filed the report.
Harrison keeps his eyes on the road. He drives with the same terrifying competence he uses to kill.
I'm sitting next to a lethal, ferociously capable man who watched me naked in a creek yesterday, saved my life this morning, and is now driving me into the unknown.
Fear should be the only emotion in the cab.
But as his hands rest on the steering wheel—large, steady, scarred—something deep and unfamiliar settles in my chest.
I'm not scared of him.
God help me, I want to see what else those hands can do.
THREE
The Exile
WYATT
The silence inside the cab of the truck is absolute.
We left the gravel access road ten miles back, but my body hasn't registered the shift to smooth asphalt. My nervous system is still vibrating. A dangerous, jagged hum running under my skin.
It isn't the adrenaline from the shot. That faded the moment we cleared the valley.
