Page 16 of Reaper

“It’s fine,” she said.

“It’s not fine. It’s spreading.”

I reached for her wrist. Not grabbing. Open palm, fingers extended, the way you reach for something you’re asking permission to touch. She didn’t pull away. Her skin was cool from the water, damp under my fingers as I turned her arm to get a better look at the bruise.

The discoloration ran from just below her elbow to midway down her forearm, a mottled map of purple-green that darkened at the center. The edges were bluish, the capillaries broken in a pattern that suggested something blunt and fast.

My thumb pressed the edge of the bruise. Careful. Testing the give of the tissue, checking for swelling, for the firmness that meant deeper damage. Her skin was warm under the coolness of the water. Soft. The muscle beneath tensed slightly at my touch, then relaxed, and I could feel her pulse against the pad of my thumb where the veins crossed her wrist.

Steady. Strong. The same rhythm I’d felt through my jacket on the bike ride from the festival, pressed against my back as we cut through the cold dark toward the clubhouse.

The contact held.

Longer than it needed to. My thumb resting on the edge of the bruise, her wrist turned in my grip, the kitchen around us holding its breath the way rooms do when something is happening that has nothing to do with the walls or the floor or the smell of diesel in the air. The older member had stopped filing. I could feel the absence of the rasp like a sound that had been there and wasn’t anymore. The prospect stood in the corridor doorway, radio silent on his belt, watching us with the wide-eyed stillness of a young man who knows he’s witnessing something he shouldn’t be and can’t look away.

Neither of us moved to end it. My hand on her wrist, her arm turned in my grip, the bruise between us like a language neither of us had decided how to speak. Her breathing had changed. Subtle. The rhythm the same but deeper, each inhale drawing a fraction more air than the one before, and I could feel it in the slight expansion of her ribs where they pressed against the fabric of her sweater.

Neither of us moved. Two people standing close enough to share body heat, in a room full of men who weren’t looking at each other.

Then the radio cracked.

The sound hit the kitchen like something breaking. Static first, sharp and white, then the prospect’s voice cutting through it, low and clipped, the words compressed by the channel’s limited bandwidth into something that barely carried past the doorway.

“Vehicle. Two blocks out on Miller. Engine cold. No plates front or rear. Been sitting six hours minimum. No movement.”

I released her arm. My hand came away from her wrist and the cool air hit the space between us and the absence of contact felt colder than the contact had felt warm. Her arm dropped to her side. She didn’t rub the bruise. Didn’t flex her fingers. Just stood there with water drying on her skin and her eyes on mine for half a second before they moved to the doorway where the radio had spoken.

A dull pressure built behind my eyes that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the math that had just changed.

I crossed to the prospect in four steps. Took the radio from his belt without asking. His hand moved to let me, reflex more than permission, and I keyed the mic and held it to my mouth.

“Make and position. Specific.”

The voice came back. Same man—one of the perimeter scouts, positioned on the roof of the auto shop across from the safe house’s eastern exposure. “Black SUV. Chevy Tahoe, third-gen. Parked at the junction of Miller and Cedar, driver’s side facing the access road. Windows tinted past legal. No movement inside that I can confirm. Been there since at least 0200.”

I keyed the radio. “Hold position. Don’t approach. Don’t signal. Radio silence unless it moves.”

“Copy.”

I handed the radio back to the prospect. His fingers closed around it, and I turned and faced the wall.

Six hours. Minimum.

The vehicle had been there before dawn. Before the first gray light had hit the slatted window above the sink. Before Lila had woken up on the empty cot down the hall. Before I’d found her at the dartboard with the clipping in her hands and the morning light cutting strips across the floor.

Six hours of a cold engine and tinted windows and a man—or men—sitting in the dark watching a building they had no business watching, counting the hours until something gave them a window.

I stood still. Facing the concrete block wall, close enough that I could see the texture of the paint, the hairline cracks running between the blocks where the foundation had settled, the faint shadow of something written there once and painted over. My breath came even. Controlled. The way it always did when the calculation was running and the variables were stacking up faster than I could solve them.

A contract doesn’t sit for six hours without a reason. A hitter doesn’t park two blocks from a target and wait through the coldest part of the night unless they’re waiting for something specific. A shift change. A pattern. A moment when the door opens and the woman steps through it and the distance between the vehicle and the target gets short enough to cover in the time it takes to draw, aim and fire.

They were patient. That was the thing. Patient in a way that made the man at the festival look like an amateur by comparison. Patient enough to wait through dawn, through morning, through whatever hours it took for the safe house to reveal its rhythm.

I turned back toward the room.

My eyes found Lila first. She stood by the sink, one hand resting on the stainless steel edge, the other at her side where my fingers had been seconds ago. Her expression hadn’t changed. Still steady. Still measuring. But something in the set of her shoulders had tightened—not fear, not quite, but the alertness of someone who’d heard the radio and understood, without being told, that the math had shifted.

Then my eyes moved to the door. The steel frame. The deadbolt I’d thrown last night, the sound of it carrying through eight feet of space between us. The same door stood between her and whatever was parked two blocks away on Miller and Cedar, engine cold, windows tinted, waiting.