Page 25 of Reaper

I dropped into the cracked leather chair. The frame creaked under my weight, springs complaining, and the sound was loud in the quiet. My elbows found my knees. Hands hanging between them, fingers loose, the dried blood on my knuckles catching the light in dull brown flakes.

We sat like that. Eight feet between us. Her shadow stretched thin against the wall behind the cot. Mine hunched in the corner by the window, angular, hard-edged, the shape of a man built for one kind of work and doing another kind instead.

The silence ran.

Long enough that the refrigerator in the kitchen three doors down kicked on with a metallic rattle that carried through the walls. Long enough that my jaw started to ache from holding it shut. Long enough that the quality of the quiet changed from absence to presence, and the presence had teeth.

“You’re keeping me prisoner.”

Her voice hit the room like something dropped. Not loud. Not accusatory. Just there, simple and direct, the way she said everything. Three words. Delivered flat, without heat, and somehow that made them land harder than if she’d shouted.

I looked at her. Really looked. The bruise along her left ribs. The way her sweater hung off her frame. The set of her mouth—level, controlled, the lower lip caught between her teeth for half a second before releasing. Her eyes were on mine. Steady. Waiting.

“I’m keeping you alive,” I said.

“Those aren’t different things to you.”

“No. They’re not.”

She shifted on the cot. The springs whined. One hand came up, fingers pushing a strand of hair behind her ear, slow and deliberate.

“My brother is either running or he’s dead, or he walked in willingly,” she said. “I’ve been sitting with that for eight months. Not the specifics. The shape of it. The way his voice changed on the phone. The way he stopped coming by. The way he looked the last time I saw him—like someone had reached inside his chest and taken something out, and he didn’t know how to ask for it back.” Her hands twisted together in her lap. “I should have pushed harder. I should have made him tell me. I should have done something besides sit in my apartment and wait for him to call and pretend everything was fine when I knew it wasn’t.”

“You couldn’t have stopped this.”

“I could have tried.”

“Trying doesn’t change the math. The Hollow Kings don’t run contracts because someone’s sister asked nicely. They run contracts because someone owes money or someone saw something or someone made a choice that put them on the wrong side of a line. Your brother made choices. Those choices have consequences. You don’t get to carry the consequences because you share blood with the man who made them.”

The words came out harder than I meant them. Stripped of the control I usually wrapped around everything, the edges raw in a way that made something tighten low in my chest the moment I heard them. I hadn’t planned to say it. Hadn’t planned any of this. The room was too small, the air was too close, and the woman sitting eight feet away with a bruise along her ribs and a crescent moon in the meat of her palm was looking at me like I’d just confirmed something she’d been wondering about since the fence.

“You don’t get to decide what I carry,” she said.

“I’m not deciding. I’m telling you the truth. The truth is your brother’s choices put a target on your back. The truth is that target doesn’t care whether you pushed hard enough or asked the right questions or did everything you could. The target cares about one thing: eliminating the liability. And right now, that liability is you.”

She stood.

One smooth motion. Boots on the floor, the sound sharp in the quiet, and she was on her feet and the distance between us shrank from eight feet to four in the time it took my lungs to empty. Her eyes were level with mine where I sat in the cracked leather chair. Dark. Wide. Carrying something that had been building since the gravel lot and hadn’t found its way out until now.

“So, what am I supposed to do? Sit in this concrete box while you decide what happens next? Wait for my brother to call from wherever he is—if he’s anywhere—and hope the Hollow Kings don’t find him first? Hope you find him first? Hope someone finds him before whoever carved my name into a fence post decides they’ve been patient long enough?”

“You’re supposed to let me do my job.”

“Your job is killing people.”

The words landed between us. Heavy. Final. A truth that didn’t soften when spoken—it got harder, more certain, settling into the concrete like something that had always been there, and we’d just now noticed.

I didn’t deny it. Didn’t reach for the qualified version, the club-sanctioned version, the version that made what I did sound like something other than what it was. I just held her gaze and let the words sit there in the air between us, and the silence that followed was different from the silence before. Cleaner. The kind that comes after something true has been said and nobody’s pretending otherwise.

“That’s not all it is,” I said.

She moved. One step toward me. Then another. Close enough now that I could smell the shampoo in her hair, something floral underneath the diesel and concrete, and her hand came up, and her fingers found the dried blood on my knuckles. Not grabbing. Touching. Tracing the ridge where the skin had split behind the hayride fence, her fingertip warm against the cracked flakes, and the contact was so unexpected that my breath caught in a way I hadn’t prepared for.

“You’re afraid,” she said. Soft. Not a question. A confirmation. “Not of them. Of this. Of me being here. Of the mark being on me. You’re afraid because you’ve done this before, and it didn’t end the way it was supposed to.”

Something locked tight in my chest. Her finger was still on my knuckle, tracing the split skin, and the warmth of it was doing something to me that I didn’t have a name for and didn’t want to examine.

“Once,” I said. The word came out rough. Stripped. “She didn’t make it.”