Page 43 of Reaper

The radio cracked before the vinyl finished.

Static first. That thin hiss that lived in the channel between transmissions, the sound of empty air compressed into something that wasn’t quite silence. Then Gauge’s voice came through, low and clipped, each word landing with a particular flatness, a man who didn’t waste syllables when the math was clear.

“Reaper. Wire intercept. North strip. Name I haven’t heard before surfacing in chatter tied to the Kings’ territory. Not on any of our lists.”

I set my mug down on the counter without looking away from the doorway. The ceramic hit the laminate with a sound that was too loud for the quiet we’d been holding, and the coffee sloshed over the rim and pooled dark against the countertop. I didn’t wipe it. Didn’t move to catch it. Just stood there with my hand still on the mug and my eyes on the empty doorway and Gauge’s voice in my ear laying out coordinates I hadn’t asked for and didn’t need to because the name was the point and the territory was the point and everything else was logistics.

“Say again the name,” I said into the radio. My voice came out flat. The particular flatness that happened when the domestic slipped away and the work came back, and the transition was so seamless it barely registered as a transition at all.

Gauge repeated it. A name. Three syllables. Nothing I recognized from fifteen years of running territory and reading threats and memorizing the faces of men who thought they could take something that belonged to the club. The name sat in the channel between us, and the static filled the space around it, and I let it sit there long enough to make sure I’d heard it right.

“Territory reference is solid,” Gauge said. “Chatter’s fresh. Less than twelve hours old. They’re moving into the vacuum the Kings left. Not probing. Setting up.”

I crossed to the kitchen doorway. Three strides, boots on linoleum, the sound carrying in the small room because the vinyl had stopped, and the prospect had stopped scrubbing, and the only thing left was the hiss of the radio and the sound of my footsteps and Lila’s breathing somewhere behind me where I’d left her at the table with my cut on her shoulders and coffee going cold in a chipped mug.

I put my back to her. Planted myself in the doorway, one hand on the frame, the radio pressed to my mouth, and I listened. Gauge didn’t elaborate. Didn’t need to. The name. The territory. The fact that someone was moving into ground we’d just cleared with blood and broken bones and a fairground that didn’t exist anymore. The rest was implication, and implication was all either of us needed because the math hadn’t changed since the east gate went down. Someone walks onto Devil’s Mark territory, they answer, or the club is finished.

And I would be the one delivering the answer.

My hand dropped from the radio to my side. Close to my hip, close to the grip, the motion automatic the way breathing was automatic when the air got thin. The leather of my holster was warm from my body heat, the weapon inside it cooler, and my fingertips brushed the edge of the grip without drawing because drawing wasn’t the point yet. The point was the contact. The reminder. Something that had been hanging at my hip for fifteen years and would be hanging there when this was done.

Gauge went quiet. The channel hissed. Static filled the space where his voice had been, and I held the radio against my ear for three more seconds because three seconds was how long it took to make sure he was done, and the transmission was complete, and whatever came next was mine to handle.

I turned back toward the kitchen.

Lila was watching me over the rim of her mug. Both hands still wrapped around the ceramic, steam long gone, the coffee inside it dark and still. My cut was on her shoulders. The leather draped across her frame the way it had draped when I walked in, too big, too heavy, the sleeves pooling around her wrists where her fingers came out to hold the mug. Her eyes were on my face. Reading it. The way she read everything—the set of my jaw, the drop of my hand, the stillness that had replaced the looseness I’d been carrying against the sink five minutes ago.

She didn’t ask. Didn’t need to. The question was in her eyes the same way the answer was in my posture, and the space between those two things was narrower than either of us wanted to admit.

“We’ve got something,” I said.

Short. Flat. The kind of statement that contained exactly as much information as it needed to contain and not one word more. I didn’t lie. Didn’t soften. Didn’t tell her it was nothing when it was something, because she’d spent enough time in rooms where men lied about what was coming to deserve better than another lie from me.

Something shifted in her face. Fast. Controlled. Not fear—I would have recognized fear, would have seen it in the way her pupils dilated, or her breath caught, or her fingers went white on the mug. This was something else. Recognition, maybe. The particular look of someone watching a man transition from one version of himself to another and understanding, without being told, that the transition was necessary and irreversible and had nothing to do with her and everything to do with her at the same time.

Her fingers tightened on the mug. Once. Hard. The tendons standing white under the skin for half a heartbeat before they eased, and then her hands were steady again, and her eyes were steady, and whatever had moved across her face settled back into the stillness she’d been carrying since the fence.

I pushed off the doorframe.

One smooth motion. Weight shifting from the frame to my boots, the linoleum firm under my tread, and I was moving before my brain had finished cataloging all the reasons moving was the right answer. The radio went back on my belt. The clip snapped into place with a sound that was small in the quiet and both of us heard it. My hand found the edge of the counter where my mug sat with cold coffee pooled around its base, and I left it there because the coffee didn’t matter, and the mug didn’t matter, and the only thing that mattered was the name sitting in my head and the territory it was tied to and the air in the room, which had changed in a way everyone present understood without being told.

I stood in the center of the kitchen, back to the sink, eyes on the doorway, my hand loose at my side where the grip waited.

Chin down. Eyes forward. The fluorescent light buzzing overhead the way it always buzzed, indifferent, unchanged, throwing that flat, sick glow across the scarred linoleum and the metal table and the woman sitting at the far end with my cut on her shoulders and her eyes never leaving mine.