Page 11 of Reaper

“Prospect called from a clean number an hour ago. Told her you were staying with family for a few days, asked her to keep feeding him. She didn’t ask questions.”

Something in Lila’s shoulders came down, just a fraction. Relief she didn’t bother hiding.

“Thank you,” she said.

I didn’t answer. There wasn’t anything to say to that, and I didn’t trust my voice not to give away how much it had mattered that she’d asked.

Each time I came back into the room, I didn’t look at Lila. She sat cross-legged on the cot, arms folded, watching the same patch of floor I was watching.

The third time I came back from the door, she spoke.

“Have you done this before?”

The question landed in the quiet like something dropped. Not loud. Not challenging. Just there, simple and direct, the way she said everything.

I turned. Looked at her. Really looked, for the first time since she’d set her phone on the cot.

She hadn’t moved. Still cross-legged, still against the wall, but her arms had loosened, hands resting on her knees now, fingers laced together. Her eyes were steady. Waiting.

“Done what,” I said.

“Pulled someone out. Someone you didn’t know. Put them in a room and kept them there because the alternative was worse.”

Quiet settled between us. Then, beyond the wall, a door slammed, and the sound carried through the building like a distant gunshot.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

“Once.”

The word came out rougher than I meant it to. 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 it.

“She didn’t make it.”

Silence after that. Different from the silence before. Heavier. Loaded with something neither of us had invited into the room.

Lila didn’t say she was sorry. Didn’t offer the empty words people reach for when they don’t know what else to hold. She just held my gaze for a long moment, her eyes doing that thing they did—reading, assessing, cutting through the surface to whatever lived underneath—and then she nodded. Once. The same sharp nod she’d given me in the gravel lot.

I looked back at the door. On edge. Hand resting near my belt where it had been for hours, the muscle memory of vigilance so deep I’d stopped noticing I was doing it.

When I glanced at her again, she’d shifted. Not much. Shoulders dropped a fraction, the rigid line of her spine softening just enough to be visible. Her grip on her own arms had loosened. She was still watching me, but the watchfulness had changed—less guarded, less braced. Like something had been confirmed that she’d been wondering about.

I didn’t like it. The confirmation. The way it sat between us, taking up space that belonged to nothing.

My thumb worked over the scarred knuckles of my right hand, back and forth across the split skin. The pain was dull, distant—the kind your body registers but doesn’t bother reporting because there are more important things happening.

She was a liability. Every minute she spent in this room was a minute the club carried a risk it hadn’t signed up for. A target that bled onto anyone standing close enough to catch the splash. A civilian with no understanding of what lived outside that door—men who sent hitters to crowded festivals, patience that waited weeks for a window, reach that found you no matter where you hid.

A problem I created by choosing to step in.

I shifted my weight off the wall, took two steps toward the center of the room, stopped, shifted back.

There was no resolution. That was the thing. No clean math that made this worth the cost. The mark was on her, and the mark meant something, and that something had weight that every man in the club would feel in different ways—Dox in the set of his jaw, the prospect in the widening of his eyes, the men on the perimeter in the extra sweep of every check.

I’d done it anyway.

The cot creaked as Lila shifted, pulling her knees to her chest, chin resting on her folded arms. Watching me. Not saying anything, carrying whatever was coming for her in the steadiness of her eyes.

Hours, grinding past, and the only thing that changed was the quality of the silence between us—so slowly I almost missed it.