Claimed by the reaper

Chapter 4

Reaper had learned a long time ago that violence, done properly, required no anger at all.

Anger made men sloppy. Anger got men killed. What Reaper brought to the handful of situations in his life that required his particular skill set was something colder and considerably more reliable: a total, focused absence of hesitation, the kind of calm that unsettled people far more than shouting ever could.

He brought exactly that calm to the man currently kneeling in the clubhouse's back lot an hour after Wren had gone inside to try, with visibly shaking hands, to locate the flash drive she'd been too afraid to look at for months.

"You're going to tell me who sent you," Reaper said, crouching to the man's eye level, his voice conversational in a way that made Tank, standing watch nearby, visibly tense. "And you're going to tell me quickly, because I have considerably more important things to deal with today than a Vultures scout stupid enough to get caught watching my clubhouse in broad daylight."

The man, young and clearly new enough to the Vultures' organization to not yet understand exactly what kind of mistake he'd made, swallowed hard, his eyes darting toward the exit Tank was very deliberately blocking.

"I don't know anything. I was just passing through."

"You were parked outside my property for forty minutes, taking photographs with a long lens camera," Reaper said, unmoved. "That's not passing through. That's surveillance. So let's try this again, and this time, let's skip the part where you insult my intelligence."

The man's composure cracked within another minute of careful, patient pressure. No violence required, simply the steady, unhurried certainty of a man who had never once needed to raise his voice to make people understand exactly how much danger they were in.

Silas Cade, the Vultures' president, had apparently caught wind of a new woman staying at the Ironhawks clubhouse and wanted eyes on the situation, uncertain what it might mean for the fragile, cold peace that had held between the two clubs since the fire.

"Tell Cade," Reaper said, once he'd extracted everything useful from the increasingly terrified young man, "that whatever he thinks he's watching, he's about to discover he understood considerably less about this situation than he assumed. Tell him I said that specifically."

He let the man go, watching him scramble toward his car with the particular, undignified speed of someone deeply grateful to be leaving with all his fingers intact, and felt none of the satisfaction the encounter should have provided. Only a colder, more focused certainty that whatever Wren was actually carrying had just become considerably more dangerous than either of them had understood an hour ago.

He found her in the clubhouse library an hour later, a small, underused room that had become, in the short time she'd been staying with them, something like her private refuge. She was sitting cross legged on the floor with a laptop open in front of her, the flash drive finally, carefully connected.

"Cade already has eyes on us," he said without preamble, watching her face carefully for her reaction. "One of his scouts was photographing the clubhouse an hour ago. Whatever's on that drive, Wren, he already suspects it matters."

Something in her expression tightened with fresh fear, old instinct visibly warring with the fragile trust she'd been building over the past few days.

"How would he even know?"

"Small town. People talk. Marcus's associates and the Vultures clearly have more overlap than either you or I understood." He crossed the room, settling on the floor across from her, deliberately keeping his voice level despite the coiled, controlled anger still sitting just beneath his composure. "I need you to understand something, Wren. Whatever's on that drive, I intend to protect you completely, regardless of what it costs. But I need you to trust me enough to actually show me what you're working with, so I know exactly what we're protecting you from."

She studied him for a long moment, something assessing and uncertain in her expression.

"You went outside a little while ago. I heard voices. Was that..."

"Business," he said simply, unwilling to lie to her but equally unwilling to burden her with details that would only deepen her fear before she needed to understand them. "Handled. You don't need to worry about it."

"That's not entirely reassuring, given everything you just told me about Cade's scout."

"No," he admitted, something almost like respect moving through him at her refusal to simply accept a comfortable half truth. "It's probably not. But I promise you this: nothing that happens outside these walls touches you while I'm standing between you and it. That's not a comfort, Wren. That's a fact."

Later that night, once Wren had finally, cautiously begun sorting through the photographs on the drive, nothing conclusive yet, though something in her expression suggested the beginning of real, unsettling recognition as she worked, Reaper found himself standing alone on the clubhouse's back porch, working through a tangle of thoughts he hadn't expected to be dealing with this early in whatever this situation actually was.

He'd meant what he told her that first rain soaked night. He didn't do anything halfway. But he also hadn't expected, in the handful of days since she'd walked into his bar, exactly how quickly and completely his careful, controlled world would rearrange itself around the fact of her presence in it.

He thought about the fear in her expression when she'd first realized what her photographs might mean. He thought about the careful, hard won trust she'd extended toward him despite three years of learning, the hard way, that trusting men rarely ended well for her. He thought about the particular, unfamiliar tightness in his chest every time he imagined Marcus, or worse, Cade, getting anywhere near her again.

It should have concerned him, how quickly he'd moved from mild curiosity to something considerably more possessive and absolute. He'd built his entire adult life around careful, controlled distance, the particular discipline required of a man whose job sometimes demanded violence he needed to be able to walk away from without carrying it home. Wren represented exactly the kind of complication he'd spent years successfully avoiding.

He found, standing alone in the quiet dark, that he didn't particularly care.

Whatever she was carrying, whatever danger it brought crashing into his careful, controlled world, he'd already made his decision the moment he told Denise to get her coffee that first night. She was his to protect now, in every sense that mattered, and Reaper had never once in his life been a man who did that particular job halfway.

Cade wanted to test the boundaries of what the Vultures could get away with. Marcus, wherever he currently was, would eventually come looking for the woman who'd escaped him.

Reaper found himself almost looking forward to both confrontations, if only for the simple, satisfying clarity of finally having a target worth the full weight of exactly how dangerous he actually was.