Reaper
1292 Words
Mia POV
The building didn't look like much from outside.
A converted warehouse, no sign, windows painted dark, the kind of place you'd walk past without a second look unless you knew to look twice. I knew to look twice. My father's letter had been specific.
I stood across the street for a minute just looking at it, the garbage bag cutting into my shoulder, rain finally starting to ease off into something closer to mist.
Then I crossed the street and knocked.
Nothing happened for a moment. Then the door opened hard, like whoever was on the other side hadn't bothered checking who it was first, and two men were on their feet inside before I'd even gotten a full look at the room.
One of them had a hand moving toward his waistband, the other just stared at me like I'd grown a second head.
"We're closed," the first one said.
"I'm not here to buy anything." I held up my hand, ring catching what little light there was. "Frank Calloway sent me."
That stopped him. "Say that again."
"Frank Calloway. He's my father." My voice didn't shake, which surprised me a little. "I was told to come here and say his name."
The second guy, younger, had gone very still. He looked at the first guy. Neither of them said anything for a second. That stretched out longer than it should have.
"Wait here," the first one said, and disappeared into the back.
I stood in the doorway, very aware that the younger one hadn't stopped staring at me.
"You're really his daughter? he said.
"That's what I keep saying."
"He never mentioned a daughter."
"He never mentioned a biker club to me either, so I guess we're even."
That got something close to a smile out of him before he caught himself and put it away.
The first guy came back. "Come in."
I stepped inside. The room opened up bigger than the outside, a long bar against one wall, scattered tables, a hallway leading toward the back. Maybe eight or nine men scattered around, and every single one of them stopped what they were doing the second I walked through the door. Cards left mid-hand. A conversation cut off halfway through a sentence. The quiet that followed had weight to it, the kind that presses against your skin.
Someone near the bar muttered, "No way."
Another voice answered, barely above a whisper. "Frank's kid?"
The silence swallowed both comments before I could figure out who'd spoken.
Then a door at the back opened and he walked out.
I knew immediately he was the one running things. It wasn't just the size of him, though he was tall, the kind of build that takes up space without trying to. It was the way the whole room shifted slightly when he appeared, like everyone had been waiting for him without admitting it.
He stopped a few feet away and looked at me. Really looked, in a way that made me want to fold my arms over the ruined dress and didn't.
His gaze lingered on the soaked lace for the briefest second before returning to my face.
Whatever he thought about it, he kept it to himself.
"You're Frank's daughter," he said. Not a question.
"Mia Calloway."
"Cole Drayton."
He didn't offer his hand. His eyes dropped to the ring on my finger, then came back up to my face, and something in his jaw tightened like he didn't love what he was seeing. "Come with me."
I followed him through the door at the back into a room that was half office, half something else. Maps pinned to one wall. A desk that had clearly seen real use. Two chairs that didn't match each other.
He closed the door and held out his hand. "The second envelope."
I handed it over.
He opened it standing up, reading fast, and I watched his jaw tighten further with every line. He didn't say anything until he was finished. Then he set the papers down on the desk very carefully, like he didn't trust himself to put them down any other way.
He looked back at the papers.
For the first time since I'd met him, he looked genuinely unsettled.
"Your father left you everything," he said.
"That's what I'm starting to understand."
"Do you have any idea what that actually means?"
"Not entirely. But I'm a fast learner."
He studied me for a long moment. "I have a problem with this," he said.
"I figured." I held his gaze even though every part of me wanted to look away first. "My father trusted you enough to send me here. So I'm going to trust that too, for now. Is that going to be an issue?"
"It's already an issue."
"That's not an answer."
Something flickered across his face, surprise maybe, like he hadn't expected to be pushed back on. "Your father and I had an arrangement. He runs things his way, I run things mine, and we didn't cross those lines." He nodded at the papers on the desk. "This crosses the line."
"He's dead. I don't think he's running anything anymore."
"Which is exactly the problem."
I didn't have a response for that one. He watched me not have one, and something about his expression shifted slightly, not softer exactly, just recalculating.
"How much do you know," he said. "About what he actually did."
"I know he ran a logistics company. I know he died of a heart attack two years ago. I know I'm standing in a biker clubhouse holding a letter that says he founded it." I shrugged, and the motion made the dress shift uncomfortably against my skin. "So. Not much, apparently."
"Not much," he repeated, like he was filing that away somewhere.
"Is that going to be a problem too?"
"Everything about today is a problem, Miss Calloway." He said it flat, no heat in it, which somehow made it worse than if he'd shouted.
"I have a club to run. A business to keep clean. And now I have Frank's daughter standing in my office in a wedding dress holding paperwork that says half of what I've spent six years building actually belongs to her."
"I didn't ask for any of this."
"I know." He said it quieter than everything else. "That's the only reason you're still standing here."
I held his gaze and didn't say anything, because I wasn't sure what the right thing to say was, and for once I decided not to fill the silence just to fill it.
He moved past me to the door and opened it, said something to one of the men outside, low enough I only caught the tail end of it. "Get her a room at the end of the hall."
"Follow him," Cole told me, still not looking at me.
I picked my garbage bag back up. At the doorway I stopped.
"Thank you," I said.
He finally looked at me again. "Don't thank me yet."
"Why?" I asked.
He didn't answer right away.
"Because tomorrow morning, everyone in this building finds out what Frank left you."
My stomach tightened.
"And after that," he said quietly, "nothing about your life will belong to you anymore."
I followed a stranger down a hallway in a building I didn't know, in a part of the city I'd never spent real time in, soaked through in a dress that used to mean something, carrying a letter from a dead man in my fist.
This is my life now.
Tomorrow, I'd find out what life my father had planned for me instead.
Somehow, I had a feeling the second one was going to be a lot more dangerous.
- Writer
