Claimed by the Reapers MC

8.Blood In

The vest was too big. Kevlar panels, black nylon, the Reapers' winged skull stitched over the heart. Tank had cinched the straps as tight as they'd go, and it still hung loose on my shoulders. Forty pounds of borrowed armor.

"Move your arms," Tank said.

I raised both arms, twisted my torso. The vest barely shifted.

"Good." He tapped the chest plate with two knuckles. "This stops anything under a .308. Above that, you're having a bad night either way."

We were in the garage. Six bikes. Six men. Kael, Tank, Jax, Wolf, Ghost, and a prospect named Cole I'd seen twice and spoken to zero times. Nineteen years old — same age as Danny. He was trying very hard to look like he wasn't terrified.

Wolf tossed me a helmet. "Put this on. If we go down, you stay on Ghost's bike no matter what. You don't stop. You don't look back. You ride."

"I've never been on a motorcycle in my life."

"First time for everything, princess." Same line. Same grin. But his eyes weren't smiling. None of theirs were.

Ghost was loading the field kit into his saddlebags — suture packs, morphine, QuikClot gauze, two tourniquets, a portable defibrillator that looked like it had seen Fallujah. He caught me watching and held up three fingers.

"Three rules. One: you don't leave the station unless I tell you. Two: if someone's bleeding, you find the source and you stop it — everything else can wait. Three: if I go down, you take over and you don't freeze."

"You're not going down."

"I wasn't planning on it." He handed me a small black pouch. "Pressure bandages. Keep it on your belt. If you need it, you won't have time to dig through the kit."

I clipped the pouch to my jeans. The weight of it was nothing. The weight of what it meant was everything.

Kael mounted his bike first. No speech. No rallying cry. Just a single look down the line of men, one nod answered by five others, and the engines turned over in sequence — six Harleys growling in the dark.

Ghost reached back and pulled me onto the seat behind him. "Hold the grab bar. Not me. If we take a turn fast, you don't want to pull me off the throttle."

I gripped the cold metal bar behind the seat. My knuckles were white before we even left the garage.

The gate opened. The bikes rolled out into the Oregon night, headlights cutting through pine trees and fog. The air was sharp with the smell of gasoline and wet earth. Above us, stars — more than I'd ever seen inside the city. Below us, asphalt. Then gravel. Then dirt.

We rode for forty minutes.

Ghost's bike was smooth, almost silent compared to the others. He rode differently from the rest — precise, no wasted movement, the same way he handled a scalpel. I watched the taillights ahead of us and tried not to think about what was waiting at the end of this road.

The lumber mill rose out of the darkness like a skeleton. Three buildings — a main warehouse, a sawmill with a rusted smokestack, and a smaller structure that might have been an office forty years ago. Dim lights in two windows. Four bikes parked out front. No sentries visible.

Kael raised his fist. The column stopped. We were a quarter mile out, hidden by tree cover. The field station was a clearing fifty yards off the main road — flat ground, clear sightlines to the mill, close enough to hear gunfire but far enough to be out of the line of it.

Ghost killed the engine. "We're here. Off the bike. Stay low."

I dismounted on legs that had gone numb from the ride. Ghost was already setting up — ground tarp, kits open, headlamp on low red setting. He worked like the clearing was an operating room.

The others had gathered around Kael. Even from fifty yards away, I could see the tension in their bodies. Jax was rolling his shoulders like a fighter before a bell. Wolf was bouncing on his heels, too much energy. Tank was perfectly still — a boulder waiting for gravity to do its work.

Kael's voice didn't carry, but I saw him point. Two fingers toward the warehouse. One toward the sawmill. Tank and Jax nodding. Wolf cracking his neck. Cole, the prospect, looking like he might throw up.

Then they moved.

I watched them disappear into the tree line. Six shadows swallowed by darker shadows. Ghost touched my elbow.

"Now we wait," he said. "Hardest part."

"How long?"

"As long as it takes."

The first shot came seven minutes later. A single crack that echoed through the trees like a branch breaking. Then three more in rapid succession. Then silence.

Then everything.

The gunfire was not like the movies. It was not rhythmic or dramatic. It was chaos — overlapping, close, far, too many sources to count. Muzzle flashes lit up the mill windows in irregular strobes. Someone was shouting. Someone else was screaming. An engine roared and died. Another volley. Another scream.

My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my teeth.

Ghost didn't move. He sat on his heels beside the open kit, hands resting on his thighs, breathing slow and even. "Someone's coming," he said.

I heard it before I saw it — boots on gravel, heavy, stumbling. Tank burst through the tree line with Cole draped across his shoulders. The prospect's face was pale. His left arm hung at a wrong angle. Blood was soaking through his jeans at the thigh.

"Leg," Tank said, lowering Cole onto the tarp. "Through and through. Lost a lot on the way back."

Ghost was already moving. "Avery — tourniquet, upper thigh, high as you can get it."

I didn't think. My hands moved before my brain caught up. Velcro strap. Thread through the buckle. Cinch down until the bleeding slows. The movements were muscle memory from a hundred ER shifts, except the ER had fluorescent lights and beeping monitors and a crash cart three steps away. This had dirt and pine needles and the distant sound of people trying to kill each other.

"Tourniquet's in," I said.

"Good. Hold pressure on the exit wound." Ghost was already packing the entry wound with QuikClot gauze, fingers deep in the hole, finding the source. "Cole, you with me?"

Cole's eyes were glassy. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm — is my leg still there?"

"It's still there. You're going to feel this."

Cole screamed. Ghost didn't flinch. I held pressure and watched the kid's face go from grey to white to something worse.

Then the gunfire stopped.

The silence was louder than the shooting had been. No engines. No voices. Just the wind through the pines and Cole's ragged breathing and my own pulse hammering in my ears.

Kael came through the trees first. Blood on his cut. Not his. His eyes found me, checked I was still there, still alive, and moved on.

Jax behind him. Wolf behind Jax. Five men out. All walking. All breathing.

Tank was the last to arrive. He knelt beside Cole and put one massive hand on the prospect's shoulder. "You did good, kid. Stayed on your feet."

Kael pulled off his gloves. His knuckles were raw. "Mill is ours. Six Serpents down. Three ran east. Let them run — they'll tell the rest what happens when you put a dead man's cut on our gate."

Wolf let out a breath that was half laugh, half relief. "Holy s**t. We actually did it."

"We did it," Kael said. "Now we go home."

Home. The word hit me in a way I didn't expect. I was kneeling in a clearing at midnight, covered in someone else's blood, tourniquet still tight in my grip, and Kael called the compound home — and I knew, with a certainty that scared me more than the gunfire, that I thought of it that way too.

Ghost finished dressing Cole's leg and stood. "He'll need surgery tomorrow. Plate and screws, probably. But he'll keep the leg."

"Can he ride?" Kael asked.

"Not safely."

"Tank, you take him. Ghost, take Avery." Kael pulled his gloves back on. "We move in five."

I stood up. My legs were shaking. I didn't know when they'd started. Wolf appeared beside me, pistol still in his belt, blood on his cheek that he hadn't bothered to wipe off.

"You didn't freeze," he said.

"I almost did."

"Almost doesn't count." He bumped my shoulder with his — a gesture so casual, so human, that it almost undid me. "Welcome to the Reapers, princess."

We rode back through the dark. The sky was just beginning to lighten over the mountains, pale grey bleeding into the black. I held the grab bar and watched the taillights ahead of me and thought about what Kael had said.

This is the point of no return.

I'd crossed it. Somewhere between the tourniquet and Cole's scream and Wolf's shoulder bump, I'd crossed it. There was no version of Avery Sinclair left who could walk back into St. Catherine's ER and pretend none of this had happened.

The gate opened. The compound welcomed us home. Kael killed his engine and swung off his bike and walked toward the clubhouse without looking back.

And I realized, standing in the gravel with Ghost's bike still warm beneath me, that I didn't want to go back.

I wanted to know what came next.