Chapter Eleven — Inside The Reaper's Den
1357 Words
I do not sleep in.
Even on mornings when I have nothing pulling me out of bed early, my body refuses to stay horizontal past seven. My mother was the same way. She used to say that sleeping late felt like missing something even if that something turned out to be nothing important.
I think about her more in Raven Creek than I did in the city.
I think that is because the city was full of noise and noise is very good at filling the spaces where thinking would otherwise go. Raven Creek is quiet in a way that leaves those spaces open. At first that felt uncomfortable. Now it feels like honesty.
I dress carefully without knowing why. Not formally. Just deliberately. Like the morning requires a certain kind of intention.
Margaret has coffee waiting when I come downstairs. She does not ask how I slept or what my plans are. She just pours and sits and that is enough.
"Cole is outside," she says after a while.
"Already?"
"He has been there since six thirty." She says it without particular expression. Just information.
I wrap both hands around my mug and look out the front window. Cole is leaning against the wall across the street in his jacket with his hands in his pockets, face turned toward the end of the main road, doing his quiet watchful thing like a man who genuinely does not mind standing still for long periods of time.
I finish my coffee.
I put on my jacket.
I go outside.
Cole falls into step beside me without ceremony.
"Ready?" he asks.
"I think so," I say. "What should I expect?"
He considers this with the particular expression he gets when he is deciding how honest to be.
"It is not what most people picture," he says finally. "When they hear motorcycle club."
"What do most people picture?"
"Chaos. Dirt. Men behaving badly in a large room." He pauses. "It is more like a house where people actually live. Just with better security and worse coffee."
"Worse than Dolly's?"
"Significantly."
We walk in comfortable silence for a few minutes. The morning is cool and bright and Raven Creek is doing its quiet unhurried thing. The old men are already on their bench even though it is barely past eight. The hardware store owner is sweeping his front step. A dog sits outside the bakery waiting for someone.
"Cole," I say.
"Yes."
"The men who came into the diner. Marsh and the others. Have they come back?"
"Not directly," he says. "But there have been others. Further out. Watching the roads in and out of town."
I absorb that.
"How long do you think before they try something more direct?" I ask.
Cole is quiet for a moment.
"That is part of what today is about," he says. "Kael wants you to understand the full picture. Not pieces of it."
"Finally," I say.
Cole glances at me sideways. "He was always going to tell you everything. He was waiting until he was sure you were safe enough to hear it without needing to run."
"And now he is sure?"
"Now he thinks the running would be more dangerous than the knowing." He pauses. "Which is probably true."
The clubhouse is half a mile outside of town on a private road that does not feel like a road until you are already on it.
The gates are heavy iron and they open before Cole reaches them, which means someone saw us coming from a long way back. The yard inside is wide and clean. Seven motorcycles parked in a neat line along the left side. A large workshop at the back with the doors open and the sound of something mechanical being worked on inside.
The main building is solid and low with a wide front door that stands open.
I expected something dark and loud.
It is neither.
The common room is large and warm with a long table down the middle and mismatched chairs that look like they have each come from a different place and a different decade. There are bookshelves along one wall that are actually full. Photographs on the other wall, dozens of them, people and moments and places arranged without any particular system except that they all mattered enough to put up.
A kitchen at the far end where someone is making something that smells like actual food.
Nadia is at the long table with papers spread in front of her and a coffee cup at her elbow. She looks up when I walk in and gives me a nod that manages to be both welcoming and completely unsurprised.
Dex is in the corner with his arms folded looking large and quiet and exactly like himself.
Two other men I recognise from around town are sitting at the table. They look up when I come in. One of them nods. The other goes back to whatever he is reading.
It feels like walking into someone's home.
A complicated home with security cameras and iron gates and men who carry themselves like people who have had to make hard decisions and will have to make more. But a home.
Kael comes through a door at the back of the room.
He looks at me for a moment and something in his face settles. Like he has been slightly braced all morning and my arrival allows him to stop.
"You came," he says.
"You asked," I say.
He almost smiles. He pulls out a chair at the head of the table and waits. I sit down. Cole takes the chair to my left. Nadia gathers her papers into a neat stack. Dex unfolds his arms and pulls out a chair without being asked.
Kael sits across from me.
"I want to show you something," he says. He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and puts a folded map on the table between us. Old. The paper soft with handling. He opens it carefully.
It is a land map. Hand drawn in parts and printed in others, with sections marked in different colours and notes written in margins in handwriting I do not recognise.
He puts his finger on a large section marked in red.
"This is the Vale land," he says. "All of it. What your family originally owned."
I look at the map. The section he is pointing to is significant. Larger than I expected. It takes up a considerable portion of the area shown.
"And now?" I ask.
He moves his finger across the map section by section. "This part was transferred in 2001 through legal pressure. This part in 2004. These three sections between 2008 and 2012." He pauses. "All of it absorbed into Hale holdings through a series of legal processes that were technically legitimate and practically coerced."
I look at the map quietly.
"But not this one," Kael says.
His finger rests on a smaller section at the centre of the map. Not the largest piece. But clearly the original one, the one everything else was built around, marked in a different colour from all the rest.
"That one cannot move without you," he says.
"And what is underneath it?" I ask. "That makes it worth all of this."
Kael looks at me steadily.
"Water," he says. "Underground water. A reserve large enough to supply this entire region for generations. In a part of the state where water rights are becoming the most fought over thing there is." He pauses. "Whoever controls that land controls something worth more than money."
I look at the map.
At my family name written in faded ink at the centre of it.
At the thing my mother carried the weight of her whole life without once putting it down long enough to explain it to her daughter.
"Okay," I say quietly.
Kael looks at me.
"Okay what?" he says.
I look up at him.
"Okay," I say again. "Tell me everything. From the very beginning. Leave nothing out."
Kael holds my gaze for a long moment.
Then he reaches for his coffee.
And he begins.
- Writer
