Iron coven

## CHAPTER THREE: Reyes

For a long moment, nobody moved. The red candlelight kept its slow, breathing pulse. Selene didn't step between them, which told Marcus more than any words could have — she wasn't afraid of what might happen here, or she'd already decided she didn't have the right to stop it either way.

"You've got some nerve," Marcus said, echoing Selene's own words back at her without meaning to, "standing in front of me."

"I know." Reyes didn't flinch, didn't reach for anything. He just stood there, big and gray-bearded and older than Marcus remembered, like the fifteen years since he'd taught a twenty-two-year-old kid how to hold a pistol steady had aged him twice over. "I've had the speech ready a long time, Marcus. Turns out there isn't one. There's just what happened."

"Then tell me what happened. Not the version with the book and the deal and the—" Marcus gestured at the room, the pedestal, the wrongness of the air itself. "Tell me what happened to my brother's *body*."

Something moved behind Reyes's eyes — the same something Marcus had seen in Selene's, grief wearing the mask of composure because composure was the only thing that let a person keep functioning. "There wasn't a body," Reyes said quietly. "That's the part nobody tells you until you've seen it. It doesn't kill people the way you're picturing. It doesn't leave anything behind to bury. I stood there and watched your brother get erased out of the air like he'd never been solid to begin with, and then I had to get back on my bike and ride home and figure out how to tell his mother — our club's mother, all of us, she raised half of us — that there wasn't going to be a funeral. Just an empty jacket."

Marcus's jaw worked. He wanted to hit him. He wanted it so badly his hands had already curled again, knuckles white, and some old, disciplined part of him — three years of learning exactly which fights were worth the write-up and which weren't — was the only thing keeping his feet planted.

"You could've warned him," Marcus said. "You could've warned *me*. Danny sent me one text in three years, Reyes. One. And it was about this."

"I know what he sent you. I was there when he wrote it, if you want to know the truth — I saw him on his phone in the last hour before he ran, and I thought he was texting his kids." Reyes's voice cracked, just slightly, just once. "If I'd known it was you, I don't know what I would've done differently. Maybe nothing. That's the part that keeps me up, Marcus. Not that I don't feel it. That I've turned it over ten thousand times and I still don't know what the right version of that night looks like."

Selene finally spoke, quiet, careful, like she was stepping between two live wires without wanting to touch either one. "Tell him the rest, Reyes."

Reyes's eyes flicked to her, some silent argument passing between them that Marcus couldn't read — old history, club history, the kind of shorthand that only exists between people who've bled in the same rooms for a decade and a half.

"The rest," Reyes said slowly, "is that I wasn't just following an order that night. I've been looking for a way out of this deal since before you patched in, Marcus. Since before Selene's father even handed her the gavel. Fifteen years, I've been chasing every scrap of half-truth and old-world nonsense I could find — talked to men who don't exist anymore, paid for things I'm not proud of, burned favors I'll never get back — trying to find out if a deal like this can actually be broken, or just paid off forever like a mortgage nobody ever finishes."

"And?" Marcus's voice came out rougher than he meant it to.

"And I think I found something." Reyes glanced at the Ledger on its pedestal, and for the first time Marcus saw real fear cross his face — not fear of the book itself, but fear of what he was about to say out loud, like saying it made it more real, more dangerous, more possible to lose. "I think the deal can't be broken. Not from outside it. But I think it can be *rewritten* — by somebody who was there when it was made in the first place."

The room went very still. Even the candlelight seemed to hold its breath.

"You were there," Selene said. It wasn't a question. Marcus got the sense she'd suspected this for a long time and was only now hearing it confirmed.

"I was twenty years old and I was standing behind your father on that fire road holding a shotgun I never fired, because there was nothing to shoot at that a shotgun could touch," Reyes said. "I watched him sign what he signed. I don't know if that makes me qualified to undo it or just makes me the last man standing who remembers exactly how bad an idea it was to sign it in the first place."

Marcus felt something shift in his chest — not forgiveness, not yet, maybe not ever, but something adjacent to it. A recalculation. The man in front of him wasn't the villain his three years of prison rage had built. He was something worse and more complicated: a man who'd killed Marcus's brother to save two more lives, and had spent a decade and a half quietly trying to make sure nobody would ever have to make that choice again.

"Why didn't you tell me this," Marcus said to Selene, and there was an edge in it now, the first real anger he'd let out since walking through the gate.

"Because knowing there's a possible way out and having a way out are two different things," Selene said. "And because every month I don't have a name for that book, it takes somebody I love instead of choosing. I don't have room in my life right now for hope that isn't finished cooking, Marcus. I have eleven days and an empty ledger line."

Reyes looked between them — the brother of the man he'd erased, and the woman carrying her father's debt like a second spine — and something settled in his face, old and resolved.

"Then we'd better start cooking it faster," he said. "Because I don't think we've got eleven days anymore. I think we've got less. The Cutlass Kings hit our southern run this morning. Four men down. And the book doesn't care whose blood spills it — a war casualty counts same as a runner, if the timing's close enough."

Selene's expression didn't change, but something in her stance did — a soldier's stillness settling over grief, over anger, over everything else she didn't have time to feel right now.

"Then it's about to get very loud around here," she said. "Marcus — you rode in unarmed?"

"I rode in on a promise to myself that I was done with all this."

"Well." Selene moved past him toward the door, toward whatever was already gathering itself in the yard outside — engines, voices, the low animal sound of a club bracing for war. "Promises made in prison don't always survive the door opening. Welcome home, Marcus. Go find a gun."

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