Raven's Reckoning (Black Ops Brotherhood MC #13)

Chapter 1

The studio door was supposed to be open by now.

The guitar hadn't stuck. Jessica Massey had.

He swung off the bike and walked toward the back entrance, rolling his shoulders against the Carolina humidity that clung like a second skin.

The building was a converted warehouse split into small studio spaces—musicians, artists, a pottery guy who worked weird hours.

Jessica's unit sat at the far end, sharing a wall with a pawn shop that always had too many cars in its lot for the amount of legitimate business it did.

Raven had noticed that the first week. Filed it away. Didn't mention it.

Some things weren't his concern.

He knocked twice and heard movement inside—not the usual sounds of an amp being positioned or a music stand being adjusted. This was different. Frantic. The scrape of equipment being dragged across concrete.

"Jess?"

The door opened six inches, chain still engaged. One brown eye appeared in the gap, scanning the lot behind him before finding his face.

"You alone?"

"Always." He kept his voice even, reading what he could see of her—dilated pupils, elevated breathing, the slight tremor in the hand gripping the door. "What's going on?"

The chain rattled free. The door swung open.

Jessica stood in the middle of her studio surrounded by chaos.

Her amp was disconnected, cables coiled haphazardly in a milk crate.

Microphone stands lay flat across her equipment cases.

The guitar she usually had in her hands was zipped into its road case, leaning against the wall like it was ready to run.

She was packing. Not organizing. Fleeing.

"Lesson's canceled," she said. "All lessons are canceled. I'm getting out of here."

Raven stepped inside and closed the door behind him, engaging the deadbolt without thinking about it.

The studio was small—maybe four hundred square feet of soundproofed walls and industrial carpet, barely big enough for her teaching setup and practice rig.

He'd spent hours in this room learning chord progressions he'd never master, watching her hands move across fretboards with an ease he envied.

Right now, those hands were shaking.

"Talk to me."

"I can't." She grabbed another cable, wrapping it wrong, not caring. "I just need to go. I'll call you when I land somewhere, maybe, I don't know—"

"Jessica." He didn't raise his voice. Didn't need to. Eight years of psychological operations had taught him that volume was the enemy of influence. "Stop."

She stopped. The cable dangled from her fingers, half-coiled.

"Something happened," he said. "Something that has you ready to bolt without a plan or a destination. You're not performing fear right now—you're genuinely terrified. So tell me what you heard."

Her head snapped up. "How do you know I heard something?"

"Because you keep looking at that wall." He nodded toward the shared wall with the pawn shop. "And because you said 'what I heard' instead of 'what I saw.' You're a musician. You live in sound. Whatever scared you came through your ears, not your eyes."

Jessica stared at him for a long moment. He watched the calculation behind her expression—deciding whether to trust him, weighing his presence against the threat she'd been running from.

"Three days ago," she said finally. "I was here late, working on a song that wasn't coming together. The AC was off because my electric bill was already too high. And I heard voices through the vent."

She pointed to a metal grate near the ceiling, positioned where the ductwork connected her studio to the pawn shop next door.

"That vent runs through both spaces?"

"The whole building shares the same system. Usually I don't hear anything—the pawn shop's quiet, just register noise and customer chatter. But that night, they were in the back room. Right on the other side of that wall."

"What did they say?"

Jessica set down the cable and wrapped her arms around herself. The gesture was protective, unconscious. She wasn't looking at him anymore—she was looking at the vent like it might start talking again.

"Names first. Denny. Keith. Travis." She swallowed. "And someone they called Pruitt, who wasn't there but they were waiting for."

Raven filed the names away. Four players. Enough for an organization, not just a crew.

"What else?"

"They were talking about someone who skimmed.

I don't know what—money, merchandise, something.

They kept saying he thought he could get away with it, thought nobody would notice.

" Her voice dropped. "And then they said Pruitt was bringing the van at midnight because the body wasn't going to move itself. "

The words hung in the studio's dead air.

"A body," Raven repeated.

"I heard them, Vic." She used his real name—the one he'd given her because Victor Reyes sounded like a man who took guitar lessons, not a Black Ops Brotherhood enforcer who specialized in making people believe things that weren't true.

"They killed someone for skimming, and they were planning how to dispose of him.

Dates, times, which roads to take to avoid cameras. Everything."

"Did they know you were here?"

"I don't think so. I was so quiet—I turned off my amp, didn't move, barely breathed." She laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Spent two hours frozen in that chair waiting for them to leave."

Raven moved to the vent, examining the grate without touching it. Standard HVAC connection, probably original to the building's construction. Sound would carry clearly through the ductwork, especially at night when ambient noise dropped.

She'd heard everything. Names. Plans. A body.

And someone in that pawn shop had probably figured out the same thing by now.

"The men following you," he said. "When did that start?"

"Two days ago. Right after—" She stopped. "How did you know about that?"

"You said lessons were canceled. All of them. You're packing equipment you could replace instead of calling the cops." He turned to face her. "Something escalated between hearing that conversation and right now. What?"

Jessica's jaw tightened. He watched her decide to trust him, watched the moment her survival instinct overrode her natural suspicion of smooth talkers.

"There's a guy," she said. "Big, mean-looking.

He was at my gig Monday night—just standing at the back of the bar, not drinking, not talking to anyone.

Just staring at me. And then he was in the parking lot when I loaded out.

And then he was at the coffee shop yesterday morning when I got breakfast."

"Same guy every time?"

"Same guy. And he's not subtle about it. He wants me to know he's there."

Intimidation surveillance. Classic pressure tactic. Make the target aware they're being tracked, let fear do the work of containment while the organization decides what to do about the leak.

"Anyone else?"

"I don't know. Maybe. There was a car in my apartment lot this morning that I didn't recognize, and the pawn shop has had more traffic than usual." She ran a hand through her hair, frustration bleeding through the fear. "I'm probably being paranoid, but—"

"You're not paranoid."

The words landed hard. Jessica's eyes met his, searching for comfort she wouldn't find.

"The men you heard are part of something organized," Raven said. "They killed someone and disposed of the body, which means they've done it before and they'll do it again. They know someone might have heard them, and now they're watching you to see if you're a problem."

"I didn't tell anyone. I didn't go to the cops."

"Doesn't matter. They can't take the chance." He moved toward her, stopping an arm's length away. "How much can you carry?"

"What?"

"Right now. On my bike. How much can you carry?"

She looked around the studio—the amp, the cases, the milk crates full of cables and pedals. Equipment that represented years of gigs and saving and scraping by. Her whole life compressed into a four-hundred-square-foot room.

"I can't leave all this."

"You can replace equipment. You can't replace yourself."

"That's easy for you to say. This is everything I own—"

"Jessica." He stepped closer, and she didn't step back. "I've seen what happens to witnesses who hesitate. Who try to negotiate with the kind of men who move bodies at midnight. You can stay here and hope they decide you're not a threat, or you can come with me right now and let me help you."

"Help me how? You give guitar lessons and ride a motorcycle. What are you going to do against—"

"I'm going to take you somewhere safe. Somewhere they can't find you while I figure out who these men are and how to make them stop."

She studied his face the way she'd studied his hands during lessons—looking for tells, inconsistencies, the places where performance broke down. He let her look. Let her see whatever truth she needed to find.

"Who are you really?" she asked quietly.

"Someone who knows how organizations like this work. Someone with brothers who know how to handle threats." He held out his hand. "Bring one guitar, your phone, and anything you can't live without. We leave in two minutes."

Jessica didn't move. The studio hummed with the silence of a decision being made—stay and gamble, or trust a man she'd known for three months and follow him into the unknown.

Her hand found her guitar case.

"The Martin," she said. "The rest can burn."

She grabbed the guitar, a notebook of handwritten songs from her desk, and her phone from the charger. Raven led her out the back door, scanning the lot for surveillance before guiding her to the bike.

"Ever ridden before?"

"Once. Badly."

"Hold onto me and don't let go. We're going somewhere nobody's going to follow."

She climbed on behind him, arms wrapping around his waist, the guitar case pressed between her back and the seat. Raven kicked the Heritage to life and pulled out of the lot, heading for the compound and the brothers who could help him figure out just how deep this pawn shop operation went.

Behind them, the studio sat dark and abandoned, equipment left scattered like the aftermath of a raid.

In two days, Jessica Massey had gone from teaching chord progressions to running for her life.

Raven was going to make sure she didn't run alone.