Chapter 2 Kill Order #2
“We have to make it to my bike,” I say. “We disappear before they lock down the streets.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one that matters.”
“No.” Her voice turns hard. “The only one that matters is whether I’m running with Eli Mercer’s killer.”
The words land between us like a fresh shot.
I don’t stop moving. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hit.
I cut through a narrow gap between two buildings and pull her with me into deeper shadow for half a second, listening. Nothing close yet. No footsteps in the cut. No engine at the mouth of the alley.
We’ve got seconds.
I turn back to her. “I didn’t kill Eli.”
She searches my face so intensely it almost feels physical. “You expect me to take that on faith?”
“No.” I drag a hand over my mouth, already tasting iron and old smoke in the back of my throat. “I expect you to listen while you keep moving.”
A siren wails somewhere far off. Not coming here. Just city noise. Wrong place, wrong night. It fades behind us as I pull her forward again.
“Then talk,” she says.
I should keep it simple. Deny. Deflect. Get her moving and deal with the rest later. That’s the smart play. But smart has a shelf life when a woman has seen enough to become leverage for every man involved, and Mara is too observant to drag blind for long.
If I want her with me, I need some version of the truth.
Not all of it.
Never all of it.
“I got a call,” I say as we move. “Anonymous number. Told me Eli was in trouble. Gave me the warehouse address.”
Her eyes narrow. “When?”
“About forty minutes before you saw me come through that door.”
“Why would you go alone?”
Because Eli was Jax’s son. Because if there was a mess involving him, I handled it quiet before it became club business. Because half my life has been cleaning up after other people’s panic and calling it loyalty.
Instead I say, “Because that’s how you keep a situation from turning into a war.”
She doesn’t look convinced, but she keeps pace now.
“So you arrive and?”
I see it all again the second she asks. The warehouse half-dark. The metallic stink. Eli on the concrete, too still, one eye swollen, throat marked. Blood already tacky near his mouth. No pulse. No heat worth calling life.
Gone.
And worse than the body, what was around it. What it meant.
My jaw locks.
Mara notices. “And?”
“I found him dead.”
The words come out flat. Useful. Controlled.
She watches me for one hard beat. “That’s it?”
“No.”
I hate that my voice changes on that one syllable.
She slows just enough to force me to look at her. “What aren’t you saying?”
I glance ahead, then behind us. Still clear. For now. Rain beads on the chain-link fence to our right. Somewhere farther out, an engine revs, then cuts.
No time. Still not enough.
I could lie cleanly here. Could tell her I found Eli and that was all. Could let the rest stay buried a little longer.
But she saw too much at the scene. She saw men wiping things down. She saw panic. She knows enough already to hear the wrong note in anything polished.
So I give her the truth with the heart cut out of it.
“I touched the scene,” I say.
Her whole body goes still even while her feet keep moving.
“How?”
I hold her gaze because looking away would be worse. “I moved him.”
She stops dead.
I grab her arm and yank her forward again just as voices rise somewhere behind us.
Mara’s lips part, then flatten. Her face drains of what little warmth was left in it. “You moved the body.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
That question slices cleaner than any knife.
Because I saw something near Eli that could tie back to a fire we buried. Because my first instinct wasn’t justice, it was containment. Because I made the kind of choice a guilty man makes, even when he isn’t guilty of murder.
Because fear dressed itself up as loyalty, and I let it.
I can’t tell her any of that.
Not yet.
So I say the only part I can afford. “Because what was in that room wasn’t just about Eli.”
Her stare hardens into something dangerous. “That is not an answer.”
“It’s the one you’re getting.”
She lets out a disbelieving breath, almost a laugh but with no humor in it. “You swear you didn’t kill him, but you admit you tampered with the body?”
“I didn’t kill him,” I repeat.
Behind us, boots scrape somewhere too close.
I catch Mara by the elbow and pull her hard into the narrow recess of a locked service door just as two shadows cut across the far end of the alley.
We flatten into darkness. Her breath catches against my throat.
Mine stays locked behind my teeth. The men pass the opening without looking in, voices low, guns in hand.
I wait until they’re gone.
Then I look back at her.
She studies me in the wet dark, trying to separate the words from the man, the confession from the denial, the truth from whatever poison is still hiding under it.
Then she says, very quietly, “That’s not innocence.”
No.
It isn’t.
The worst part is hearing it from her and knowing she’s right.
Mara keeps staring at me like the shape of me has changed.
Maybe it has.
Maybe that’s what truth does when you drag even part of it into the light. It warps everything around it. A man says I didn’t kill him, and the words should mean one thing. Then he admits he moved the body, and suddenly every line blurs. Murder. Loyalty. Panic. Guilt.
All of it bleeding together until innocence becomes technical instead of clean.