Reaper's Cinder (Grimm Reapers MC #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Ash

The Sutton Diner sits a quarter mile off the mountain highway, low and chrome-bright, the kind of place that's been there long enough the county drives past it without seeing it anymore. I see it. I've been seeing it twice a week for seven months.

I take the same stool. End of the counter, back to the wall, sightline to the door and the kitchen window both. Old habit. Army first, club second. By now it's just the way I'm built. I don't have to think about it.

She's on the grill when I come in. Tuesday, so it's a short staff. Ella, and whoever Darlene's sent over to work the floor, which this week is Becca. Becca's the louder one. I've had long enough to learn the difference.

I order coffee and I don't look at Ella directly, which is the same thing I do every time I'm in here and which has been getting harder every week.

The diner smells like bacon grease and fresh coffee and something sweet from the oven, pie or biscuits, the whole of it threaded through with the particular warmth of a kitchen that's been running since before dawn.

Her father built this place. She told the county health inspector that, back in March, when I was in the corner booth and he was at the counter. She said it like it mattered. It did.

The coffee comes from Becca, who sets it down hard enough to slosh. I drink it.

Ella's hands are visible through the kitchen window.

She moves fast and clean at the grill, no wasted steps, no hesitation.

She knows where every pan is without looking.

I've watched her work this grill for seven months and she is the same every time: efficient, certain, a woman who is good at something and doesn't get credit for it.

I don't look away from the window.

I'm not subtle about it. I'm not trying to be. Nobody in here is paying attention to what I'm looking at except Ella, who isn't looking at me at all, which is its own thing to notice.

Becca comes from the back with her phone out. She doesn't look up when she passes the window. She says, not to anyone in particular, "You're burning the eggs," and she is correct and she is also three tables behind on refills and not moving to fix either problem.

Ella turns the eggs without answering.

I watch her hands. She's wearing long sleeves today.

It's July. I have a list in my head that I keep adding to and not doing anything with, and long sleeves in July is on it.

So is the way she never lets Becca get fully behind her.

So is the flat, careful voice she uses when there's a Sutton in the room and the warmer one she uses when there isn't.

The door opens. Two county guys I don't know, work shirts, mud on their boots. Becca redirects from wherever she wasn't going and gets to them fast. She has a system: tables tip better than counter, and she knows it.

I drink my coffee. The eggs come up and Ella plates them and she's already back to the grill before the ticket clears.

Twenty minutes go by. I don't hurry.

Then Becca comes back behind the counter for change and she passes Ella, who has come out of the kitchen to refill the saltshakers, and Becca stops. She picks up one of the refilled shakers and turns it over and sets it back down with two fingers, like she's correcting a flaw in a display.

"You didn't top this one off," she says.

Ella looks at it. "I did."

"There's a gap at the top."

"There's always a gap at the top."

Becca says, pleasant as a closed door, "Daddy's going to ask why the condiment budget keeps going over and I'm going to have to tell him it's because you can't fill a saltshaker." She sets it back down. "Again."

The word again does the work. Ella's shoulders go in. Not far, just a degree, a woman absorbing something she's been absorbing long enough that the motion is automatic. She picks up the shaker and doesn't say anything else.

My hand goes flat on the counter. I notice it the way I notice everything now, late and from a distance, like it belongs to some other man.

There's a stillness that comes into me before I do a thing, and I know its shape, and I sit inside it without moving.

Becca is four feet to my left, her back to the room, between me and the register.

I know how that goes. I know it the way I know where the door is. I let it stay something I know.

Becca goes to cash out the county guys.

I put my coffee cup down.

It doesn't make a sound. I do it deliberately.

Ella is refilling the shaker at the counter, her back half to me. I look at the space between her shoulder blades. I look at the line of her neck, the way she's holding herself together so thoroughly that the effort doesn't show anywhere except in the stillness of it.

I've been coming into this diner for seven months.

I haven't done enough with that time.

The shaker goes back in its holder. Ella turns to go back to the kitchen and she glances at the counter the way she always does, quick inventory, what needs doing, and she sees me looking.

She doesn't startle. She's noticed me before. She just meets my eyes for one second and then looks down at the counter and moves to wipe a spot that's already clean.

I let her get three steps.

"Which pies are homemade?" I ask.

She stops. Turns. The question isn't what she expected. She recalibrates, the way you do when you braced for one thing and got another.

"All of them," she says.

"All of them."

"My dad's recipes." She says it without softening it, just a fact. "We don't do box mix."

I look at the case. Pie and more pie, the kind that lists a little to one side because someone made them by hand without a ruler. "Which one do you make most."

Something in her face does a thing I file away: a small shift, a fraction of an opening, there and gone. "Cherry," she says. "It moves the slowest so I make it most to practice."

"Practice."

"The lattice." She looks at the case briefly. "I can't get it even."

I look at the cherry pie. The lattice lists a little to the left, same as all the rest. "Looks even to me," I say.

She looks at me again. This time she doesn't look away.

"I'll take a slice," I say.

She cuts it and plates it and sets it in front of me and she's careful about how she does it, precise, the same way she is about everything at this counter. Like this place deserves care even when nobody's grading her on it.

The pie is good. Better than good. The filling's tart and the crust doesn't fall apart and there's something in it I can't name, some spice layered underneath the cherry, and I eat the whole slice without tasting much of it because I'm thinking.

The spice is the kind of thing you only get by making a thing a thousand times and adjusting it a little each time for nobody's sake but your own.

She put that in there. Nobody asked her to.

Nobody knows it's there but me, now, and her.

Becca cashes out her table and comes back behind the counter and says something to Ella about the drink station that I don't catch, low and dismissive.

Ella's back is to me so I watch Becca's face instead.

It's the face of someone who does this the same way you do laundry.

No heat in it. Just routine. That's the part that stays with me.

A person has to be ground down a long time before the grinding stops needing any feeling behind it.

Ella doesn't respond. She goes back to the kitchen.

I leave forty dollars on a twelve-dollar bill. I don't write anything on the ticket. I pull on my cut and I go.

In the parking lot I put on my helmet and I don't look back at the window.

I look back at the window.

She's standing at the counter, looking at what I left. She's not moving. Her hand is flat on the bill and she's looking at it with an expression I cannot read from here and I want to read it so badly it's its own kind of problem.

I need to do something about that list in my head.

I ride