Chapter 7
Reaper
She had no right being there. No patch, no protection, nothing but fire in her eyes.
I scrubbed the rim of a glass so hard, it squealed against my rag. My hand didn’t stop even when the prospect beside me glanced up, nervous, like I might snap the thing in half.
Lucy leaned on the bar, chin high, like she belonged there.
Like she wasn’t two seconds from being torn apart.
She tugged that old hoodie tighter as if it could hide her.
It didn’t, not from me. I saw every curve she tried to bury under cotton and grief, and fuck if I didn’t want to put my hands on every inch of her softness.
All the hard, sharp girls around there were easy to touch and easier to forget.
Lucy was different. She was built to be remembered.
I told myself to look away. Instead, my gaze dragged back, caught on the set of her jaw—Caleb’s jaw—and something twisted in my chest until my grip slipped.
The glass clattered against the counter.
I caught it, too fast, too tight. Nobody called me on it, but a few heads turned.
I forced my shoulders to loosen and my breath to even out.
I watched her as I gripped the glass tighter, and while she laid into me like she belonged there, like she had a right to answers. Maybe she did, but rights meant nothing in my world. Respect did. Blood did. Loyalty did.
And grief? Grief got you killed if you weren’t careful. Hadn’t anyone told her that walking into a reaper’s den meant you might not walk out?
Caleb had been my best friend, more like a brother.
He’d patched in under me, rode next to me, bled for this club on runs where I couldn’t afford to lose anyone else.
When my old man died and left this whole damn mess in my lap, Caleb was the only one who didn’t flinch.
He took the fall for things he didn’t do.
He buried bodies we weren’t supposed to have.
He kept his mouth shut when silence was the only thing that would keep us alive.
Then, one day, he walked away. He didn’t give a speech, didn’t make threats. He handed me his patch, told me he was getting clean, and begged me not to stop him. “If I stay, I lose myself. If I leave, I might get out alive.” So, I let him go.
I’d lied to her. Not with my words—those were careful, measured—but with the silence between them. That silence held everything she didn’t know, everything I couldn’t say. Because the truth wasn’t just dangerous, it was a fuse already lit, and there were many too ears listening to our conversation.
I knew she’d come looking for answers, and that when she did, it would give me an excuse if anyone was wondering why I was looking into it. I could say it was personal, that I knew them from way back and I had to look like I was trying to help her. The quicker she got out from it, the better.
What I didn’t expect was how much she reminded me of him. Not only her face, but the way she spoke, the way she challenged me, like she didn’t care if it cost her.
That’s what scared me the most. Because the second she stepped through that door, I stopped thinking like a President and started thinking like a man who owed a dead brother a favour he never got to ask for. A man who’d let the woman he was in love with walk away thinking she meant nothing to him.
She thought I was stone, unshakeable, but every word she said was more damaging than she’d know. Instead of crying, I’d poured my grief into the barrel of a gun and waited for a name to pin it to.
Then there was her, and she wasn’t leaving. I almost laughed when she said she wanted in, like it was a job application. Like the word truth meant something in a place where lies were currency and bodies were payment.
“You wouldn’t last a week,” I told her.
She didn’t blink. “Try me.”
I believed her, and that was the problem.
Lucy Kane wasn’t part of my world. She had no patch, no brother left to protect her, and if she kept coming back, she was going to end up the same way Caleb did—dead in a dirty room with secrets stitched across her spine.
So, I did the only thing I could do. I poured another drink and gave her time to back out, but she didn’t back down.
She drank the bitter whiskey like it was her way of proving something. I watched her throat bob, watched her face twist from the taste, and saw the moment she swallowed more than just liquor. She swallowed the risk.
God help me, a part of me wanted her to pass my test. I wanted her to get inside and burn this place down with her grief and her fire and her refusal to die quietly like so many others had.
But the other part of me, the part that had buried too many brothers, too many friends, and watched too many good people go up in smoke, wanted her gone before the fire spread.
Before the club smelt her weakness, and before the men started asking who she belonged to.
I looked at her empty glass, her hands curled tight and her knuckles white.
She’d already made her choice. Fire ran in the Kane blood, and she was burning.
I had to figure out if my choice would be to protect her, or make sure she never came back.