Chapter Twelve
Choice in the Slaughterhouse
Steel
Harper leaves in an ambulance, and for the first time in years, I don’t know what to do with my hands. They’re still wrapped around the knife. Blood drips from the blade onto the dirt between my boots.
A dead man lies behind me. A wounded prospect is on his way to County with Harper beside him. And I stand in the yard while every brother around me pretends not to watch me crack open.
Good men would feel shame. I feel absence, and that’s worse.
“Steel.” Savage’s voice comes from my left. Quiet and controlled.
I don’t look at him. Instead, I watch as the ambulance lights disappear beyond the gate. Red flashes fade against the dark road until there’s nothing left but dust and silence.
“She’s safe,” he says.
I almost laugh at the absurdity of the fucking word.
Safe.
Harper came into my world because I dragged danger across her path. She slept in my bed because I made violence feel like shelter. She put her hands on me and called it choice, and then she watched me gut a man on his knees.
Safe is a word for people who don’t know better.
“She flinched,” I say lowly.
Savage says nothing because there’s nothing to say.
My voice comes out flat. “From me.”
Saint steps closer, but not too close. “She watched an execution,” he says.
I turn my head slowly. “He was armed.”
“He was down.”
“He was breathing.”
Saint’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t look away. Neither does Savage. That’s the problem with brothers. Real ones don’t let you lie to yourself even when you really fucking need to.
Fury drags the body away with two prospects. Mama M is inside with the women, locking down the back hall. Crimson is barking orders near the fence like he didn’t nearly fracture us this morning. Men move. The compound repairs itself around blood because that’s what it knows how to do.
I know how to do that too. Patch the hole. Dump the body. Find the enemy. Forget the woman’s face when she realized loving me might cost her soul.
The clubhouse door opens behind me, and Raven steps out with a strip of bloodied cloth tied around her upper arm, her face pale but her spine straight. Savage sees her before I do, and his whole body changes.
“You should be inside,” he says.
Raven lifts a brow. “And you should try having one original thought before the next apocalypse.”
His jaw tightens as she walks past him and stops in front of me. Raven Blackwood doesn’t look at the knife first, she looks at my face, and that makes her smarter than most.
“You let her leave,” she says.
“I did what she asked.”
“Yes.” Her voice softens half an inch. “That’s the part that hurts.”
I look away. The knife feels heavy in my hand.
“She said she needed peace,” I say.
Savage exhales once. “Do you have any to give her?”
“No.”
“Then give her the next best thing.” I look at him. His eyes are cold, but not cruel. “Choice.”
Harper said no, and I backed up. Harper said don’t come, and I stayed. Harper left, and I let her. Choice. It feels like ripping out my own fucking spine.
Raven steps closer. “She isn’t gone because she doesn’t want you.”
My jaw locks. “Don’t,” I grit out.
She ignores me of course. “She’s gone because she wants you too much and she doesn’t know how to survive that yet.”
The words land wrong. Deep and ugly, but undeniably true.
My body remembers her under me. Her hands on my shoulders. Her mouth opening on my name. The way she said she chose me, and the way I believed her because I could feel it in every inch of her body.
My hands were on her skin last night. Tonight, they held a knife in front of her. No wonder she ran.
“She should stay gone,” I say.
Raven laughs once. Not amused but bitter. “That’s noble. Also, stupid. A common combination in dangerous men.”
Savage’s gaze cuts to her. She looks at him. “What? You had the same disease.”
“This isn’t about us.”
“It’s always about us when one of your men starts confusing self-punishment with sacrifice.”
Saint’s phone buzzes, he checks the screen and goes still.
That pulls me back faster than comfort ever could. “What?” I ask.
Saint looks at Savage first, which is absolutely the wrong fucking move.
I step toward him. “What?”
“The ambulance never made it to County.”
Everything stops. “What did you say?”
Saint’s face hardens. “The ambulance diverted. Dispatch logged a route change after a traffic block near Charleston. The unit went dark four minutes later.”
The quiet comes back, but it's not empty this time.
Savage turns to the gate. “Move.”
But I’m already running.
Raven is right behind us. Savage snaps, “Raven.”
She keeps moving. “We can argue about this later.”
For once, he doesn’t stop her.
****
The ambulance is on its side beneath an overpass, lights still flashing weakly against concrete pillars. One back door hangs open, and there’s blood on the asphalt.
Too much blood, and not enough bodies.
I’m out of the van before it stops moving. “Harper!” My voice tears raw through the night, but there’s no answer.
I hit the wreckage hard, ripping the half-open door wider. Inside, medical supplies are scattered everywhere. Gauze. Tubing. A broken oxygen mask. A monitor blinking useless numbers into the dark. Tyler’s blood smeared across the bench.
The driver is dead behind the wheel. Tyler is unconscious but breathing, strapped to the stretcher, face white and slick with sweat.
Harper is gone.
The world tilts before it sharpens. Savage appears beside me, Saint behind him, while Fury swears near the front of the rig. Raven climbs into the wreckage from the opposite side, careful over broken glass. Savage makes a sound low in his throat.
“Don’t,” she snaps without looking at him. “I know what I am doing.” She crouches near the bench and looks at the floor. “Steel,” she says.
I turn, and she points. There’s blood on the floor near the rear doors, not pooled, but dragged. A snapped piece of trauma shear lies under the bench, the metal stained red.
My fingers close around it. Harper’s weapon of choice. A raw sound claws up my throat at the sight. I let her leave, and now she could be hurt, and the thought alone is driving me insane.
Savage grips my shoulder. “Steel.”
I turn to face him, and for once, he doesn’t tell me to keep my head. Maybe he knows it’s too late.
Raven reaches toward the stretcher and touches the bandage at Tyler’s thigh. “She kept pressure after the crash.”
I see it now. The tied bandage. The brace. The blood pattern. Harper did her job while men came to take her.
“She saved him,” I say, and Savage looks at me. “She kept pressure on him after the crash.” My voice is rough. “She saved him before they pulled her out.”
Of course she did. Even terrified. Even hurt. She saved the living.
I step out of the ambulance. “Get Tyler to County,” Savage orders Fury. “Now.”
Raven follows me out, her eyes on the drag marks leading toward the tire tracks. “She fought them.”
“She would,” I mutter.
“There’s more blood near the door.”
I look down at the second trail—it’s not enough to be fatal, just enough to tell me someone put hands on her. The world narrows to that blood. Harper’s blood. My medic’s blood.
No, not mine.
But every part of me still answers like something sacred has been touched.
Saint crouches near the asphalt outside, flashlight sweeping over tire marks. “Three vehicles. One van, two bikes. They headed north.”
“Reaper,” I say.
“That would be my most likely guess.”
“No,” I correct, standing with Harper’s broken shear in my fist. “Definitely.”
Tyler groans weakly, and that sound is the only reason I don’t tear the night apart in every direction at once. I climb back into the ambulance and check his pulse like Harper would. Fast and weak, but alive.
Raven watches me.
“What?” I snap.
“Nothing.”
“You’re looking.”
“Yes.” Her gaze drops to my hand on Tyler’s pulse. “She got under your skin deeper than you think.”
“She’s gone.”
“Then go get her.”
Savage turns from the wreck, already moving. “Saint?”
Saint rises, phone to his ear. “I’ve got a plate hit. Near the industrial sector north around the old rail spur. It’s the same area as the trace.”
Reaper’s stage.
He took the medic, now he thinks he has me.
Savage faces me. “He wants you coming blind.”
I look at the blood on the asphalt, at the broken shear in my hand, at the place Harper should be.
“He’ll get me,” I say.
Savage’s eyes narrow. “Steel.”
I meet his stare. “But not blind.”
Raven steps between us, which is either brave or stupid. “No. He gets all of us.”
Savage’s jaw flexes. “Raven...”
She points toward the ambulance. “He used Harper because he thinks women are leverage. Again. I am getting tired of men being unimaginative.”
“She’s right,” Saint says, and Savage looks at him with something like betrayal on his face. Saint shrugs. “She usually is right when it’s inconvenient.”
Raven’s eyes stay on mine. “You go in there only as the monster, and he wins. You go in there as the man Harper asked to come back, and you might actually save her.”
“I’ll save her.”
“I know.” Her voice drops. “But save yourself too, Steel. She’ll need both.”
I hate that. I hate that she sees too much. I hate that Harper is bleeding somewhere because Reaper wanted to prove love is a weakness.
****
Reaper chose to hide in an old slaughterhouse. Subtle bastard.
The building squats at the edge of the industrial district, windows broken, walls tagged, rusted hooks still hanging from ceiling rails visible through gaps in the roof. Saint’s drone finds four men outside, maybe six inside. Heat signatures are dirty because the building holds the day’s warmth.
No clean count. No clean line.
But I don’t need clean. I need Harper.
Savage lays out the plan in a whisper over the hood of the van. Fury takes west. Saint cuts power. Crimson and two men hold the south exit. Savage moves through the front with three brothers.
Raven listens, arms crossed, face pale beneath the harsh moonlight.
Savage looks at her. “You stay in the van.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
She smiles without humor. “Try again.”
His eyes go flat. “This isn’t the time.”
“Exactly. So stop wasting it.”