Chapter 3: Six Words on a Stranger's Phone

I'd never seen a man's eyes change color before. I still don't know if it was rage or something worse.

It lasted less than a heartbeat — a flash of gold where brown should have been, there and gone so fast I spent the whole ride home convincing myself I'd imagined it, exhaustion and smoke and grief conspiring to hand my brain a hallucination shaped like a stranger's stare. I let go of his arm like it had burned me. He stepped back like I had.

"Go home, Rae Calloway," he said, and his voice had dropped into something rougher than before, something with an edge on it I didn't understand yet. "Please."

Please. Not an order. A request, low and strange, from a man who I'd bet hadn't asked anyone for anything in a very long time.

I went. I don't remember most of the ride back — just smoke still hanging low over the tree line as I passed it again, the garage reduced now to a smoldering black skeleton where firefighters picked through the wreckage with flashlights, looking, I assumed, for anything worth saving. There wasn't going to be anything worth saving. I'd built enough engines in that shop to know fire like that doesn't leave you spare parts. It leaves you ash and a lesson.

Nadia was waiting on my porch when I finally got home, wrapped in a blanket she'd clearly grabbed off her own couch, two mugs of something gone cold on the step beside her.

"You rode into Reapers territory," she said. Not a question.

"I rode into Reapers territory," I confirmed.

"Alone. At one in the morning. After your garage burned down." She said each fact like she was laying bricks, building toward some conclusion she wanted me to arrive at on my own so she wouldn't have to be the one to say it out loud. "Rae, do you have any idea—"

"I have some idea," I said, sitting down heavy beside her, my whole body finally admitting how tired it was now that I'd stopped moving. "I saw one of their bikes leaving the scene, Nadia. A Reapers patch. I wasn't going to sit around waiting for the insurance company to tell me my dad's whole life just vanished for no reason."

Nadia went quiet in a way that made my stomach drop before she even said anything.

"What," I said.

"Your dad," she said carefully, "used to fix bikes for them. Did you know that?"

I stared at her. "What are you talking about?"

"Before you were old enough to remember. Before your mom—" She stopped herself, and I noted it, filed it away the way you file away a rattle in an engine that isn't loud enough yet to diagnose. "He worked on their bikes for years. Everybody around here over forty knows it. Nobody talks about it because talking about the Reapers around here is like talking about the weather during a hurricane — pointless and a little bit dangerous."

"Twenty years I worked in that garage," I said, "and my own father never once mentioned—"

"There's a lot your dad never mentioned," Nadia said, gentle in the exact way that made it worse. "I always figured he had his reasons."

I thought about the half-second flicker in Ronan Vale's eyes when I said my father's name. The way he'd said it back to me — not like a question, like a bill coming due. The way an entire man's posture had rearranged itself around three syllables I'd said my whole life without once understanding their weight.

"He knew him," I said slowly. "Ronan Vale. He knew my dad."

"Ronan Vale," Nadia repeated, and something crossed her face that I hadn't seen since we were seventeen and she found out a boy she liked had a girlfriend three towns over. Not quite fear. Something adjacent to it. "You talked to Ronan Vale himself? The Alpha?"

"The what?"

"President," she corrected quickly, too quickly, the word swapped in like she'd caught herself saying something she wasn't supposed to. "The club president. That's — that's not a small thing, Rae. People don't just walk up and talk to him."

I let that sit for a second, the wrongness of her correction humming under everything else, too tired and too raw to chase it down properly that night. I told myself I'd ask her about it later, once I'd slept, once the world had stopped smelling like my whole life burning.

I went inside instead. Poured myself two fingers of my dad's good whiskey, the bottle he kept for occasions that never seemed to come, and sat at the kitchen counter where a stack of unopened insurance mail waited for me like a small, polite tombstone.

That's when the phone rang.

Not my phone. A burner — cheap, black, plastic, sitting on the counter where I absolutely had not left it, where nothing had been sitting an hour ago when I'd walked out the door toward the fire. I stared at it like it might detonate. It buzzed again, screen lighting up with a text instead of a call.

Tell her the truth or I will.

No name. No number I recognized. Just six words sitting on a phone that shouldn't exist in a kitchen that should've been empty, and somewhere underneath the fear climbing up my spine, a colder, sharper thought took hold and wouldn't let go.

Somebody had been in my house tonight. And they wanted me to know it.

I checked every window first — stupid, probably, since whoever left the phone was clearly long gone, but my hands needed something to do that wasn't shaking. Every lock was exactly as I'd left it. No broken glass, no forced latch, nothing to explain how a stranger had gotten a phone onto my kitchen counter without so much as disturbing the stack of mail beside it.

Unless it wasn't a stranger. Unless it was someone who already had a way in — a key, a memory of which window stuck and which one didn't, the kind of familiarity you only get from someone who'd spent real time in this house before I ever locked a door against anyone.

I thought of my father's old crew, the men who used to come around for Sunday cookouts when I was small, before they stopped coming and I never once asked why. I thought of every unremarkable adult who'd ever had a reason to be in and out of our kitchen, and realized, with a sick lurch, that I couldn't actually rule any of them out.

The phone buzzed again. A second text, this one longer.

He'll tell you it was for your own good. Ask him what happened to the garage lease the year he stopped coming around. Ask him whose name is really on the deed.

I read it three times. Then I picked up the phone with a dish towel wrapped around my hand, some half-remembered crime show instinct telling me not to smudge whatever prints might already be on it, and I sat there at my kitchen counter until the whiskey went warm and the sky outside started turning the pale, exhausted gray of almost-morning.

Whoever this was, they knew things about my father I didn't. They knew things about the garage's ownership that made my stomach twist with a dread I couldn't yet name. And they wanted me to get those answers from Ronan Vale specifically — which meant either they trusted him to eventually tell the truth, or they wanted to watch him fail to.

I didn't sleep that night. I sat at that counter with a dead man's whiskey and a stranger's phone and turned over every version of the truth I could imagine, and none of them were good enough to explain why my father had let this town believe he'd never

known a single Reaper in his life.