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All Chapters of Claimed By My Father’s Outlaw : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

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Chapter 81

RAINEI had Ghost against the truck's tailgate before he finished the sentence. My forearm across his throat. I don't remember deciding to do it."Say it again.""Cole wrote that cipher." He didn't fight me. He stood with his hands open, a man waiting to be shot. "The winter before the Conclave, for the Revenants' tactical channel. Two copies. Cole kept one. I kept the other.""And you let me run my whole war over a channel built by a dead man!""I thought it was safe. That's why I gave it to you.""Why do you have it?"Wind tugged my hair. Behind us, Tomas and the others lifted Sean's body onto a blanket, wordless and gentle. Isla sat on the dock with her knees pulled up, staring at the water."Because I rode with him six years," Ghost said quietly. "Because the night before the Conclave he pulled me aside and said he was going to kill Ambrose. He said if it went wrong, I should find you."My arm went slack. "Me?""He didn't say why. When he didn't come back, I came anyway. The carte

Chapter 82

RAINEThe south wall was still coming down when I started running.Bricks rained across the yard. Black smoke rolled low over the gravel, and somewhere inside it men were screaming, old patches whose voices had cracked back into boys'. I didn't think. I vaulted a burning crate, hit the gate at a dead sprint, and shouted the only order I had."South barracks! Everybody out! Now!"Hollis stood in the doorway with a rifle in his hands and a stunned look on his face. "Queen, that was the wall. The barracks are fine—""They're next. Wall first, then the barracks. Out, Hollis!""How could you possibly know that?""Three minutes. Trust me or bury forty men."He stared at me for exactly one second. Then he turned and roared in the voice he'd used for thirty years. "You heard her! OUT!"They poured out in boxers and unlaced boots, dragging gear, dragging each other. Ghost's riders hauled the wounded off their cots. Tillman came staggering through the smoke with a man over his shoulder, tie fla

Chapter 83

RAINE Every nerve in my body screamed at me to run to him. I made my boots do the opposite. One slow step at a time, until I stood in front of the broken wall with my hands loose at my sides and my heart trying to batter its way out through my ribs. "I'm Mercer." His gaze finally landed on me. Flat. Polite. The look of a man reading a menu. It was the cruelest thing anyone had ever done to me, and somewhere under the pain I understood he was doing it for love. "Mr. Cruz sends his regards," he said. "And who are you?" "Maddox." The corner of his mouth lifted, with nothing behind it. "I believe we've met." Rifles shifted all along the wall. Hollis stepped up beside me, jaw like granite. "That's the Revenant who gunned Ambrose at the Conclave." "Ambrose was a fool," Cole said, without turning his head. "He died like one. Mr. Cruz doesn't hold grudges against useful men." He tilted his head at Hollis. "Lower the rifle, old man. You'll hurt yourself." Hollis's muzzle shook

Chapter 84

RAINE"He's gone to Cruz," I said.Nobody in the war room breathed."That's impossible," Hollis said. "He can barely stand.""He walked a mile and a half on a bullet wound to their pickets. Ghost's scout found the boot prints." I put the folded patch and the note on the table. "He didn't ask. He never asks. He just decides.""Then there's no handover," Ghost said slowly. "No handover, no shot.""And if Mr. Mercer says the wrong word to the wrong man," Tillman said, pale as paper, "our asset's cover goes with it. Two men dead before sundown."Isla slammed her palm on the table. "So we go get him.""I'm going to," I said."Queen, you can't leave this wall!" Hollis took a step toward me. "The second wave comes at dusk!""I'm not leaving the wall." I looked at him. "You are the wall."He stopped."Forty-one men," I said. "You said you wouldn't forget it. Then hold it for me. I can't be in two places, and I'd rather be wrong about my father than right about leaving him."For a long moment

Chapter 85

RAINEThe steel was cold against my skin. His hand was steady.But I'd spent six weeks learning that man's body by heart, and I felt it. A tremor, the faintest vibration, running from his wrist down the barrel and into my skull, like a plucked wire."Please," Cruz said pleasantly. "Don't kill her yet, Mr. Maddox. I have questions.""Of course, sir."Cruz settled back in his chair, pouring the second glass of wine. He had the soft, patient voice of a man who'd never been in a hurry in his life. "Your radio says east. Your riders are in the east. Yet here you are, small and alone and very brave." He tilted his head. "Tell me why.""I'm the diversion," I said.Cruz laughed. "No. You're a daughter. It's much simpler." He sipped. "Sentimental. I'd forgotten how sentimental your people are.""Let her go, Alejandro," my father said."Victor, we haven't finished our conversation." Cruz put down the glass. "You know what I want. Your insurance. The ledger. Ten years of payments, names and date

Chapter 86

RAINECole didn't put down his weapon.He smiled. It was the first real smile I'd seen on his face in two months, small and crooked and absolutely lethal."You knew," he said. "Good. That saves time."He fired twice.Not at Cruz. Not at the six men. He fired twice into the air above our heads, two sharp cracks that rang off the concrete ceiling, and then the whole world went black.The generator died with a shriek of sparks somewhere beyond the walls. Ghost's rifle, from eight hundred yards, through a gap in a shed. Floodlights, work lamp, the dispatch office bulb, everything blinked out at once. I heard the room gasp. Then every gun in it began to fire."Down!"I threw myself flat. Bullets tore the dark apart, muzzle flashes strobing white and red across the floor. I crawled toward where I'd last seen the chair, razor blade slick in my fist. A boot slammed past my face. Somebody screamed and fell. I found a leg of the metal chair with my left hand, followed it up to a wrist, and sawe

Chapter 87

RAINEWe covered five miles in eleven minutes.I rode with the phone jammed between my helmet and my ear, and Isla's voice in it was flat and strange, the voice of someone carrying a very full glass. "He's nineteen, Raine. He's shaking like a leaf. Hollis has a rifle on him, and I told Hollis if he fires I'll shoot him myself.""Don't let anyone touch him.""Nobody's touching him. Nobody's breathing near him.""I'm coming.""I know," she said. "That's the only reason I'm still standing."Cole rode a captured dirt bike on my right, his bleeding arm tucked against his ribs. Ghost and the riders fanned out behind us. On the back of Tomas's bike, my father sat pillion with his forehead against the other man's shoulder blade, the white of his bandages gone dark at the edges. Nobody said a word. Nobody had to. We were all thinking the same thing. Cruz is dead. So why does it feel like we just lost?The compound looked like a body that had been in a car wreck. The south wall was a heap of br

Chapter 88

RAINE"Ramón Beltrán," said the voice from the vest. "My father held your note. My uncle Alejandro was patient enough to wait ten years to collect it. You were very rude to cut that short.""Beltrán." Vex leaned against Tomas, gray as a ghost. "Your father was a better man than you sound.""My father was a man you owed, and he's been dead six years, which makes it my debt now." The soft click of ice in a glass. "You killed my uncle tonight. That's a second invoice. I'm feeling generous. I'll take them as one.""What do you want?" I said."Ah. Blackjack." He chuckled. "Do you know how much you sound like your mother?"I nearly lunged at the vest. Cole's hand closed around my arm like a vise."The ledger," Beltrán said. "And Victor Mercer, alive. The Marlow Bridge at midnight, no one but the old man and the book. Do that and the boy walks away. Bring so much as a stray dog, and I make him a fountain.""He's nineteen!""He's a very useful pulse. Which reminds me. Eli?"The boy's eyes wen

Chapter 89

RAINE"Ghost. Two men on the shed door. Nobody gets in. Nobody. I don't care who.""Even—""Everyone."He understood. I watched him not ask.The back shed was an old tin box behind the garage I hadn't been allowed inside since I was fifteen. Vex kept it padlocked. Cole cut the lock with bolt cutters from my toolbox. Isla came in behind us with a lantern, Eli's blanket still around her shoulders. She'd left the boy sleeping in the infirmary with Pike keeping watch. The door scraped open on a smell of old oil and ten years of dust.A tarp, gray with age, humped over something in the corner.I knew what was under it before I touched it.David's bike.Bent frame. Scorched fork. The front wheel gone. On the fender, a faded sticker, a cartoon serpent with a wrench in its jaws that he'd drawn himself the summer he turned sixteen. Somebody had kept it. Not scrapped it, not sold it. Ten years in the dark, under a tarp, in a shed I'd been forbidden to enter."He kept it," Isla whispered.My han

Chapter 90

RAINENobody moved.Hollis looked at the letter. Then at me. Then, very slowly, his hand rose to his chest like a man feeling for a heartbeat."He wrote it down," he said. "That stubborn son of a bitch. He actually wrote it down.""Is it true?"The old man didn't answer. He didn't need to. I watched thirty years crack across his face like ice on a pond.I don't remember crossing the floor. I remember the blade in my hand, the fine steel I'd used on the tank, and the cold wall against Hollis's back, and the skin of his throat under the point. Cole said my name twice. Isla's breath hitched."Say it.""Raine—""Say it, Hollis!""Yes." It came out of him as a whisper. "It's true."A drop of blood slid down the blade."Ten years ago," Hollis said, "your father was pushing me out. Bad knee, old man. He had the new boys. And I'd bet everything I had on a deal that went sour. I owed money, Queen. To the wrong people. And Beltrán's father's man came to me and said, 'Tell us which road Vex's fa

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