Chapter 13: Ridge of no return
Chapter 13
The engine had stopped, but the silence it left behind was worse.
Rowe lay awake long after Reaper’s breathing had evened into sleep, his arm heavy and warm across her waist. She stared at the ceiling of his room, replaying the sound over and over—a single motorcycle, revving once in the dark beyond the compound fence, then gone.
No headlights.
No follow-up.
Just a message delivered in engine noise.
I know you’re in there. I know you heard me.
She slid out from under his arm as carefully as she could.
He caught her wrist before she made it two steps.
"Where are you going?"
Not a question.
His voice was rough with sleep, but his eyes were already sharp, already awake in that unnerving way he had—like some part of him never fully slept, never fully stopped guarding the door.
"Bathroom," she lied.
"Rowan."
She stopped.
He sat up, the sheet falling to his waist, scars catching the thin moonlight through the blinds.
"You’ve been staring at that ceiling for twenty minutes, as it owes you money. What’s in your head?"
She could have kept lying.
Instead, she reached for the phone on the nightstand and pulled up the message again, the one that had arrived just before dawn.
The bloodline is the key. Your mother is still breathing... for now. Come alone to the northern ridge tomorrow, or the price doubles.
"Tomorrow’s today," she said quietly. "In about fourteen hours."
Reaper’s jaw tightened as he read it a second time, like maybe the words would rearrange themselves into something less cruel.
"You’re not going alone."
"They said—"
"I don’t care what they said."
He swung his legs off the bed, already reaching for his jeans, the conversation apparently over as far as he was concerned.
"Every single message you’ve gotten from these people has been a hook wrapped in a promise. Crossroads was supposed to be safe, too. You still ended up with a bullet graze and three dead Disciples on the ground."
"And a sister," Rowe said. "I got a sister out of it, Jax. If I hadn’t gone—"
"If you hadn’t gone, you’d still be in one piece with no one shooting at you specifically."
He yanked his shirt over his head, and for a moment the room felt smaller, charged with the particular fury of a man who loved something he couldn’t fully protect.
"I am not doing this again. I am not standing in a doorway waiting to hear if you made it out."
"Then don’t stand in a doorway."
She caught his hand before he could finish tucking his knife into his boot.
"Come with me. Not behind me. Not a mile back, listening through an earpiece.
With me."
Something in his expression cracked open—the same rawness she’d glimpsed in the mine, in his room, in every unguarded second he allowed himself around her.
"They said alone."
"They also said my mother’s alive," Rowe said. "I stopped believing every word out of these people’s mouths the second they burned my barn down. We do it my way this time.
Our way."
He studied her for a long moment, and she watched him war with himself—the president who followed intelligence and contingency, against the man who’d once carried a bleeding twelve-year-old girl out of a burning building and never quite put her down again.
"Fine," he said finally.
"But we bring Ghost and Viper as far as the tree line. Close enough to move fast, far enough to look like you came solo if anyone’s watching through a scope."
It wasn’t a compromise.
It was a command dressed up as one.
But she’d take it.
The northern ridge was a different country from the crossroads—higher, colder, the red rock giving way to scrub pine and gray stone as the desert climbed toward the mountains.
Rowe had ridden these trails exactly once before, as a teenager, chasing Cade on a dirt bike while their father hollered at them both to slow down.
Now the trail felt like something else entirely.
A throat she was riding straight into.
Reaper kept his bike a length behind hers the whole way up, close enough that she could hear the low, steady growl of his engine beneath her own—a sound that had become as familiar to her as her own heartbeat over the last week.
Ghost and Viper peeled off at the tree line exactly as promised, vanishing into the pines with the kind of quiet competence that told her they’d done this a hundred times before, for a hundred reasons she’d probably never know.
The ridge opened onto a flat outcrop of stone overlooking the valley, the town’s lights a scattered handful of stars fallen to earth below them.
The wind cut sharply and cold at this elevation, whipping Rowe’s hair loose from its braid.
A figure waited at the far edge of the outcrop.
Not Raven.
Older.
A woman in a long dark coat, hood pulled low, standing very still with her back to the drop-off, like she wanted them to see she had nothing to run to.
Rowe’s stomach dropped straight through the stone beneath her boots.
She knew that posture.
She knew the particular way that woman held her shoulders, squared and proud even in fear—because Rowe had inherited it.
Had been told her whole life she stood exactly like her mother.
"Mom," she breathed, the word tearing out of her before she could stop it.
The woman’s hood lifted.
Five years had carved deep lines into a face Rowe had spent half a decade trying to forget and the other half aching to remember.
Gray threaded through dark hair.
A scar, thin and pale, ran along her jaw that hadn’t been there before.
But the eyes—
The eyes were the same.
Rowe’s own eyes stared back at her across twenty feet of cold stone.
"Rowan."
Her mother’s voice cracked on the single syllable.
"God. Look at you."
Rowe took a step forward.
Reaper’s hand closed around her arm before she could take a second.
"Wait," he said low.
Not to her mother.
To Rowe.
His eyes were fixed past the woman’s shoulder, scanning the treeline, the rocks, the shadows pooling at the base of the outcrop.
Old instinct, honed over a decade of ambushes and betrayals.
"Something’s wrong."
"Jax—"
"She’s not alone," he said.
"Look at her hands."
Rowe looked.
Her mother’s hands were pressed flat against her own thighs, fingers spread wide, deliberately visible.
The posture of someone signaling don’t come closer, don’t trust this without being able to say it out loud.
"Mom," Rowe called out, her voice unsteady now.
"Are you here alone?"
Her mother’s throat worked.
Her eyes flicked, just once, toward the tree line to her left—the opposite side from where Ghost and Viper waited.
"Run," her mother said, and her voice broke completely on the word.
"Rowan, baby, you need to—"
The shot came from the trees before she finished the sentence.
Rowe watched, frozen, as her mother’s body jerked and folded, crumpling sideways onto the stone in a way that would haunt every dream Rowe had for the rest of her life.
"MOM!"
She was moving before Reaper could grab her again, sprinting across the outcrop with no thought for cover, no thought for the shooter still somewhere in the dark trees, nothing in her head but the woman bleeding out on the rock twenty feet away.
Reaper’s shout followed her, furious and terrified in equal measure.
Then his footsteps pounded after her.
Then gunfire erupted from the trees in earnest—not one shooter but several, muzzle flashes strobing white against the black pines.
Rowe hit the ground beside her mother and pressed both hands to the wound blooming dark across her stomach, warm blood instantly slicking her fingers.
"Stay with me," Rowe gasped.
"Stay with me, please, I just found you—"
Her mother’s hand, shaking and slick with her own blood, closed weakly over Rowe’s wrist.
"The club," she whispered, each word costing her visibly more than the last.
"It’s not the Disciples, baby.
It was never just the Disciples.
It’s someone wearing Reaper’s own colors.
Someone who’s been feeding them everything.
Someone close.
Someone he trusts—"
A bullet cracked into the stone inches from Rowe’s knee, spraying grit across her face.
Reaper reached them in the same instant, dropping into a crouch and returning fire toward the trees in three sharp, economical shots that silenced one muzzle flash for good.
"We have to move her," he barked.
"She’s still talking, she—"
"Rowan."
Her mother’s grip tightened, urgent now, her eyes locked on Rowe’s with a clarity that cut through the pain contorting her face.
"Listen to me.
The name.
I heard them say the name before I got away.
The one who sold your father out.
The one who’s still inside those walls."
Another volley of gunfire tore across the ridge.
Somewhere behind them, Ghost’s voice roared out a warning, and the pines lit up with answering fire from the Reapers moving in to cover their retreat.
Her mother’s lips moved.
A single word.
A name.
Barely more than a breath.
And then her eyes rolled back.
Her hand went slack in Rowe’s grip.
The wind off the ridge carried her last word away before Rowe could be certain she’d heard it right.
Reaper hauled them both up, half-carrying Rowe’s mother toward the bikes as bullets chewed the stone at their heels, shouting for Ghost, for Viper, for anyone to get the doc on the radio now—
But all Rowe could hear, over and over, drowning out the gunfire and the engines and Reaper’s voice screaming her name, was the shape of that single word on her mother’s dying lips.
A name she recognized.
A name that belonged to someone standing in the Iron Reapers’ chapel not twelve hours ago.
Someone none of them had ever thought to suspect.
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