Chapter 16: When the Wolves your Colors
Chapter 16
Viper’s eyes swept the wrecked medical bay—the overturned supply cart, Doc pressing gauze to his own bleeding temple, Coyote slumped and bleeding against the wall—and something crossed his face too fast for Rowe to name before he schooled it back into practiced alarm.
"What the hell happened in here?"
"Ask him," Reaper said, jerking his chin toward the unconscious prospect without loosening his grip on Rowe. "He was two seconds from putting something in Elena’s IV line when we walked in."
Viper’s gaze cut to Coyote, then back to Reaper, and for just a heartbeat—barely longer than a blink—something flickered behind his eyes.
Rowe watched for it the way she’d learned to watch for a rattlesnake’s tail in the brush: not with her eyes alone, but with every nerve in her body straining toward the threat.
"Christ," Viper muttered, crouching to check the kid’s pulse with rough, businesslike hands. "He’s one of mine. I vouched for him eight months ago."
He looked up, and his expression settled into something that might have been genuine horror, or might have been the practiced face of a man who’d rehearsed this exact reaction.
"I’ll find out who got to him."
"You do that," Reaper said, his voice flat as stone.
Rowe felt the tension coiled in his body even through the fabric of his shirt. She understood then that Reaper was doing exactly what he’d told her he would—playing it colder than she’d ever seen him, giving nothing away, watching his oldest friend with the same lethal patience he’d give an enemy across a negotiating table.
"Get him to interrogation the second Doc clears him to move," Reaper continued. "I want him conscious, and I want him talking before sunrise."
Viper nodded, already hauling Coyote’s limp body up by the arm, calling for two prospects to help carry him.
As he passed through the doorway, he paused, glancing back at Rowe with an expression she couldn’t quite read.
"Your mother," he said quietly. "Is she gonna make it?"
"We don’t know yet," Rowe said, and made herself hold his gaze, made herself give nothing away either.
Something in his jaw ticked.
Then he was gone, disappearing down the hallway with Coyote’s dead weight between two prospects, and the medical bay fell into a heavy, ringing silence.
Doc refused help stitching his own temple, insisting he’d had worse from bar fights in his twenties, and set immediately to checking Elena’s vitals with hands that only shook slightly.
The IV line was intact.
The heart monitor’s steady rhythm hadn’t wavered once through the entire chaos.
"She’s stable," Doc confirmed, though exhaustion carved deep grooves beneath his eyes. "Whatever he was planning to put in that line, he didn’t get the chance. You two got here in time."
Rowe sank into the chair beside her mother’s bed, her legs finally giving out now that the adrenaline had nowhere left to go.
Reaper remained standing behind her, one hand resting on her shoulder, his eyes fixed on the doorway like he expected another ghost to materialize out of the shadows at any moment.
"I need to ask you something," Rowe said quietly, once Doc had shuffled off to clean his own wound and the room held only the three of them—her, Reaper, and her mother’s unconscious, unreadable face. "And I need you to be honest with me, even if you don’t want to be."
Reaper’s hand tightened slightly on her shoulder.
"Ask."
"Do you believe him? Coyote. What he said about her."
For a long moment, Reaper said nothing.
He moved around the bed, crouching so he was level with her, his steel-gray eyes searching her face like he was trying to find the version of this answer that wouldn’t break her.
"I believe," he said slowly, "that Coyote believed it. Whether someone fed him a lie to make him believe it, or whether it’s true—I don’t know yet. That’s the part that scares me, Rowan. Not the possibility that it’s true. The fact that I genuinely can’t tell you it isn’t."
Rowe’s throat tightened.
"She was pregnant. She was taken. She’s spent five years in a safehouse being used as leverage—"
"According to Raven," Reaper said gently, not unkindly, "who heard it from an old lady raising her in a Devil’s Disciples compound. Who had every reason to believe whatever story kept a scared, motherless kid from asking harder questions about where she really came from."
The words landed like a slap, not because they were cruel, but because Rowe realized, with sick clarity, that she’d never actually questioned the story.
She’d wanted it to be true so badly—wanted her mother back, wanted the abandonment to have been a lie all along—that she’d swallowed it whole the second Raven offered it to her.
"You think Raven lied to me."
"I think," Reaper said carefully, "that Raven might believe exactly what she told you. That doesn’t mean it’s the truth. It just means it’s the truth as it was handed to her."
Rowe pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, willing the room to stop tilting.
"So what do we actually know? What’s real?"
Reaper exhaled, long and slow, and reached for her hands, pulling them gently away from her face so he could hold them in his own.
"We know your father wrote a letter naming a traitor inside this club," he said. "We know that the traitor’s identity is in a ledger we haven’t fully decoded yet. We know someone just tried to kill your mother in her hospital bed rather than let her wake up and tell us who that traitor is."
His thumb traced slow, steadying circles over her knuckles.
"That tells me one thing very clearly, Rowan. Whatever she knows, it’s dangerous enough that someone in this club would rather see her dead than let her speak it."
"That doesn’t prove she’s innocent."
"No," Reaper agreed. "But it doesn’t prove your father’s letter was wrong about who the real snake is, either. If she sold him out, why would anyone risk exposure trying to silence her now, five years later, when the story’s already buried?"
He shook his head slowly.
"Something isn’t adding up. And until it does, I’m not going to let you tear yourself apart deciding whether to hate or forgive a woman who hasn’t said a single word for herself yet."
Rowe let her forehead drop against his shoulder, exhaustion and grief and fury tangling together until she couldn’t separate one from the other anymore.
"I hate this," she whispered. "I hate not knowing who to trust. I hate that every single person who’s supposed to love me in this club might be the one who destroyed my family."
"Not everyone," Reaper murmured against her hair, his voice rough with a tenderness he rarely let surface, even now. "I’ve loved you since you were too young for me to admit it, and I have never once lied to you about what I know. I never will."
He gently lifted her chin until she looked at him.
"Whatever this costs—even if it’s Viper, even if it’s forty years of loyalty I have to burn to the ground—you get the truth from me. Always."
She believed him.
That was the terrifying part.
In a world where every other certainty had crumbled to ash in the space of two weeks, Reaper’s word was the one thing she still trusted without hesitation.
Elena’s fingers twitched against the blanket just before six in the morning.
Rowe was at her side instantly, gripping her mother’s hand as her eyelids fluttered, struggling against the weight of sedation and blood loss.
"Mom. Mom, can you hear me?"
Elena’s eyes opened, glassy and unfocused, searching the ceiling before finally settling on Rowe’s face.
Something in her expression cracked with relief, tears welling instantly at the corners of her eyes.
"Rowan," she rasped, her voice barely more than a breath. "You’re safe. You’re really safe."
"I’m here. I’m okay. You’re the one who got shot, Mom, do you remember—"
"The ridge."
Elena’s grip tightened weakly around Rowe’s fingers.
"I remember the ridge. I remember telling you—"
"A name," Rowe finished, her heart hammering. "You told me a name. I need you to say it again. Clearly. I need to be sure."
Elena’s eyes shifted past Rowe’s shoulder, finding Reaper standing at the foot of the bed, his whole body coiled with tension, waiting.
"It wasn’t Viper," Elena whispered.
The words hit the room like a gunshot.
"What?"
Rowe’s stomach dropped straight through the floor.
"I never said Viper," Elena said, each word costing her visibly more strength than the last, her breath growing shallow and ragged. "You misheard me, baby. The wind—the gunfire—I said a different name. I said—"
Her eyes rolled back.
The heart monitor’s steady beep shattered into a frantic, screaming alarm.
"Mom!"
Rowe surged to her feet as Doc came sprinting through the door, shoving her bodily out of the way, shouting orders at the prospects flooding in behind him.
Reaper hauled Rowe back against his chest, holding her upright as her legs threatened to buckle beneath her, both of them forced to watch helplessly as Doc worked to stabilize a heart that had chosen the worst possible second to fail.
And underneath the chaos, underneath the alarm still screaming through the room, one thought echoed through Rowe’s mind with terrible, growing dread.
If it hadn’t been Viper’s name her mother whispered on the ridge—
Then whose had it been?
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