Page 6 of The Lasso Master

Gavin wasn't wrong.

A sudden burst of laughter and raised voices echoed from downstairs—sharp, unmistakable, and way too gleeful to be coming from a sanctioned scene.

Reed turned toward the sound, already picking out the culprits by tone alone.

"That sounds like Roxie," he said dryly."And that’s definitely Keely and Vanessa."

Gavin groaned. "Shit."

Reed didn’t even try to hide his grin. "You might want to run."

Gavin was already heading for the door. "When three brats start trouble together, it’s never small."

Reed called after him, "Most likely, they’re about five minutes from being over a bench with their asses lit up."

Gavin laughed over his shoulder. "Sounds like a Friday night."

Reed shook his head, the smile lingering despite himself. Some things at Iron Spur never changed—and thank god for that. It was predictable, grounding. The kind of familiar chaos he could navigate blindfolded. But Harper? She was different. Unscripted. Unstable in the best and worst ways. A variable he hadn’t accounted for—and the one thing in this whole damn place that felt like a real threat.

His smile faded as the noise downstairs grew more distant. His mind shifted, pulling back from Gavin, from Jesse, from the familiar chaos that was the Iron Spur. It all faded intobackground static. Because no matter how loud the club got, Harper Langston was louder in his head.

Would he tame her? Put her in rope and watch her unravel in his hands? Teach her what it meant to trust someone without losing herself? Or would she slip past his defenses, worm her way inside the cracks he didn’t let anyone see, and tear him open from the inside?

Reed clenched his jaw, the weight of it settling like a stone. It would be one or the other. Of that, he had no doubt.

3

HARPER

Harper didn’t run the moment her phone buzzed—but only because she was standing in the middle of a boutique coffee shop surrounded by hipsters and overpriced muffins. Running would draw attention. She needed less of that.

She took one sip of her drink—espresso, strong and hot, just the way she liked her mornings and her men—and casually slipped her phone from the inside pocket of her leather jacket. She expected a news alert, maybe a burner client checking in.

What she got instead was a cold splash of adrenaline straight to the spine. The text had no name. Just a number she hadn’t seen in over a year. A number that belonged to a ghost with excellent timing and the moral compass of a shark.

GET OUT NOW, SPECTER.

Her stomach dropped, a hard punch of dread that hit just below her ribs. But her face? Smooth. Unbothered. She slipped into that old muscle memory—the kind honed over years of walking into rooms she wasn’t supposed to be in and walking out with things that didn’t belong to her. Smile like you're in control. Move like you're expected somewhere. She lifted her phone to her ear, posture easy, mouth twitching in a mimicry of casualconversation as she rose from her chair with fluid, unhurried grace. Nobody would look twice—just another woman taking a call. Just another phantom making an exit.

But under the smooth exit strategy, Harper felt a pulse of something jagged twist beneath her ribs—a sting of detachment, maybe grief. She wasn’t just leaving a coffee shop. She was shedding another version of herself. Another half-truth, another alias, another mask scraped clean off. It never got easier. But letting go was part of the job. The hard part. The part that kept her from ever getting too comfortable in her own skin.

“Uh-huh. Yeah. I can be there in ten,” she said lightly, then exited with calm, unhurried steps that belied the chaos cracking like glass under her ribs.

The moment she was outside, her breath turned sharp—like she'd been holding it without realizing. Cold air hit her lungs, but it didn’t clear the panic. It sharpened it. Her eyes scanned the street, every pedestrian a potential tail, every reflection a surveillance risk. She didn’t bolt. She calculated. Slowed her pace. Controlled her breathing. Controlled her presence. Because panic got you caught. And Harper Langston had survived too long to go down panicked.

Son of a bitch.

Her heart twisted at the thought of him. Stuart had once been everything—mentor, protector, the one who saw potential in her chaos and shaped it into precision. He'd taught her how to steal stars, how to disappear in plain sight, how to make the world bend. But beneath that brilliance had always been something colder. Something cruel. He’d taken her under his wing when she was barely out of juvenile detention and taught her how to blend in, vanish, and extract value without leaving a trace.

For a while, they were good. Too good. A two-person crew that made ghosts look clumsy. But Stuart never saw her as a partner—just a tool or worse, a commodity. The man who hadturned her into a weapon didn’t do it out of love or belief in her. He did it to sell her—to the highest bidder, like she was a rare artifact instead of a girl looking for a place to belong.

Not with fire—he'd used precision. Subtle cuts. He didn’t torch bridges; he rewired them to collapse when she was halfway across. It was his signature move: pull her in with just enough truth, enough nostalgia, then gut her with betrayal wrapped in charm and soft promises. The last time it had cost her a client and three cracked ribs. This time? It might cost her freedom.

And she’d seen it coming. God, she’d seen it. He was predictable in that way—always playing the long game, always one step ahead. But guilt had a long reach, and she still carried the weight of what he’d done for her once, back when she hadn’t known better. She owed him a debt, and part of her, the reckless part that remembered who he used to be, had clung to the stupid, fragile hope that maybe he’d changed. That he’d choose loyalty over leverage. That this time, he wouldn’t light the match and walk away smiling while she burned.

She should’ve known. The second those gallery cameras blinked offline for five unplanned minutes during the last job, her gut twisted. Cameras don’t just blink. Not unless someone’s messing with the feed. Stuart had always been good at rerouting systems without leaving fingerprints. He'd probably used her signature techniques as cover—timed her entry, piggybacked her code, made it look like she orchestrated the whole thing. Then, when the heat turned up, sent in an anonymous tip with her name at the top, like wrapping a bomb in a love letter.

It was his favorite con. Build the job around her skill set—make her feel useful, essential—then vanish just before the payout, leaving her holding the metaphorical bag. He'd do just enough to convince her she was in control, then reframe the entire job to make her look like the mastermind. It was a dance he’d choreographed to perfection: use her talent, profit off herprecision, and drop her in the fire before she realized the smoke wasn’t hers.

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