Page 6 of The Reaper
And if I wasn’t?
Then God, help the man who thought he was chasing me.
Because he wasn’t ready.
Not for me. Not for this.
Not for what I’d become in the pursuit of perfection.
Still, I reached over and set the folded note on the pillow beside mine.
Let him come.
I was already waiting.
2
CALEB
Charleston hit me like a sucker punch the second I stepped off the plane. Humid air wrapped around my throat, thick and unrelenting, like the city was testing if I could breathe through it.
I’d been in worse—sandstorms in the desert that scraped your lungs raw, jungles where the wet heat turned every breath into a fight—but this felt personal. Sticky. Mocking. The kind of place that whispered,You don’t belong here, boy.And maybe I didn’t.
Montana was clean edges, wide skies, air that cut sharp and honest.
This? This was lowland murk, all haze and hidden rot beneath the pretty facades. The kind of place where secrets didn’t stay buried—they festered.
I thought about turning around right then. Grabbing the next flight back west, letting the world swallow me whole again.
But I couldn’t leave. Not yet. The call had come through channels that didn’t exist on paper. Pentagon first, then theAgency, then whispers from ghosts I didn’t even know haunted my ops. Pulled me off a hunt that mattered. A real one.
The Japanese tech tycoon, all smiles and TED Talks on the surface. Charismatic bastard with a billion-dollar grin, flashing innovation and philanthropy like it meant something.
But I’d seen the underbelly. The girls he bought when boredom hit, shipped in crates like cargo from Tokyo to his private islands. Hookers, escorts, whatever label you slapped on them—they were disposable to him.
And when the high wore off, he’d carve them up. Slow. Methodical. Like dissecting a circuit board to see what made it tick.
I’d been closing in, shadows in his wake from Singapore to Seoul, piecing together the trail of bodies he left like discarded prototypes. That was my bread and butter. Silent work. No medals, no headlines. Harvesting the rotten. I hadn’t planned to stop. Not for anyone.
But the call had yanked me.
“Stand down,” my handler said, voice clipped over the encrypted line. “New priority. Charleston. Details on arrival.” I pressed for more, but he shut it down. “Well-connected. Tantamount to an order.”
Fine. So be it.
I moved through Charleston International Airport, backpack slung over my shoulder, no checked bags, no ties. But instead of heading straight to some place called Dominion Hall, I did what I always did. I walked.
Recon wasn’t optional; it was instinct. Burned into me from years of ops where one wrong corner meant a bullet in the back. I didn’t know how long I’d be stuck in this swamp of a city—could be days, could be weeks—so I mapped it. Started at the airport, taxi to downtown, then let my feet carry me.
Broad Street first, with its cobblestones that rattled like old bones underfoot. Past the historic homes, all pastel paint and iron gates hiding God knows what. The air smelled of salt and decay, low tide pulling secrets from the harbor. Tourists milled about, snapping photos of churches and fountains, oblivious to the undercurrents. I wasn’t. Cities like this had layers. Peel one back, find the grime. And if you kept peeling? You found blood.
As I walked, my mind drifted to my brothers. The seven of us—wild as the Montana winds that shaped us. Growing up on that ranch was freedom wrapped in hard lessons. Endless acres where we could ride horseback till the sun bled out, fish in rivers that ran cold and clear, swim in hidden lakes that froze your blood in winter. Hunt deer at dawn, rifles steady in young hands, learning silence and precision before we knew what war would demand.
Mom—Lila Voss, tough as leather, soft where it counted—kept us grounded. Dad was a shadow. In and out, work pulling him away, but when he was there? He taught us to track, to read the land, to trust our guts.
“The world’s full of predators, boys,” he’d say, voice low over campfire embers. “Be the one they fear.” I’d built my life on that one sentence. Still did.
We were spread thin now. The had brothers each carved their path in special operations, ghosts in the machine of wars that never made the news. Silent warriors, all of us. No parades, no glory. Just the job. The kill. The quiet after.
