Page 27 of Tater
He didn’t answer. Just tore open one of the med packs from his saddlebag and started working in silence. The night around them buzzed with cicadas and faint radio static from somewhere down in the valley.
When he pressed the gauze down, she flinched. Not from the pain. From his hands—steady, careful. Too careful.
“You held your ground back there,” he said finally. “But you froze when that back door opened.”
Ren met his eyes. “Because I knew them.”
His fingers paused. “Them?”
“Shadow,” she said. “From before.”
Something in his expression shifted—anger, recognition, maybe both. He stepped back, fists clenching.
“He’s supposed to be dead.”
“Guess he didn’t get the memo.”
“Who was the other one?”
“You ain’t gonna like it, it was one of our own, one of our prospects.”
Tater turned, staring out at the lights below. The muscles in his shoulders coiled tight, like the world itself had just spat in his face.
“Then this ain’t just a betrayal,” he said quietly. “It’s a reckoning.”
The dragon stirred inside her again, restless, and cold. Ren could almost feel its approval—like it fed off his rage, his promise.
“Then we burn it down,” she whispered.
He looked at her. Long enough for something dangerous to pass between them.
“Yeah,” he said. “We will.”
The wind slipped through the trees, brushing her hair across her face, and the smell of oil and gunpowder clung to her like a ghost that wouldn’t let go. The adrenaline’s gone, but the ache stayed—a deep, low pulse that didn’t belong entirely to her.
The dragon’s still awake. Watching through her eyes.
It likes him.
That thought unsettled her more than the wound ever could.
Tater stood a few feet away, arms crossed, cigarette ember flaring red in the dark. He looks carved out of something older than the road, older than this world. His kind of stillness is dangerous—it’s the calm before a man chooses who dies next.
And gods help her; She finds comfort in it.
She shouldn’t.
She’s seen what happens when she trusts men who live by vengeance. The burn scars on her shoulder still remember the last time she believed someone’s promise meant safety.
But Tater isn’t safety.
He’s a storm with rules.
And maybe that’s the difference.
Ren stared at the faint glow of town far below them, the place where normal people are probably laughing over cheap beer, where no one’s bleeding out behind locked doors. For a heartbeat, she wished she could be one of them.
But the dragon moved beneath her skin, restless. It doesn’t dream of peace. It dreams of the hunt.
