Page 25 of Twisted Steel

“Who sent you?”I demand.

He claws at my arm with his good hand.His nails scrape over tattooed skin.Pointless.Weak.“Vultures,” he chokes.

“I want a name.”

“I don’t...”

I drive my knee into his ribs, and something cracks.

“Give me a name.”

“Reaper,” he wheezes.“Reaper said to scare her.Just scare her.”

Scare her.I look through the cracked gap in Harper’s window, into her dark bedroom.Small and quiet.A life untouched by men like him or me, until we dragged blood across her doorstep.

Just scare her.

My hand tightens, and the man’s feet kick once.

“Steel?”Harper’s voice cuts through the phone.“Steel, talk to me.”

It saves his life.Not because I have mercy but because I don’t want to scare her any more.I loosen my grip enough for him to suck air.

“You crawl back to Reaper,” I say into his bloody face, “and you tell him Harper Quinn is under Sons’ protection.”His eyes roll, and I shake him hard enough to snap him back to attention.“No.You tell him she’s under mine.”

The difference matters.It will start a war faster.Not that I give a single flying fuck.

I throw him down the fire escape stairs.He hits the landing below with a crash and a wet groan.He’s alive, barely useful, but good enough.

I climb through Harper’s window.

The room smells like her.Clean sheets, tea, hospital soap, and fear.My boots hit her bedroom floor, and I lock the window behind me with the pathetic little latch that started this whole thing.Then I cross to the closet.

“Harper.”No answer.

I knock once on the door.Softly.Which is ridiculous, considering I just climbed through her window after turning a man into a message.

“It’s me.”

The door opens slowly.She’s sitting on the floor, knees drawn to her chest, phone gripped in one hand and a black high heel in the other.

Her hair is loose around her face, and her eyes are huge.She’s alive, and that’s the only thing keeping me from going back outside and finishing what I started.

She stares at me.Then at the blood on my knuckles.Then back at my face.

“Did you kill him?”

“No.”

Her throat works.“Did you want to?”

“Yes.”Honesty lands between us like a bomb.

She absorbs it, and I watch her do it.I watch the medic, the woman, the survivor, all fight for room behind her eyes.

“You climbed through my window,” she says.

“He was on the fire escape.”