Chapter 4
The smell hit Elise before she saw it.
Burnt plastic. Melted rubber. The acrid chemical stink of accelerant that had done its job and moved on.
She stood in her own driveway with her keys in her hand and stared at what was left of her van.
Two hundred thousand miles of road history.
A decade of Thursday night gigs and Sunday morning drives and sleeping in parking lots when the next venue was too far to make it back home.
The PA system she'd saved for three years to buy.
The monitors she'd rebuilt twice. The cables she'd organized and labeled and coiled with the precision of a woman who knew that gear was the difference between professional and amateur.
All of it melted to the frame.
The van sat on its rims like a corpse, windows blown out, paint blistered and black, the interior nothing but ash and twisted metal. Someone had done this with purpose. The accelerant pattern—she could see it, the splash marks on the gravel where fuel had been poured—showed planning. Care, even.
They'd wanted her to know this wasn't random.
Elise's knees buckled. She caught herself on the mailbox post, fingers white-knuckled around the wood, and forced herself to breathe.
Twenty minutes.
Roughcut had called twenty minutes ago to say he was on his way, that the club had decided to move her somewhere safe. Twenty minutes earlier and he might have interrupted them. Twenty minutes later and she might have been inside the van, loading gear for the Thursday gig she no longer had.
The timeline made her sick.
She heard the truck before she saw it—a diesel rumble that shouldn't have been comforting but somehow was. Roughcut's pickup rolled into her driveway and stopped, and he was out of the cab before the engine finished dying.
He didn't say anything.
Just walked to where she stood, took in the wreckage with those sad brown eyes, and positioned himself between her and the road like his body could shield her from what had already happened.
"I was going to load up for tonight," she heard herself say. Her voice sounded distant. Wrong. "I had a gig. Independent place in Babbitt again—the owner didn't care about the blacklist. I was going to prove I could still work."
Roughcut's jaw tightened. "When did you leave this morning?"
"Six. Maybe six-thirty. I walked to the diner for breakfast because I didn't have groceries." A laugh scraped out of her throat. "I was being responsible. Eating a real meal before a long night."
"And the van was fine when you left."
"The van was fine." She turned to look at him, and something cracked in her chest. "The van was always fine. I took care of her. I replaced the clutch myself last spring. I knew every rattle, every squeak. And now—"
Her voice broke.
Roughcut didn't reach for her. Didn't offer platitudes or empty comfort. He just stood there, solid as a foundation, and waited for her to find her footing again.
She hated that it helped.
"We need to move," he said finally. "Whoever did this might come back to see their work. And you've got gear inside?"
"My guitars. A backup mic. Some cables I didn't load yet." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, furious at the tears. "Everything else was in the van."
"Get the guitars. I'll check the house."
He moved past her before she could argue, and she watched him clear her front door like he expected someone to be waiting inside. It should have felt like an invasion. Instead, it felt like someone finally giving a damn whether she lived or died.
The house was empty. Of course it was—a one-bedroom rental that she'd chosen for the cheap rent and the driveway big enough for the van.
Elise grabbed her acoustic and her electric, the gig bag with her backup cables, and the lockbox with her showcase paperwork that she kept under her bed like it was sacred.
Because it was. Six months of planning. Ten years of grinding toward this one shot.
And now she couldn't even get to the next town.
Roughcut loaded her guitars into his truck with the same impossible care she'd noticed at the bar. Like they were made of glass. Like he understood that these were the only things she had left that mattered.
"Where are we going?" she asked as he opened the passenger door for her.
"Compound. Twenty miles outside Ely."
"Savage headquarters."
"Safest place on the Range right now." He waited until she climbed in, then closed the door with a gentleness that didn't match his size. "Wennberg's people won't touch you there."
The drive north was quiet.
Elise watched the Minnesota landscape roll past—pine forests and abandoned mines and the particular gray of late winter sky that promised nothing good. Her mind kept circling back to the numbers, the math that had kept her sane through a decade of fifty-dollar gigs and gas station dinners.
"Replacement van is eight thousand minimum," she said to the window. "If I'm lucky and find something that runs. PA system is another four. Monitors, cables, stands—call it two more. That's fourteen thousand dollars I don't have."
Roughcut didn't respond. Just drove with steady hands on the wheel.
"The Babbitt gig was going to pay three hundred. I had two more lined up this month before Wennberg dropped the blacklist. That's maybe a thousand in lost income, and that's before I factor in the showcase."
She turned to look at him. "You know what happens if I can't gig for the next six months? I lose my calluses. I lose my stage rhythm. I show up to the most important performance of my life playing like someone who's been sitting in a living room instead of working rooms."
"You'll work rooms."
"With what van? With what gear?" The bitterness in her voice surprised her.
"I've spent ten years building this. Ten years of bar gigs that paid barely enough to keep the van running, of drunk assholes grabbing at me after shows, of driving home at two in the morning through towns where nothing's open and nobody cares if you make it.
" She pressed her palm against the cold window.
"And one night. One match. And it's all gone. "
The truck's engine hummed through the silence.
"I'm not going to tell you it's going to be okay," Roughcut said finally. "I don't know if it is."
Elise blinked. Turned to look at him.
"What I know," he continued, eyes on the road, "is that the club doesn't make promises it can't keep. Permafrost put you under Savage protection. That means something."
"What does it mean?"
"Means Wennberg doesn't get to touch you." His hands flexed on the wheel—just once, a controlled movement that spoke to something underneath the calm. "Means whoever burned your van is going to answer for it. Means you're not alone in this anymore, whether that's comfortable or not."
She studied his profile. The strong jaw, the sadness that lived in his eyes, the careful way he held himself like he was constantly calculating how much space he took up.
"Why do you care?" she asked.
The question hung in the air between them.
Roughcut was quiet for a long moment. Then: "Because someone should."
It wasn't enough of an answer. It wasn't nearly enough. But the way he said it—like caring was something he'd had to relearn, like it cost him something to admit it—made her throat tight.
"I've been handling everything alone for ten years," she said.
"I know."
"I don't need someone to rescue me."
"I know that too." He glanced at her, just briefly, those brown eyes holding hers. "But there's a difference between rescue and backup. One of them means you can't handle it. The other means you don't have to handle it alone."
The compound appeared through the trees—a sprawling complex of converted mine buildings surrounded by forest on three sides.
Elise saw the single road approach, the defensive positioning, the way the whole place was built like men had learned to survive in hostile territory and designed their home accordingly.
Roughcut pulled through the gate and parked near a massive garage.
"You're going to be safe here," he said.
Elise looked at the compound, at the Savage cuts visible on men working in the yard, at the world she'd just been pulled into because a man with dead eyes had decided she was his property to control.
"Safe," she repeated. "That's a word I haven't thought about in a while."
Roughcut was quiet. Steady hands on the wheel. A silence that didn't demand anything from her.
It was the first thing about him she trusted completely.