Chapter 10
Chapter ten
Jasmine
This is not happening. This is so not happening.
Two men. Two guns. One sheriff with a steady voice and a set jaw like granite.
“Officer Vaughn …” My voice breaks on his name, breath catching like a thread snagged on a nail.
“Hang on,” he says without looking at me, tone clipped, eyes locked on the men. “I’ve got them.”
He called for backup. He’s alone with them anyway. My hands clamp over my mouth to stop myself from saying anything else that could jinx whatever fragile luck is keeping his blood inside his body.
“You heard my partner,” the hairless one says, his voice low and wrong. “Do yourself a favor. Step back out that door.”
“And like I said,” Asher replies, even, “that’s not happening.”
The hairy one lifts his pistol a fraction.
“Please,” I whisper. “Just—please.”
Asher shifts another two inches to his right, angling behind the pillar by the booths. He doesn’t drop his gun. He doesn’t try to play hero with his fists. He becomes very, very still, like he’s the hinge and the room will turn on how he moves next.
“Guns on the floor,” he says, calm like a math problem with only one right answer. “On your knees. Fingers laced behind your head.”
They don’t move.
A siren blooms outside—faint, then louder, growing teeth. The men flick a glance toward the door. It’s all the space Asher needs. He pivots, clean as a line snap, sights the bearded one … safer backstop, and barks, “Now!”
The bearded’s gun clatters to tile.
“Yours,” Asher snaps at the other man.
A heartbeat. Another. The hairless one’s mouth thins, and his gaze ticks toward me like a threat. I flinch, then hate that I do.
“Do it,” Asher says. There’s something in his voice that doesn’t shout, just decides.
The second weapon hits the floor. Asher moves in and kicks both pistols under the counter with a sharp, efficient sweep. He steps in, hard and close, all angles and economy. He doesn’t give them anything to grab but a command.
“Hands where I can see them.”
They obey. For now.
“Down.”
The sirens are on the block now—loud enough to rattle the diner’s windows. The bell over the door stutters on its hook like a nervous tick.
“I said down.”
They go to their knees. The clean-shaven one shifts like he’s thinking about being stupid. Asher shifts a fraction more and the thought dies.
Two more heartbeats and the room fills with blue. Officers flood in—Quick first, Joel right behind—and it’s cuffs and rights and the scrape of leather on tile. Asher steps back, gun still on the men until the cuffs click. Then he breathes. Then—only then—he looks at me.
The flutter in my stomach is so sudden it’s almost a laugh. Which is deranged, considering the floor is littered with guns and adrenaline. But there it is: a dizzy, stupid warm spill of relief that feels like it might knock me over if I let it.
“You okay?” he asks, voice rough with the sandpaper edge of controlled fear.
I nod too fast. “You saved me.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Of course it wasn’t. I swallow. “I’m fine.”
He scans the room, habit and duty, and then holsters and steps closer to the counter. Two officers haul the men up and out; someone bags the guns; someone else radios a code word I don’t understand but makes my shoulders drop an inch.
“You could’ve been hurt,” I say, the words slipping out hot before I can tidy them. “They had guns—”
“And now they don’t,” he says evenly. “And you’re unhurt.”
“You should’ve waited for backup.”
“I did,” he says, nodding toward the door through which sirens are ebbing. His eyes cut to mine, the heat in them different now—steady, assessing. “And I kept them from using you to keep me outside.”
Right. Stop being mad at the person who did exactly what he’s trained to do. I press my palms against the counter until I feel laminate give a little. “I hated that you were in here.”
He huffs a laugh that isn’t a laugh. “Get in line.”
We stare at each other for a beat too long. The scar above his brow looks sharper when his jaw is tight like that. I realize I’m staring, and the flood in my stomach has the nerve to slosh warmer.
Focus, Jasmine.
“What did they want?” he asks.
“I don’t know.” I truly don’t. It wasn’t till I saw their guns that my brain connected the dots labeled weird bike and empty street and dumb bad decisions into something called robbery.
“Lying to me won’t help,” he says, not unkindly. “I saw them this morning—posted up near your wall. I didn’t like it then. Like it less now.”
“You saw them?” My voice jumps. “And you didn’t—”
“Arrest them for existing on a bike? No.” He lifts a brow. “We don’t cuff people for wearing matching jackets.”
“Maybe add it to the list,” I mutter. “They literally just tried to rob me.”
His mouth curves, just barely. “They didn’t.”
“Thanks to your macho fighting abili…”
“My training,” he cuts in.
“—ties,” I finish, refusing to give him the last word even when he probably deserves three of them.
We stand there wrapped in leftover adrenaline and our favorite pastime: irritating each other. When the sirens soften to a hum, he tips his head toward me, something gentler under the gravel.
“Lock the back door. Let a friend stay with you for the rest of the day. I’ll swing by later to take your statement.”
“I don’t need—”
“Please,” he says, and the word lands like a hand on my elbow guiding me away from a hole I can’t see.
“Fine,” I say. “But if you wring any more blood out of me for forms, I’m charging you per line.”
“Send an invoice to the county.” He dips his chin. “You did good.”
“I stood there and tried not to pass out.”
“That’s doing good,” he says, like it’s the simplest equation.
He turns, clips his cap back on, and heads for the door. I tell myself not to watch him leave. I watch him leave.
The knot in my stomach untangles as the cruiser pulls away. The butterflies go with it.
For now.
***
It’s nearly six when Riley shows up, the diner smells like cinnamon and the inside of my head is a junk drawer I can’t close. She drifts behind the counter in a highlighter-green dress that could be seen from space and drops onto the stool like the day just slung her over its shoulder.
“If I smell like puke,” she says, “it’s because a third grader decorated me with it. Do not hug me.”
“Noted.” I pull a tray from the oven and let a wave of warm sweet air buff my nerves. “Why were you carrying a third grader?”
“Fred had a family emergency. I covered elementary.” She fans herself with a menu. “Never again.”
“Isn’t the elementary across the courtyard from your office?”
“Yes, which is still too close for bodily fluids.”
I put the pan down and look at her. Riley’s hair is down now, a riot across her shoulders. She looks like a warning label for whimsy. “Want coffee?”
“I want a refund on my day.” Then, gentler: “And your day. I heard.”
Of course she did. This town moves information around like air.
“I’m fine,” I say, because I don’t know how to talk about the moment the guns went sliding and the world flooded back in.
She tilts her head. “Fine-fine or Jasmine-fine?”
“Fine,” I repeat. “The sheriff showed up.”
“The sheriff shows up,” she says dryly. “That’s his whole deal.”
“Riley.”
“Okay, okay.” She sips water. “Did he—”
“Don’t say rescue,” I warn.
“…‘render the situation safe for civilians’?” She grins into her cup. “How very… sheriff.”
I should tell her about the way he moved—precise and clean and un-dramatic; how he didn’t grandstand, how he kept looking past me to every corner of the room like there were other people here he needed to save too.
Instead, I cut lemon bars into neat squares that are suddenly too tidy for the chaos inside me.
“You’re quiet,” Riley says after a moment. “Which for you is… suspicious.”
“I’m processing.”
“Mm.” She props her chin on her fist. “Do you want to talk about your actual problem now or do I need to play twenty questions?”
“Which problem?”
“Harold Swanson,” she says, and somehow makes it sound like a rash. “Our new mansion enthusiast.”
I groan. “What now?”
“Guess the name of his company.”
“If you say something like ‘Legacy Ventures,’ I’m going to ban the word ‘legacy’ from the block.”
“H.S. Incorporated.” She waits.
I blink. Somewhere in my brain a drawer opens. “H.S.”
She nods. “H. for Harold. S. for Swanson. Incorporated for ‘we’re about to be upset.’”
The buy offer. The heavy paper. The tasteful serif font. H.S. Incorporated, across the top like a smirk.
“He’s the one trying to buy Scotty’s,” I say, the dread fizzy instead of cold. “It was him.”
“Not just Scotty’s.” Riley leans close like the walls are listening. “I heard from Nora that filings hit the clerk’s desk yesterday—same LLC making offers up and down Brime. Most above market. It smells like a sweep.”
I press my hands to the counter. “A sweep for what?”
“Power,” Riley says simply. “Control. Leverage. Whatever word rich people use when they want to own how a place feels.”
The anger that’s been pacing my ribs since the oil rig talk sharpens. “I’m not selling.”
“I know.”
“He can club me over the head with a briefcase full of gold bars,” I say, “and I’m still not selling.”
“I said I know.” She smiles then, proud and a little wicked. “We’ll make it expensive for him to even try.”
I breathe out. The floor steadies. “What’s our plan?”
“First,” she says, “we keep doing what we do: serve people who love you and will yell if you go away. Second, we turn on the lights: public, loud, and boring. Sunshine is awkward for men in nice suits. Third, we pull records: who owns H.S. Incorporated, who sits on its board, which law firm is filing, what other towns they’ve done this to, and who still hates them for it. ”
“You sound happy,” I accuse.
“I love a research montage,” she says. “Also, I spoke to Nora already. She’ll set aside copies of the filings for you. We can pick them up before she closes.”
I lean on my elbows and look at my best friend. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m effective,” she says, unbothered. “And so are you. Also—” she lifts a brow— “are you going to bake the sheriff a thank-you cookie or are we pretending you didn’t almost swoon?”
“I did not—”
“The word you’re looking for is fluster, if you want to keep your dignity.”
I point my knife at her. “I will bake scones. For Brick. Because he’s a child. And because scones help bones knit.”
“Science,” she says gravely.
I stack cinnamon rolls into neat little pyramids and try not to picture Asher’s steady hands, or his voice when he said please, or the way my name sounded like it landed somewhere soft when he said it earlier. My head is a very inconvenient place to live today.
“I’ll lock the back,” I tell Riley. “And I’ll sleep here if I have to.”
“You’ll sleep at my place,” she says. “I have a dog with a bark that could wake the dead and a neighbor who thinks he’s a vigilante because he owns a flashlight. We’re untouchable.”
I laugh, because Riley can make me do that even when the world wobbles. “Deal.”
She slides off the stool and snags a lemon bar. “Nora’s in until five. I’ll swing by after dismissal. We’ll get the papers, we’ll highlight in aggressive colors, we’ll drink coffee and make a list of everything Harold Swanson underestimates about women with good shoes.”
“Add men with badges who don’t run,” I say before I can stop myself.
Her smile turns feline. “Oh?”
“Go back to work,” I tell her, shooing. “You smell like kid.”
She blows me a kiss, swipes two cookies, and glides out in a blaze of green.
When the door shuts and I’m alone with the hum of the fridge and the chirp of the bell settling back on its hook, I press my palms to the counter again. The laminate warms under my skin. Through the front window, Brime Street looks ordinary—the kind of ordinary people move to Golden Heights to own.
Not on my watch.
I flip the OPEN sign to CLOSED for twenty minutes, check the back door lock, and pull flour from the bin.
If a certain sheriff shows up to take a statement later, he’ll find scones.
For his kid, obviously. Not because my stomach did anything stupid when he looked at me.
Not because his “please” turned my bones into something unreliable.
Scones are for healing.
The fight is for me.