Chapter 10
The argument started at the kitchen table and ended at the truck.
Dana heard them planning in the great room while she poured her second coffee — Squall's voice low and certain, Diesel tracing routes, Breech listing numbers.
Thursday night. The warehouse on the industrial road.
Deane and his crew. She set the mug down and walked in, and the conversation stopped the way conversations stop when the person they're about enters the room.
"I'm coming," she said.
Squall looked at her. "No."
"That warehouse is on the old Chandler industrial stretch. I've been driving past it since I had a learner's permit. I know the building."
"You knew the Harmon loft too. That doesn't mean you walk into another—"
"It means I'm more useful in that truck than sitting here watching Nora's bar." She pulled out a chair and sat down at their table like she'd been invited. Diesel glanced at Squall. Breech didn't glance at anyone — he just watched, the way he always watched, cataloguing.
"The building used to be Garrity Chandlery," Dana said.
"Marine hardware, wholesale. Went under about five years ago when the fishing fleet shrank.
The main floor is open — warehouse space, loading bays on the south wall, roll-up doors.
But there's a mezzanine level on the north end that Garrity used as an office, and underneath the mezzanine there's a utility corridor that runs to a pump room on the water side. "
Breech leaned forward. "That's not on any plan I've seen."
"Because it was built in the sixties and nobody filed permits for it. Garrity ran a bilge-pump repair business out of that corridor for twenty years off the books. There's a door on the water side behind a concrete retaining wall. You can't see it from the road or the lot."
Silence at the table.
"If Deane has a way out that you don't know about," Dana said, "he uses that corridor and he's gone before you clear the main floor."
Squall's jaw was tight. She could see him running the calculation — the tactical value of what she'd just told them against the cost of putting her anywhere near another building full of Meer's people.
She knew which side was winning because she knew the math was obvious, and she knew it was killing him.
"You stay in the truck," he said.
"I stay where I'm useful."
"You stay in the truck, or you stay here. Pick."
She held his gaze across the table. The brothers were watching, and she could feel the weight of that — the fact that this negotiation was happening in front of the men he commanded, and every inch she took was an inch of his authority she was bending in public.
She could have pushed harder. She wanted to.
But Nora's voice was in her head — the only question is whether you're the kind of woman who can stand in that and hold your ground — and holding ground didn't always mean advancing.
Sometimes it meant standing exactly where you were and letting the man in front of you understand that you'd chosen to stop, not that he'd made you.
"The truck," she said. "But I'm on comms, and if that corridor door opens, I'm the one who calls it."
"Deal."
Diesel exhaled quietly beside her. Breech made a note on his map.
The rest of the day was preparation she wasn't part of and didn't try to be.
The brothers moved through the compound with the focused energy of men who'd done this before — checking weapons, running routes, coordinating with a shorthand that didn't include her and didn't need to.
She stayed out of the way, checked on Ray — still sleeping in the back room, color coming back to his face — and spent two hours at the compound's garage workbench tuning the club's outboard, because her hands needed something to do and an engine was the only thing that calmed the buzzing in her blood.
Squall found her there at dusk.
He stood in the garage doorway and watched her work for a minute before she acknowledged him. She could feel him there — his presence had a weight to it now, a gravitational pull that she'd stopped pretending didn't affect her.
"You eat?" he asked.
"Nora brought me a sandwich."
"You should eat more."
"You should stop managing me."
He crossed the garage and stood beside her at the bench. Close. The deliberate closeness that had become his language — not crowding, but claiming the air around her like it was territory he'd marked.
"When this is done tonight," he said, "I want you to think about what happens next."
"With the shop?"
"With us."
She set down the torque wrench and looked at him. In the garage light, with the grease on her hands and the compound quiet behind them and the night ahead pressing in, he looked like a man standing at the edge of something he couldn't control and choosing to stand there anyway.
"I've been thinking about it," she said.
"And?"
"And I don't know yet. Ask me when you come back tonight."
His hand came up and caught her jaw — gently, firmly, the way he did everything. He tilted her face toward him and kissed her, slow and thorough, and she tasted coffee and leather and the quiet intensity of a man who was about to ride into a fight and wanted this to be the last thing on his mouth.
"Stay in the truck," he said against her lips.
"I heard you the first time."
They rode out at ten. Five bikes and a van, heading south on the coast road with their lights cutting through the dark and the harbor falling away behind them.
Dana sat in the van's passenger seat with Talley driving — the prospect white-knuckled on the wheel, clearly thrilled and terrified in equal measure to be included.
The industrial road was a dead stretch of cracked asphalt between the river and the rail line, bordered by abandoned buildings and the rusted skeletons of equipment that nobody had bothered to scrap.
The old Garrity warehouse sat at the end of the road, a long, low concrete building with loading bays on the south wall and a flat roof that sagged in the middle.
Two vehicles in the lot. A box truck backed up to the loading bay, doors open. A sedan parked near the entrance. Lights on inside — the flat white of work lamps, the kind you brought to a place that didn't have power anymore.
Talley parked the van two hundred yards back, behind a dumpster enclosure, and killed the engine.
"Comms," Dana said. Talley handed her the radio.
She watched through the windshield as the bikes peeled off — Diesel and Anvil to the loading bays, Wraith circling around to the far side, Breech holding the road. Squall dismounted and moved toward the main entrance on foot, his silhouette cutting black against the warehouse lights.
Her heart was hammering. Not fear — something sharper, something that had to do with watching a man she'd kissed twenty minutes ago walk toward a building where people might try to kill him.
The radio crackled. Squall's voice, clipped: "In position. Diesel?"
"South side. Loading bay's open. Two inside, working the truck."
"Wraith?"
"North side. Clear."
"Go."
The loading bay doors crashed inward — Diesel and Anvil, shoulder-first, the sound of metal hitting concrete reverberating across the lot.
Shouts from inside. The sharp crack of something breaking.
Squall went through the main entrance and the warehouse lit up with movement — shadows against the work lamps, the sound of men colliding.
Dana gripped the radio and watched.
The fight was fast and ugly, glimpsed through the open loading bay in strobes of light and dark.
She saw Anvil lift a man off his feet and put him through a stack of crates.
She saw Diesel take someone down in the space between two pallets.
She heard Squall's voice on the radio, short bursts — "Main floor clear. Two down. Moving to mezzanine."
Then she saw the corridor door open.
Water side. Behind the retaining wall. The door that nobody knew about except her and the ghost of Garrity's off-the-books pump business.
A figure slipped through it — tall, moving fast, heading for the seawall.
Dana keyed the radio. "Corridor door. Water side. Someone's running."
Wraith's voice came back, three words: "I see him."
Through the windshield, she watched a shadow detach from the north wall of the warehouse and intercept the runner at the seawall. There was a brief, violent collision — a sound like a bag of tools hitting concrete — and then Wraith was standing over someone who wasn't getting up.
"Got him," Wraith said on the radio. Flat. Final.
Talley let out a breath beside her that he'd probably been holding since they parked.
The all-clear came five minutes later. Squall's voice on the radio: "Warehouse is ours. Bring the van around."
Dana walked into the warehouse through the loading bay with the work lamps blazing and the crates stacked floor to ceiling on both sides.
It was everything Polk had described — pallets of tools, electronics, machine parts.
Commercial-grade equipment, none of it with matching paperwork, all of it stolen off the inland routes and staged here for laundering through shops like hers.
Three of Meer's crew sat zip-tied against the south wall. One of them was bleeding from the mouth. Another was nursing a wrist that bent at a wrong angle. The third just sat with his head down, done.
Deane wasn't among them.
"He wasn't here," Squall said, reading her face. "The rotation was wrong. He switched nights."
"So he's still out there."
"For now."
She looked around the warehouse. Thousands of dollars of stolen freight, stacked and sorted and ready to disappear into the paperwork of waterfront shops that had been bullied or bought into compliance.
This was what they'd wanted her dock for.
This was the operation they'd burned her parts room to protect.
"All of this came through the harbor?" she asked.
"Most of it. Some overland." Squall stood beside her in the middle of the warehouse floor with his knuckles raw and a cut on his cheekbone and his eyes on her like she was the only thing in the building that mattered.
"Your call on the corridor saved the night.
He was heading for a boat at the seawall. "
"I told you I knew the building."
"You did." He reached out and pulled a piece of packing straw from her hair. His fingers lingered at her temple, rough against her skin. "You also stayed in the truck."
"Mostly."
"I'll take mostly."
She stood in the middle of Roland Meer's gutted operation with stolen freight rising around her like walls and the man who'd torn it apart standing close enough to touch, and she felt something lock into place — not safety, not surrender, but the recognition that the fight she'd been in since the fire wasn't hers alone anymore, and that didn't make her weaker.
It made the fight winnable.