Chapter 14
The shop looked worse in daylight.
Squall stood in the gravel lot with Dana beside him and looked at what Deane's crew had done in twenty minutes.
The first bay's lift was off its mounts, the hydraulic lines ripped out and draped across the concrete like steel intestines.
The second bay — the one she'd saved from the fire, the one she'd run her entire operation out of for a week — was gutted.
Bench overturned, tool racks stripped, the hydraulic pump smashed with what looked like a sledgehammer.
The tarp over the fire-damaged parts room had been torn down and the charred studs behind it stood exposed to the morning light, and the combination of fire damage and demolition made the building look like something that had been hit twice by two different storms and survived neither.
Dana walked through the bay door and stood in the middle of it.
Squall watched her from the lot. He wanted to follow. He wanted to be next to her, his hand on her back, his body between her and the sight of everything she'd lost. But he stayed where he was, because this was hers and she needed to stand in it alone before she could decide what came next.
She turned a slow circle. Her eyes moved across every piece of damage — methodical, unflinching, the same way she'd inventoried the fire damage that first night. Cataloguing. Not mourning. Measuring what was gone against what could be rebuilt.
She crouched by the overturned bench and ran her hand along the frame. Checked the welds. Stood up.
"Frame's solid," she said. "They smashed the vice and the grinders but the bench itself is fine. I can resurface it."
She moved to the first lift. Tested the column, the base plate, the anchor bolts in the floor.
"Mounts are pulled but the floor's intact. New hydraulics, new lines, reset the mounts. Two days if I can source the parts."
She walked to the second bay and did the same thing — testing, touching, reading the damage with her hands the way she read everything.
"This lift's done. Column's bent. I need a full replacement." She paused. Looked at the ceiling where the fire had eaten through from the parts room. "But the roof joists are still good on this side. Structure's sound. It's all surface."
Squall crossed the lot and stepped into the bay. "What do you need?"
"A lift, a hydraulic pump, lines, fittings, a new vice, two grinders, and about forty hours of labor." She pulled her phone out and started making a list. "And my tools. They scattered everything. I need to find my tools."
"We'll find them."
She looked at him. "You keep saying we."
"I keep meaning it."
She went back to her phone, but the corner of her mouth moved — just barely, just enough.
He called Diesel.
By noon, the lot was full.
Not just bikes. Trucks, tool beds, trailers.
Diesel showed up with a flatbed and a new hydraulic pump he'd pulled from a shop in Falmouth that owed the club a favor.
Anvil arrived carrying a bench vice on one shoulder like it weighed nothing, which for Anvil it probably didn't. Breech brought a laptop, a toolbox, and a circuit tester, because Breech prepared for everything including the possibility that the electrical would need rewiring.
Wraith came with nothing. He stood at the bay door for a moment, assessed the damage, and started sorting scattered tools into piles with the silent efficiency of a man who didn't need to talk to be useful.
Talley showed up with taped ribs and a bruise on his jaw and immediately started sweeping the concrete, and when Dana told him to sit down and rest, he looked at her like she'd suggested he cut off his own arm.
"I got hit once," he said. "Anvil gets hit worse at breakfast."
"That's true," Anvil said from across the bay, not looking up.
Dana stood in the middle of her shop and watched the brotherhood take it apart and start putting it back together, and Squall watched her watching them.
The expression on her face was something he'd never seen — not gratitude exactly, not surprise, but the quiet recognition of a woman who'd been operating alone for so long that the concept of people showing up had become theoretical.
"I didn't ask for this," she said to him.
"Nobody asked. That's how it works."
"The club just rebuilds people's shops?"
"The club takes care of what's ours." He let the word sit. Watched it land. "Your shop is on our water. Your dock is on our turf. And you're—"
"Yours?"
"Yeah."
She held his eyes for a beat that lasted longer than it should have in a room full of brothers with wrenches. "I'm not property."
"Didn't say you were. Said you were mine. There's a difference."
"Not a big one."
"Biggest one there is."
She shook her head, but she was fighting a smile, and she lost. It broke through for a half second — real, warm, unguarded — and then she turned and started directing traffic, pointing brothers to tasks with the natural authority of a woman who ran a shop floor and didn't care whose patch they were wearing.
"Diesel, the hydraulic lines run under the floor channel, not over it — whoever installed the last set didn't know what they were doing. Anvil, that vice mounts on the right side, not the left. Talley, stop sweeping and start sorting those fasteners by size before I lose my mind."
They followed her orders. Every one of them.
Squall stood back and watched his brothers take direction from a woman who wasn't wearing a cut and didn't need one, and felt something shift in the way the club worked — not a break, not a problem, just the natural accommodation of a new element that fit so perfectly it made you wonder how the machine had ever run without it.
By late afternoon, the first bay was operational. Bench reset, vice mounted, hydraulics reconnected. Dana tested the lift twice, ran it to full height and back, listened to the pump with her head tilted the way she listened to every engine — not with her ears but with something deeper.
"It'll do," she said. "Until I get the replacement lift for bay two, I can run jobs out of this one."
"Again," Squall said.
"Again." She wiped her hands on a rag that was already black. "I'm good at again."
Breech appeared at the bay door. He'd been in the office — the one room that hadn't been touched, probably because Deane's crew hadn't cared about a desk and a filing cabinet — and he had his laptop open.
"Got something," he said.
Squall followed him inside. Dana came too, and he didn't stop her.
"With Vasco and Deane both gone, Meer's lost his operational arms," Breech said.
"No grab crew leader, no enforcer. He's exposed.
I've been tracking his phone — the number Polk gave us — and he's making calls.
A lot of them. To numbers in Providence, Fall River, and one in Boston that I'm still working on. "
"He's recruiting," Squall said.
"Or calling in favors. Either way, he's scrambling. A man who just lost his two top people doesn't sit still. He either folds or escalates."
"Meer doesn't fold," Dana said from the doorway. Both men looked at her. "The man who came to my shop — the one in the sport coat who made the first pitch. He wasn't nervous. He wasn't testing. He was placing an order. Men like that don't stop because the price goes up. They just change the math."
Breech looked at Squall. "She's not wrong."
"She's usually not."
Dana's phone buzzed.
She pulled it out, glanced at the screen, and went still. The kind of still that Squall recognized — not calm, not frozen, but the absolute zero of a person processing something that changed the temperature of the room.
She turned the phone toward him.
A text from an unknown number. No words. Just a photo.
The photo showed the front of Alice Prescott's house, taken from the street, shot within the last hour.
Alice was visible through the kitchen window, sitting at the table where Dana had sat with her the night of the kidnapping.
The framing was deliberate — centered on the window, clear enough to count the coffee cups on the table.
Below the photo, three words: Not just him.
Squall took the phone from Dana's hand. She let him. Her fingers were steady — no tremor, no shake. But her eyes had gone dark in a way that was past anger and into something colder.
"He's threatening Alice," she said.
"He's threatening everyone connected to you."
"Then he needs to stop breathing."
Squall looked at the photo. The composition.
The patience of it — waiting for the right angle, the right moment, the window lit just enough to prove how close the photographer had been.
This wasn't Vasco's fire. This wasn't Deane's professional grab.
This was Meer himself, cornered and losing and choosing to make it personal.
He forwarded the photo to Torch and put the phone in his pocket.
"Church tonight," he said to Breech. "Full table."
Breech nodded and left.
Dana stood in the office doorway with her arms crossed and her jaw set and the cold fury burning behind her eyes like a pilot light — small, contained, and capable of igniting everything it touched.
"I want to be there," she said.
"At church?"
"When you end this. I want to be there."
Squall looked at this woman — grease on her arms, sawdust in her hair from the rebuild, standing in her twice-destroyed shop demanding a seat at the table where the club planned its wars — and understood with a certainty that went bone-deep that she would be there whether he agreed or not.
"We'll talk about it," he said.
"That's not a yes."
"It's not a no either."
She held his gaze. He held hers. The office was small enough that the air between them felt charged, and outside the bay door the brotherhood was still working, still building, still putting her shop back together one tool at a time.
"Fine," she said. "But when you make the call, you make it knowing I asked."
She walked back into the bay and started checking Diesel's hydraulic work, and Squall stood in the office with her phone in his pocket and the photo of Alice Prescott's kitchen window burning behind his eyes.
Meer had just made the last mistake he was ever going to make.
He just didn't know it yet.