CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Attack at Vance and Daughters
The shop's front window was already broken when Sawyer's truck skidded to a stop at the curb, glass scattered bright and jagged across the sidewalk under the streetlight, and Josie was out of the passenger door before the truck had fully stopped moving.
"Josie, wait—" Sawyer's voice was sharp behind her, but she was already at the door, hands shaking as she fumbled the key into a lock that had been forced half open, someone's crowbar work still visible in the splintered frame around the deadbolt Sawyer himself had installed two weeks ago.
Inside, the damage was worse than the broken window suggested: shelving overturned, the register torn from the counter and left gutted on the floor, red spray paint scrawled crude and violent across the freshly painted back wall, three words that made Josie's stomach drop straight through the floor. *Pay what's owed.*
"They were here," she said, voice unsteady, turning in a slow circle to take in the wreckage of six years of careful building. "They were actually here."
Sawyer was already moving, checking the back room, the storage closet, methodical even with his hands visibly shaking with adrenaline, and Cole burst through the door a moment behind them, breathing hard from having run the last block.
"Nobody's here now," Cole reported, breathless.
"I checked the alley, checked behind the dumpster. Whoever did this is gone."
"How long ago," Sawyer asked, crouching by the register to examine the damage without touching it.
"Text came in maybe twenty minutes before we left the clubhouse," Josie said, still standing frozen amid the wreckage. "They must have done this right after sending it. Timed it so we'd all be occupied for at least that long getting here."
Sawyer's jaw was tight, a muscle working visibly beneath the skin.
"This isn't the full attack. This is a message.
If they'd wanted to actually hurt someone, they'd have waited for you to be here alone instead of announcing themselves with enough warning for half the club to descend on this block within the hour. "
"That's supposed to be comforting?"
"It's supposed to be true." He stood, crossing to her, and pulled her into a fierce, steadying embrace despite the chaos around them, despite his own hands still faintly trembling against her back.
"I'm not minimizing what just happened. I'm telling you what it means, which is that they wanted us scared, not that they wanted you hurt tonight.
Those are different things, and the difference matters for what we do next. "
More trucks were pulling up outside now, Reeve's voice carrying sharp and immediate as he took in the broken window, half the club spilling out onto the sidewalk in the cold, the warm gathering back at the clubhouse abandoned entirely in the scramble to respond.
Reeve stepped inside, surveyed the wreckage with a hard, assessing look, and turned to Sawyer with an expression Josie hadn't seen from him before, something closer to fury than she'd ever witnessed in the club president.
"This ends the debt negotiation as it currently stands," Reeve said flatly. "They broke the terms we agreed on Saturday. Structured payment schedule doesn't survive somebody putting a crowbar through this woman's front door."
"What does that mean for the schedule," Sawyer asked, tension coiled tight in every line of him.
"It means we renegotiate from a position that assumes bad faith instead of good faith.
It means this gets harder before it gets easier.
" Reeve's gaze moved to Josie, something apologetic and grim in it.
"I'm sorry, Josie. I told you the risk was smaller than letting this drag out unresolved. I was wrong about how small."
"You weren't wrong to try," Josie said, surprising herself with how steady her own voice came out despite the adrenaline still coursing through her. "You were wrong about how much good faith they had left to negotiate with. That's not the same as making a bad call."
Cole was already photographing the spray-painted wall on his phone, methodical despite his youth, documenting the scene with an instinct Josie suspected he'd absorbed from watching his brother work crime scenes of a different kind for years.
"Insurance is gonna want this documented," he said quietly, "assuming we're even calling this in to insurance instead of handling it internally. "
"We're calling it in," Sawyer said firmly. "Vandalism, unknown parties, standard report. Josie's shop needs the legitimate paper trail regardless of what we handle separately through club channels."
The next hour blurred into practical logistics, a locksmith roused from bed for emergency service, Delia arriving pale and shaken to find Josie physically unhurt, Nadia showing up not long after with the fierce, protective energy of a woman ready to personally hunt down whoever had done this.
Through it all, Sawyer stayed close to Josie's side, one hand rarely leaving the small of her back, his own barely contained fury visible only in the tight set of his shoulders and the clipped efficiency of his voice as he coordinated with Reeve and the rest of the club.
It was well past midnight, the shop finally secured with a temporary board over the broken window and a fresh rotation of security posted outside, when Josie finally sat down amid the wreckage of her own showroom, exhaustion crashing over her all at once now that the adrenaline had nowhere left to go.
"I keep thinking about what would have happened if we'd been here," she said quietly. "If I hadn't gone to the gathering tonight."
"Don't." Sawyer sat beside her, pulling her against his side, his voice rough with an emotion she recognized as something close to the fear he'd clearly been holding back all night. "Don't do that to yourself. You're safe. That's what matters."
"Am I though?" She looked up at him, the exhaustion cracking into something more raw and frightened than she'd let herself show all evening. "They found a way to hurt me even with half a club watching. What happens next time, Sawyer, if there is a next time?"
He didn't answer immediately, and in the silence Josie watched something shift across his face, a decision forming behind his eyes that she recognized, with a sinking, familiar dread, as the exact expression he used to wear three years ago right before he chose silence over her.
"There won't be a next time," he said finally, low, careful. "I'll make sure of that."
"Sawyer." Her voice sharpened, old alarm bells ringing clear through the exhaustion. "What does that mean."
"It means I'm going to handle this." He met her eyes, and something in his careful, controlled tone made her chest go cold despite the warmth of his arm still around her. "I'm not going to let you keep paying the price for something that started before you were ever supposed to be involved in it."
"That sounds exactly like something you'd say right before you decided to hide something from me for my own protection.
" She pulled back slightly, studying his face in the dim, wreckage-strewn shop, fear and old, hard-won suspicion warring in her chest. "Tell me you're not about to do the thing again, Sawyer. Tell me right now."
He was quiet a moment too long, and in that silence Josie felt the whole fragile, hard-won trust of the last month tremble under a weight it hadn't yet learned to bear.