Chapter 14
TINY
Morning crawls in under the guise of soot and smoke. The burn across my back screams when I move, but I grit through it. Pain’s familiar, predictable. Easier to deal with than the memory of Syvannah’s scream echoing through the garage when the flames took the ceiling.
My room smells like smoke and antiseptic. Someone, probably Derange, patched me up while I was half-conscious, muttering something about “dumb giant instincts” and “stop trying to die for everyone.”
I push myself upright, careful not to rip the bandages.
Everything hurts. But none of it’s as sharp as the image of Syvannah flinching as my hands reached for her last night. That first tiny flinch in the garage, and then the second, worse one, later, after the fire. I swallow hard and scrub my face. I can’t think about that yet.
My cut hangs over the chair. Smoke-stained. Melted in some spots.
I pull on a T-shirt, grit my teeth, and head to see Syvannah.
Her door is cracked open. Peanut sits outside it like a furry guard dog, tail whipping like she’s offended the world burned her favorite garage.
I knock lightly.
“Syv?” My voice comes out soft, too soft for a man who nearly lost her twice in one night.
She turns her head at the sound. She’s curled up on her bed, wrapped in a blanket, hair mussed, eyes red-rimmed from smoke and exhausted tears. A sketchbook lies beside her, open to a half-drawn outline of the garage. Not destroyed. Rebuilt. Her hands tremble as she closes it.
I take a step inside, slowly. “Hey,” I say.
“Hey.” Her smile tries to form, but collapses halfway. “You okay?”
Lie. Breathe. Lie better. “I’m good.”
Her eyes flick to my bandages peeking under my shirt. She moves before she thinks. Her hand reaches to touch my back, then freezes an inch from me.
She doesn’t pull away. She hesitates. It guts me more than if she’d flinched again. “You’re hurt,” she whispers.
“I’ve had worse.” It sounds casual, but it isn’t.
Syvannah’s throat works. “I keep thinking about last night.”
“Me too.”
“I don’t like that you put yourself in front of the fire for me.”
“Too bad.” I try to smile. “I’d do it again.”
“No.” Her voice cracks, fierce and small at once. “Tiny… I don’t… I don’t know if I can watch you risk yourself like that every time something happens.”
I sit on the edge of her bed. “The alternative was letting you die.”
“I’m not asking you to choose.” But she is, and we both know it.
“I just need you alive,” I murmur.
She closes her eyes. “I’m not fragile.”
“I know that.”
“But I’m not invincible.” Her eyes open. Sharp. Honest. “I don’t want to be the reason you get killed.”
“You won’t be.”
Her voice softens, barely audible. “I almost lost you.”
I want to touch her. Pull her in, but her fingers twist the blanket instead. I stand slowly, afraid the movement will make her pull back more than she already has. “I’ll be outside if you need me,” I tell her.
She nods without looking up.
I leave her room with a weight in my chest I can’t shake. The hallway smells like liquor and loss. By the time I step outside, the early light spills over the ruins of the garage.
The garage is a skeleton of heat-warped beams and blackened rebar. What didn’t burn melted. What didn’t melt cracked. The smell is a bruise you breathe.
EMTs and Fire/Rescue have been here all night, trying to put out the blaze. Once they got it under control, the Fire Marshall deemed it a total loss and said it was under investigation. We don’t need an investigation to know how this started and why.
Red and I pick our way through the wreckage. His tablet glows blue against the soot on his face.
“Accelerant along the west wall,” he says, voice rasped down to wire. “Cut feed on the gas. Sparked remote. See these bubbled ripples? Det cord impressions.”
“Clean work,” I mutter.
“Professional work,” he corrects, tapping a char line. “Not some pissed-off kid with a match.”
I crouch near the twisted lift, brush ash from the concrete with my knuckles, and it ghosts my skin like guilt. We find the V of scorch that points to the start, the old storage cabinet where I kept extra hoses. Empty now, the metal is peeled like a can.
I should’ve seen it. Should’ve checked after the tag.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Red asks, gently.
“That I missed a tripwire I should’ve felt in my bones.” My jaw tightens. “Say it.”
He doesn’t. Red’s smarter than that. He angles the tablet so the diagnostic overlays flicker like X-rays of a corpse.
“They wanted the whole structure. The fire load ensured a roof collapse. But whoever did this wanted witnesses. With a full blaze in the middle of the night, they weren’t just destroying, they were announcing. ”
“Lattimer,” I say.
“Hounds as the sound system,” Red adds, eyes flat.
A slow tread clicks behind us. Capone stops at the threshold, smoke curling around him like a cape he didn’t ask for. He looks at the bones of our life and doesn’t blink. “Talk to me.”
Red runs it down without drama. Cut line. Accelerant. Remote ignition. Planned timing. I watch the muscle jump in Capone’s jaw twice, otherwise, he’s granite. He turns to me. “You smell it before it blew?”
“Too late.” I hold his stare. “That’s on me.”
He shakes his head once. “The bullet belongs to the shooter, not the shield. But hear me. Whatever’s following you, Tiny, is inside now.” His voice goes quieter, which is worse. “I won’t lose men to your ghosts. If they come through my gate, we bury them under it. Clear?”
“Clear,” I say, and mean it even as the noose of it tightens.
Torch clomps up in turnout pants he stole from a city fire sale, soot streaking his face. “New rule,” he says, deadpan. “If anyone lights my wrench drawer again, I’m switching the whole club to decaf.”
Trigger walks by with a crate of mags, never breaking stride. “Man drinks decaf, he’s already dead.”
Bones hauls a charred tool chest like it’s a wounded dog. “We’ll build it back. Stronger. Meaner. Add a bar.” He winks at Nina, peeking around Danyella, and stage-whispers, “Kidding. Juice bar.”
Nina considers. “With popsicles?”
“Kid’s got priorities,” Bones says gravely. Even Capone’s mouth twitches. It’s nothing. It’s everything.
“Church in fifteen,” Capone says. “Wash the ash off your throats. Leave it on your cuts.”
Men scatter. It’s not quiet work. Hoses slam into the ground, boots crunch through cinders.
Someone coughs hard enough to taste blood.
Trigger checks for burns on Dagger’s forearm while Torch curses the melted remains of a toolbox like it’s a fallen brother.
I help Bones pry a bent beam off one of the bikes that almost made it.
The frame groans, giving up a ghost of heat.
Syvannah stands beside Danyella and Nina, wrapped in a blanket but refusing to sit, refusing to go inside. I see her when she touches her cheek with the back of her hand, eyes fixed on the ruins like she’s memorizing what they lost. She doesn’t notice me watching her.
The compound breathes as one wounded animal. We rinse our faces, spit dark smoke, and straighten cuts that reek of fire and fear.
And then we walk toward Church.
Together.
Quiet.
Ready to hunt.
The table is a map of smoke. Char flakes still cling to the wood grain.
We fill the seats. Blayze sits on Capone’s left, Trigger stares at his ledger as if it offended him, Torch fiddles with a half-melted ratchet, and Dagger sits like a storm disguised as a man.
Derange and Aftermath take the far side.
Pretty Playboy, Jax, Seth, and Knight anchor the edge.
Red sets the tablet in the center and paints our problem in pixels.
Capone doesn’t raise his voice. “This wasn’t random. We’ve got Hounds spray at one site, our line hit at the docks, and now our garage is gutted with a remote. Pattern says Lattimer funds, and Hounds execute.”
Trigger flips open the Pelican case at his boots, steel gleams. “Then we cut the purse string and the dogs starve.”
Dagger rolls his shoulders. “Or bite harder.”
“Either way,” Torch says, “they’re chewing on the wrong bone.”
Capone tips two fingers at Red, who zooms to grainy footage of a side street southbound.
“Same pickup from the burn site. Plate is ghosted, but I traced the fuel stops.” He punches three points that triangulate east of San Ysidro.
“And an old ag cooperative that shouldn’t be alive is suddenly electric, literally. Night draws power like a stage.”
“Warehouse,” Blayze says.
“Or waystation,” Red replies. “Hounds prefer spokes-and-hub.”
Capone’s eyes slide to me. He doesn’t ask. He orders. “You know their hand. You take point.”
I nod. The rope tightens another notch. “We do it quietly. Courier off the hub, not the hub itself. If there’s a leak, we stem it. If there’s a throat, we find it.”
“Trigger goes with you,” Capone says. “Dagger on your wing. Red in your ear. Bones and Torch on the door if it turns stupid.” He looks around the table, counting what I already counted. Who we can afford to risk, who we can’t. “No cowboy shit.”
Pretty Playboy smirks. “Define ‘cowboy.’ Asking for a friend.”
“Friend can polish the van,” Trigger says without looking up.
Seth’s knuckles crack in measured time. Jax spins a knife once, catches it by the spine, and pockets it clean. I forget how eerily similar Jax and Torch are.
Knight tries to look invisible and fails, Capone notices him anyway. “Prospect, you shadow Red. Learn to see the teeth before they close.”
“Yes, sir,” Knight says, posture straightening by reflex.
The room’s heat drops a degree when I see Syvannah in the doorway with smoke-smudged hair tied back, eyes like questions she’s tired of holding. She doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Just dares me with silence.
Her look says to tell him. Mine answers, not yet. The hurt and betrayal in her eyes gut me. But I can’t do it yet.
Capone slaps the table once with his ivory gavel, making me jump. “We hunt.”