Chapter 13
All four tires were slashed.
Someone had taken their time.
She walked a circle around the van, cataloging the damage. Front driver. Front passenger. Both rears. The spare mounted underneath was untouched—they'd either missed it or left it on purpose.
Left it on purpose.
A message. We can hurt you, but we'll let you limp along just enough to feel it.
Amy dropped to her knees in the gravel and started working the spare free.
The lug wrench was rusted, the mounting bracket stiff from months of road grime.
She wrenched it loose with both hands, the bolt giving way with a screech that echoed off the dumpsters.
The spare came down heavy—forty pounds of rubber and steel that hit the gravel and kicked dust across her work pants.
She rolled it to the front driver side and got to work.
Jack up. Lugs off. Swap the tire. Lugs on. Jack down.
Fifteen minutes. Hands black with road grime, knees bruised from the gravel, but the van sat level on three flats and one good wheel. Enough to prove a point, even if she couldn't drive it anywhere.
She pulled out her phone and called the tire service.
"Mitchell's Tires."
"This is Amy Lawson at the diner on Bragg Boulevard. I need three tires mounted. Delivery van, Ford E-150."
"We can get someone out there tomorrow morning—"
"Tonight."
"Ma'am, we close at seven—"
"I'll pay double."
Silence on the other end. The sound of a man doing math.
"Give us an hour."
"Thank you."
She hung up, brushed the gravel off her knees, and walked inside to start the dinner shift.
The diner didn't close early.
Not for Kyle. Not for slashed tires. Not for the cold knot in her stomach that tightened every time she looked out the back window at her crippled van.
Amy tied her apron, fired the grill, and started prep work like it was any other Monday night. Onions diced. Potatoes sliced. Coffee brewing in both pots because the evening regulars liked their caffeine strong and endless.
Maria arrived at six.
"Hey, Amy. Van okay? I saw it sitting funny when I pulled in."
"Flat tires. Service is coming."
"All four?"
"Three now. I changed one."
Maria's eyes went wide. "You changed a tire in your work clothes?"
"Wasn't going to change into a ball gown first."
The girl laughed, but her expression stayed worried. She'd been working the diner long enough to know that four slashed tires wasn't bad luck. It was a threat.
"Amy, if you need me to stay late—"
"I need you to take table six. They've been waiting on menus."
Maria grabbed the menus and went.
Amy watched her cross the dining room—twenty years old, working through college, the kind of kid who deserved a boss whose problems didn't follow her to work.
The tire service showed up at seven.
Amy signed the invoice without flinching at the number. Three new tires, emergency labor, the double rate she'd promised. Money she couldn't afford to spend and couldn't afford not to.
The van sat on four good tires by eight. Ready to haul tomorrow's produce delivery, ready to prove that Kyle's crew couldn't stop her from running her business.
She went back inside and served the dinner crowd like nothing had happened.
The late shift was quiet.
Two nurses from Cape Fear Valley in the corner booth.
A soldier at the counter nursing black coffee and whatever ghosts had followed him off base.
The radio playing low from the kitchen—country music, the kind that told stories about trucks and heartbreak and the particular brand of stubbornness that passed for love in the South.
Amy wiped down the counter, refilled the soldier's coffee, cleared the nurses' plates. Normal rhythm. Normal night.
The bell above the door chimed at 10:51.
She looked up.
The man was thin. Wiry in the way that came from prison yards and bad nutrition, with close-cropped hair and eyes that sat too still in his face.
He moved through the diner without looking at the menu board, without scanning for a seat, without any of the normal behaviors of someone who'd come to eat.
He walked straight to the back booth and sat down.
Jarrett Spence.
Amy had never met him face to face. But she knew the name from Kyle's trial transcripts, from the police reports she'd read so many times the words had lost their meaning. Home invasion. Felony assault. Six years in a cell where he'd learned to enjoy making people afraid.
Kyle's specialist. The one he sent when he wanted terror, not just pain.
Amy picked up a menu and crossed the dining room.
"Evening." Her voice came out steady. Waitress-steady, the kind of calm she'd perfected over fifteen years of handling drunks and difficult customers and men who thought a smile was an invitation. "What can I get you?"
Jarrett didn't take the menu.
He didn't look at her.
He sat with his hands flat on the table, palms down, fingers spread. Still as stone. Those dead eyes fixed on a point somewhere past her shoulder, like she wasn't worth the effort of direct attention.
"Just water," he said.
"Sure thing."
She brought the water. Set it down. He didn't touch it.
She went back to the counter.
Jarrett sat in the booth for forty-five minutes.
He didn't drink the water. Didn't pull out a phone. Didn't shift or stretch or do any of the things a normal person did while occupying a seat. He just sat—hands flat, eyes forward, that unnatural stillness radiating through the dining room like a frequency only she could hear.
The nurses paid and left without finishing their coffee. The soldier glanced at the back booth, looked at Amy, and dropped a twenty on the counter before walking out.
Maria came out of the kitchen, saw Jarrett, and stopped.
"Amy—"
"Take your break."
"I don't need a break."
"Take it anyway. In the kitchen. Door closed."
Maria looked at her, looked at the booth, and went.
Amy refilled the coffee pots. Wiped the counter. Straightened the sugar caddies. Kept her back to the booth and her hands busy and her breathing even.
At 11:32, Jarrett stood.
He walked toward the exit without hurrying. Passed within three feet of Amy without looking at her.
And left something on the table.
She waited until the door closed. Until she heard the engine start in the parking lot, the tires crunch on gravel, the sound fade into the Carolina darkness.
Then she walked to the booth.
A photograph lay face-up on the table.
Her aunt's grave.
The headstone was centered in the frame—June Marie Lawson, Beloved Aunt and Friend—with fresh-cut flowers Amy recognized as the ones she'd left last Sunday.
Someone had taken the photo recently. Someone had stood at her aunt's grave and aimed a camera at the stone where Amy went to talk to the only family she had left.
Underneath the photograph, a folded piece of paper.
Amy opened it with steady hands.
You could visit soon.
Four words. Neat handwriting. No signature.
The diner hummed around her. Coffee maker gurgling. Radio playing. The refrigerator kicking on with its familiar rattle.
Amy looked at the photograph. At her aunt's name on the stone. At the flowers she'd placed with her own hands, captured by someone who wanted her to know that nothing was safe. Not her diner. Not her van. Not even the dead.
She folded the note around the photograph and put both in her apron pocket.
Then she cleared Jarrett's water glass, wiped down the booth, and walked back to the counter.
Maria emerged from the kitchen five minutes later.
"He's gone?"
"Gone."
"Amy, who was that?"
"Nobody." Amy untied her apron and hung it on the hook behind the register. "I'm closing up. You can head out."
"Are you sure? I can stay—"
"Go home, Maria. Get some sleep. You've got class tomorrow."
Maria hesitated. She was young, not stupid—she could see the tension in Amy's shoulders, the careful blankness in her expression. But she was also twenty, and twenty-year-olds didn't push when their boss said go.
"Okay. Night, Amy."
"Night."
The bell chimed. The door closed. The parking lot lights caught Maria's car pulling away, headlights sweeping across the asphalt.
Amy was alone.
She locked the front door. Threw the deadbolt. Walked through her closing routine on autopilot—register counted, grill scraped, floors swept. The photograph sat in her apron pocket like a coal, burning through the fabric.
You could visit soon.
Jarrett Spence had sat in her diner for forty-five minutes. Had watched her serve customers, wipe tables, pour coffee. Had studied her the way a predator studied territory—patiently, thoroughly, memorizing the details he'd need for whatever Kyle had planned next.
And then he'd left a photograph of her aunt's grave.
Not a threat against the diner. Not a threat against her body. A threat against her grief. Against the one sacred thing she had left.
Amy pulled the photograph from her apron and looked at it again.
June's headstone. June's flowers. June's resting place, violated by a man who'd never met her and didn't care that she'd spent her life feeding strangers because she believed a good meal could save a bad night.
Something shifted inside Amy's chest.
Not fear.
Rage.
She'd been afraid since Kyle got out. Afraid of Trent and his crew, afraid of the scratched door and the idling truck and the men who sat in her booth and stiffed her on the check.
She'd been patient the way Rebecca told her to be patient, and careful the way the system demanded she be careful, and quiet the way women were supposed to be quiet when men decided to break things.
She was done being quiet.
Amy pulled out her phone and dialed.
One ring. Two.
"Amy." Trauma's voice, alert despite the late hour. Like he'd been waiting for this call. Like he was always waiting.
"I need you to find someone for me."
"Who?"
"Jarrett Spence." She looked at the photograph one more time. Her aunt's name. Her aunt's grave. The flowers she'd left with her own hands. "He came to the diner tonight. Sat in my booth for forty-five minutes and left a picture of my aunt's headstone with a note saying I could visit soon."
Silence on the other end. The kind of silence she was learning to recognize—not absence, but pressure building behind a dam.
"Where is he now?" Trauma's voice had dropped. Low. Controlled. Dangerous in the way that quiet men became dangerous when someone crossed a line they couldn't uncross.
"I don't know. He left an hour ago."
"Are you safe?"
"I'm locked in. Cameras are running."
"Stay there. I'm coming to get you."
"I'm not going anywhere." She leaned against the counter, the photograph crumpled in her fist. "But Christopher—"
The name. His real name. She used it because this wasn't about the club or the road or the war Kyle had started. This was about the man who'd promised to protect what was hers.
"Find him," she said. "And make him understand that my aunt's grave is not a goddamn bargaining chip."
The line was quiet for one breath. Two.
"I'll find him," Trauma said.
He hung up.
Amy stood in her empty diner, photograph in her fist, and waited for the sound of a Harley engine in the dark.