Chapter Seven
Bedrock heard them coming before he saw them.
Engines. Multiple. Coming up the back road that shouldn't exist on any map, which meant someone had been watching long enough to learn the terrain.
He was on his feet before the sound fully registered, crossing to the window he'd left unboarded for exactly this reason. Through the gap, headlights carved through the pre-dawn darkness—four vehicles, maybe five, moving in formation.
Not a random search party.
An assault.
"Opal." He kept his voice low, controlled. "Get up. Now."
She was awake instantly, sleep falling away like a mask. Two days in the safehouse had taught her to respond to that tone without questions.
"How many?"
"Ten, maybe more." He grabbed the shotgun from beside the door, checked the load by feel. "They found us."
"How?"
"Doesn't matter." He crossed to her, gripped her shoulders, forced her to meet his eyes. "Listen to me. You stay in the back room. Door's reinforced—it'll hold. You don't come out until I tell you it's clear. Understand?"
"I can help—"
"You can help by staying alive." He pulled her toward the back room, the one he'd spent two days turning into a last-resort shelter. "I didn't fortify this cabin to watch you die in it."
Something flickered in her expression—fear, yes, but also that stubborn fire he was learning to recognize.
"Don't you die either," she said.
"Wasn't planning on it."
He pushed her into the room and pulled the door shut, hearing the lock engage from inside. Reinforced hinges. Solid oak. It would hold long enough.
It had to.
Bedrock moved through the cabin with a predator's economy, dousing the single lamp and letting darkness swallow everything. He knew this space now—every corner, every sightline, every choke point he'd engineered over the past two days.
The front door was a kill zone. Anyone coming through would be silhouetted against the lighter darkness outside, easy targets.
The windows were boarded except for firing slits he'd cut at precise angles.
The back door was barricaded, forcing entry through the front.
He'd turned this cabin into a funnel, and whoever came through was going to learn what happened when you poured yourself into a space designed to kill you.
The engines cut off. Doors opened and closed. Voices carried on the night air—low, confident, the sound of men who expected easy work.
"Spread out. Cover the back in case she runs."
Bedrock recognized that voice. The farm-hand from the store, the one whose fingers he'd rearranged. Earl Tuttle, if the intel Slag had gathered was accurate.
The man had healed enough to hold a gun. That was unfortunate.
Footsteps on the porch. Three sets, maybe four, approaching the front door.
Bedrock raised the shotgun.
The door exploded inward, kicked by someone with more muscle than brains, and for a frozen moment, a man's silhouette filled the frame.
Bedrock fired.
The blast caught the first man center mass, lifting him off his feet and depositing him back on the porch in a spray of red that painted the door frame. The second man through tried to dive left, and Bedrock racked the slide and fired again, taking his legs out from under him.
Screaming. Chaos. Someone shouting orders that nobody was following.
A bullet punched through the window to his right, splintering the board he'd mounted there. Bedrock dropped low, moved to the next firing slit, and put two rounds through the muzzle flash he'd spotted in the treeline.
The flash went dark.
"He's dug in!" Tuttle's voice, high with fury and something that might have been fear. "Rush him! All at once!"
Stupid. Bedrock had been hoping for stupid.
He grabbed the second shotgun from where he'd staged it, already loaded, already waiting. The front door was a mess of bodies and blood, but more shapes were pouring through, too many to stop with careful shots.
Time for volume.
He fired through the door, racked, fired again. The narrow entrance became a slaughterhouse, men falling over their own dead as they tried to push through a space that had never been designed for the traffic they were demanding.
Someone made it through. Big guy, moving fast, gun up.
Bedrock dropped the shotgun and drew his pistol, putting two rounds in the man's chest before he could aim. The body hit the floor with a wet thud, and Bedrock was already moving, sliding to a new position as bullets tore through the space he'd just occupied.
His phone buzzed. Once. Twice.
Cavalry incoming. Two minutes.
Two minutes was a long time in a firefight.
Glass shattered somewhere to his left—someone coming through the side window he'd boarded. The wood held for one impact, two, then gave way in a shower of splinters. A man tumbled through, landing hard, and Bedrock shot him before he could find his feet.
"Reaper!"
That was Opal's voice, muffled through the reinforced door. Not a scream—a warning.
He spun just as Tuttle came through the back door.
Impossible. He'd barricaded that door, reinforced the hinges—
The bastard had come through the wall.
Tuttle stood in a ragged hole of broken logs and insulation, shotgun raised, triumph twisting his bruised face into something ugly.
"Thought you were clever," he spat. "Thought you could hide her from—"
Bedrock dove as the shotgun roared, felt the blast sear past his shoulder, came up firing. His first shot went wide. The second caught Tuttle in the arm, spinning him sideways.
The third caught him in the throat.
Tuttle dropped to his knees, shotgun clattering from fingers that suddenly couldn't grip. His hands went to his neck, trying to hold in what was already leaving him, and his mouth worked around words that came out as nothing but bubbles and red foam.
Bedrock walked toward him. Didn't hurry. Didn't need to.
"You came after what's mine," he said, and his voice was ice over bedrock. "Did you really think I'd let you take her?"
Tuttle's eyes went wide—not with pain, but with confusion. Pure, genuine bewilderment that property acquisition had led here, to his blood soaking into cabin floorboards, to a Reaper standing over him with death in his eyes.
"She's just—" he gurgled. "Just a fucking—"
"She's mine."
The last bullet went through Tuttle's forehead, and the confusion froze on his face forever.
Outside, bike engines screamed up the access road. Gunfire erupted—not directed at the cabin but at the treeline, at the remaining men who'd expected easy victory and found a slaughterhouse instead.
Bedrock moved to the front door, stepping over bodies, and saw Slag's bike roaring into the clearing with Grit and Timber flanking him. Three more brothers behind them, guns blazing, turning the remaining assault force into fleeing shadows.
"Bedrock!" Slag skidded to a stop, took in the carnage with eyes that had seen worse overseas. "You good?"
"Good enough." He lowered his pistol. "They came through the back wall. Wasn't expecting that."
"Bodies?"
"Six inside. Tuttle's dead."
Slag nodded, processing. "Any runners?"
"Saw at least three head for the vehicles. They'll make it back to whoever sent them."
"Good. Let them spread the word." Grit climbed off his bike, surveying the porch with grim satisfaction. "This was ten men?"
"Ten, eleven. Didn't get an exact count."
"You dropped six yourself?"
"Seven, counting the one in the trees."
Timber whistled low. "Damn, brother. You turned this place into a killing floor."
Bedrock didn't answer. The adrenaline was fading, leaving behind the cold clarity that always followed violence. His shoulder throbbed where the shotgun blast had grazed him—superficial, nothing that wouldn't heal.
"Where's the woman?" Slag asked.
"Inside. Safe room."
"She see any of this?"
"No. But she'll see the aftermath."
He turned back into the cabin, picking his way through the bodies and the blood to the reinforced door. His knuckles rapped against the wood in the pattern they'd established.
Three. Two. Three.
The lock disengaged. The door opened.
Opal stood in the doorway, face pale, hands steady despite everything. Her eyes moved past him to the carnage behind—the bodies, the blood, the bullet holes that had turned their sanctuary into a war zone.
She didn't scream. Didn't flinch. Just looked at it all with those sharp brown eyes and then looked at him.
"You're hurt."
"Graze. It's nothing."
"It's bleeding."
"I've bled before."
She reached for his shoulder anyway, her fingers gentle against the torn fabric of his shirt. The touch burned, even through the pain.
"Earl Tuttle," she said. "The big one from my store."
"Dead."
"Good." No hesitation. No guilt. Just cold satisfaction that surprised him more than it should have. "He killed those roosters. Left them on my doorstep like a threat."
"He won't be threatening anyone else."
Slag appeared in the doorway, silhouetted against the lightening sky. His eyes moved from Bedrock to Opal to the hand she still had pressed against Bedrock's shoulder.
"We need to move," the VP said. "More will come. Compound's the only safe place now."
"She comes with me," Bedrock said. Not a question.
"Figured that." Slag's mouth twitched—not quite a smile, but close. "Brothers will clean this up. You get her to compound. Reaper's expecting a briefing."
"Copy."
He turned to Opal, ready to tell her they needed to leave, and found her already grabbing her bag from the corner. No arguments this time. No insistence that she could handle things alone.
Maybe she'd finally understood what he'd been trying to tell her.
Some fights you couldn't win by yourself.
"I'm ready," she said.
He took her hand—in front of Slag, in front of the brothers who'd arrived to find their enforcer protecting a woman with seven bodies cooling on the floor—and led her out of the cabin.
The sun was cresting the ridge, painting the sky in shades of red and gold. Behind them, the safehouse stood like a monument to violence, its walls scarred and its floors stained with the blood of men who'd underestimated what a Reaper would do to protect what was his.
Tuttle's body would be disposed of. The others too. By nightfall, this clearing would show no evidence of the massacre that had taken place.
But the men who'd fled would remember.
And they'd carry that memory back to whoever had sent them, rewriting every assumption about what it would cost to come after Opal Whitaker.
Bedrock helped her into the truck, his hand lingering on hers a moment longer than necessary.
"You okay?" he asked.
"No." She met his eyes, unflinching. "But I will be."
That was good enough. That was more than most could offer after their first taste of what his world really looked like.
He climbed in beside her and started the engine, and the cabin disappeared behind them as they headed for the compound.
The first battle was over.
The war was just beginning.