Chapter Three
The flower shop sat between two corpses.
Blast parked his bike at the end of the block and studied the scene with the focused attention of a man who understood exactly how buildings died.
The laundromat on the left—blackened brick, collapsed roof, char patterns climbing the walls in familiar V-shapes that pointed straight to the origin point.
The bodega on the right—boarded windows, smoke stains spreading from the back corner where someone had known exactly how to make a fire look accidental.
Neither fire was accidental.
He could read it in the burn patterns, the accelerant signatures, the way the damage concentrated at structural weak points. Whoever was torching this block knew their craft. Not an amateur with a grudge and a gas can—a professional who understood how buildings failed under heat.
Blast respected the skill. Hated the target.
He walked past the ruins and pushed open the door to Sawyer's Blooms, a bell chiming overhead to announce his arrival.
The smell hit him first. Green and alive and so far removed from smoke and cordite that his lungs actually ached with the contrast. Roses in the cooler.
Lilies on the counter. Color everywhere—pink and white and yellow and purple, arranged in buckets and vases and displays that turned a cramped shop into something that felt like hope.
And behind the counter, a woman with curly dark blonde hair and steady hands building something beautiful out of petals and wire.
She looked up at the bell, and Blast watched her assessment happen in real time. The leather cut. The burn scars visible at his collar. The energy that crackled off him even when he was standing still. Her eyes widened slightly, then narrowed with something that wasn't quite fear.
Caution. Calculation. The look of someone who'd learned to evaluate threats.
"Help you?" Her voice was calm. Steadier than her hands had been a moment ago, when a car had slowed outside the window and she'd frozen mid-arrangement like a deer scenting wolves.
"Need flowers." Blast moved to the cooler, scanning the selection. "Something simple. For a grave."
Her posture shifted—the wariness softening into professional sympathy. "I'm sorry for your loss. Is this for a recent service, or...?"
"Six years." The words came out easy, the way they always did when he talked about things that should have broken him. "Guy I served with. I make the trip every May."
She nodded, setting down her wire cutters and coming around the counter. This close, he could see the circles under her eyes, the tension in her shoulders, the way she held herself like someone waiting for the next blow to land.
"Abraham Lincoln?" she asked.
"How'd you know?"
"A lot of veterans in this neighborhood.
I've done arrangements for that cemetery before.
" She opened the cooler and pulled out a selection of stems, her hands moving with an artist's confidence.
"White roses are traditional, but some people prefer something more personal.
Did your friend have a favorite color? A flower that meant something to him? "
He liked country music and terrible jokes and he was twenty years old when the bomb I was defusing went off too early.
"Keep it simple," Blast said. "White's fine."
She built the bouquet in under five minutes—roses, baby's breath, a few stems of greenery that made the whole thing look effortless and elegant. Her hands never hesitated once she started working. Whatever fear lived in her eyes, it didn't reach her fingers.
Blast watched her work and cataloged details.
The shop was well-maintained but not wealthy—practical equipment, modest displays, the kind of place that survived on regular customers and word of mouth.
Photos on the wall behind the register showed her with neighborhood families, quincea?eras, weddings. A community fixture.
Not the kind of person a professional arson crew should be targeting.
"That'll be forty-two dollars," she said, wrapping the stems in paper.
He paid in cash, took the flowers, and paused at the door.
"The buildings on either side of you," he said. "When did they burn?"
Her hands stopped moving. The steadiness vanished, replaced by a fine tremor she couldn't quite hide.
"The laundromat was three weeks ago. The bodega was six weeks before that." Her voice had gone flat. Careful. "Why?"
"Just noticing."
"Everyone notices." She met his eyes, and the fear there was threaded with something fiercer. Anger, maybe. Or exhaustion. "Not everyone asks."
Blast filed that away and walked out into the May sunshine, the smell of roses still clinging to his jacket.
He drove past the burned buildings twice before leaving the block.
The laundromat fire had started in the back corner, near the gas lines. Classic accelerant job—someone who knew that commercial dryers were just waiting to become plausible deniability. The char patterns showed a fast, hot burn that had overwhelmed the structure before anyone could respond.
The bodega was cleaner. Origin point near the electrical panel, damage pattern consistent with a faulty wire that nobody would question. Except Blast had spent four years learning exactly how fires behaved, and this one had behaved too perfectly. Too conveniently.
He filed the information away and pointed his bike toward Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery.
The grave was where it always was. Row 17, Section 42. A white headstone with a name that still made Blast's chest tight when he read it, even after six years of practice.
PFC Daniel Morrison. Iowa. Beloved Son.
"Hey, kid." Blast crouched and laid the roses against the stone. "Brought you the good stuff this year. Florist down in Pilsen made them. She's got steady hands and scared eyes and someone's burning down her block."
The stone didn't answer. It never did.
"I'm gonna look into it." He straightened, shoving his scarred hands in his pockets. "Probably nothing to do with the club, but the burn patterns are professional. The kind of work that pisses me off."
Wind rustled through the cemetery, carrying the distant sound of traffic and the faint smell of cut grass. Blast stood there longer than he'd planned, watching shadows move across the endless rows of white stones.
"I'll see you next year," he said finally. "Try not to haunt me too much in the meantime."
He walked back to his bike with the florist's face still stuck in his head—the fear she couldn't hide, the anger she wouldn't let go of, the hands that stayed steady when everything else shook.
Blast went back the next day.
He told himself it was reconnaissance. The arson operation was on the edge of Wolf territory, close enough to matter, and Alpha would want a full assessment before deciding how to respond. Standard procedure. Nothing personal.
He bought a bouquet of daisies he had no use for and spent twenty minutes asking the florist about her supplier while he cataloged every detail visible through her windows.
The black sedan that cruised past at exactly eight a.m. The way her shoulders tensed when it appeared.
The careful way she didn't look directly at the driver.
She was being watched. Hunted.
And she was still here, still opening her shop at seven a.m., still building beautiful things while her neighborhood burned around her.
Blast left with the daisies and a growing list of questions.
Day three, he bought a small arrangement of mixed flowers and asked about the buildings directly.
"The shoe repair burned too," she said, her voice tight. "Before the bodega. Mr. Okonkwo had that shop for thirty years."
"Same fire pattern?"
She looked at him sharply. "You ask a lot of questions for a guy buying flowers."
"I notice things." He held her gaze, letting her see that he wasn't just some curious customer. "Especially when they don't add up."
"Nothing about this adds up." She wrapped his arrangement with hands that trembled slightly. "Three businesses in two months. All of them on the same block. All of them owned by people who refused to sell to the same developer."
"Sell what?"
"Their properties. Their homes. Their whole lives." The anger broke through the fear, hot and bright. "There's a company buying up everything on this block. Big development project. Everyone who said no got a visit from very polite men in suits, and then their buildings caught fire."
Blast felt something click into place—the cold, clear focus that came right before he started dismantling a problem piece by piece.
"What's the company?"
"Does it matter? I told the fire marshal. I told the cops." Her laugh was bitter. "Nobody cares about a few burned-out buildings in Pilsen when there's money involved."
"I care."
She stared at him, those tired eyes searching his face for something. Truth, maybe. Or threat. Or the answer to a question she hadn't figured out how to ask yet.
"Why?" she asked. "You don't even live here."
Blast thought about the burned buildings, the professional accelerant signatures, the fear in her eyes that she refused to let win. He thought about the florist who kept showing up even though someone was systematically destroying everything around her.
"I know how fires work," he said. "And I know what it looks like when someone's being burned out. You're still standing. That's interesting."
"Interesting." She handed him the arrangement with a sound that was almost a laugh. "That's one word for it."
"I'll be back tomorrow."
"For more flowers you don't need?"
His mouth curved. "Maybe I just like the company."
He left before she could respond, but he caught the flicker of something in her expression—confusion, maybe, or the first crack in her armor. She was scared and alone and fighting a battle she couldn't win.
Blast had spent his whole life making things explode.
Maybe it was time to point that skill at someone who deserved it.