Chapter Fifteen
The call came at three in the afternoon.
Becca was cross-legged on the common room floor, surrounded by the last of the wedding centerpieces—finally, impossibly, all ten finished despite arson crews and safehouse assaults and the general apocalyptic trajectory of her life—when her phone buzzed with a number she didn't recognize.
"Hello?"
"Miss Sawyer?" The voice was shaking. Accented, familiar. "This is Rosa. From the block. I still live on the—"
"Rosa." Becca's hands stopped moving. "What's wrong?"
"Your shop. Men came. Four of them, maybe five." Rosa's voice cracked on a sob. "They were inside for maybe twenty minutes. I heard glass, so much glass. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't know who else—"
The phone slipped from Becca's fingers and bounced off the concrete floor.
She didn't hear it land.
Blast was across the room in three seconds. She didn't know where he'd been—the bar, the garage, somewhere in the compound's orbit—but suddenly he was there, catching her shoulders before her knees could buckle.
"What happened?"
"My shop." The words came out flat. Hollow. Like someone had scooped the meaning out of them and left just the sound. "Rosa said men came. They—"
He didn't wait for the rest. Didn't ask questions, didn't hesitate. Just steered her toward the door, one hand on her waist, the other already pulling his phone to bark at Scout.
"Sawyer's Blooms. Get eyes on it. Now."
The ride to Pilsen was twenty minutes.
Becca pressed her face against Blast's back and didn't look at the streets passing. Didn't look at anything. She focused on the vibration of the engine through her body, the heat of him through his leather, the solid reality of the man in front of her while everything else crumbled.
Maybe it's not that bad. Maybe Rosa was exaggerating. Maybe they just broke a window, tagged the walls, something fixable—
Blast pulled the bike to the curb, and she looked up.
Her shop didn't exist anymore.
The front window was shattered. Not cracked, not broken in one corner—obliterated.
Glass scattered across the sidewalk in a glittering carpet that caught the afternoon sun and threw it back in fragments.
Through the empty frame where her display had been, she could see the destruction inside, and the sight of it stopped her breath.
"Becca." Blast's voice was gentle in a way she'd never heard from him. "You don't have to go in."
"Yes. I do."
She swung off the bike and walked toward what used to be Sawyer's Blooms.
The bell was gone. Ripped from the door frame, probably crushed under someone's boot. She pushed through the entrance and stepped into the ruins of everything she'd built.
The smell hit her first.
Bleach. Sharp, chemical, burning the inside of her nose.
They'd dumped it everywhere—across the floor, on the walls, into every surface that might hold a trace of the life this place had contained.
The scent of it buried everything else. No roses.
No lilies. No clean green fragrance of fresh-cut stems.
Just bleach and broken things.
Her coolers were destroyed. Both of them—the glass doors hanging open, shattered from the inside like someone had taken a bat to them. The compressors were smashed. The shelving was bent. And the flowers—
God, the flowers.
Every bloom she'd had in inventory was on the floor. Roses trampled flat, their petals ground into the tile. Lilies snapped at the stem and scattered like fallen soldiers. Daisies—she'd just restocked the daisies—crushed into a yellow smear across the bleach-soaked concrete.
They hadn't just destroyed her flowers. They'd murdered them. Taken the time to pull every stem from every bucket, lay them on the floor, and grind them under their heels until nothing was left but pulp.
"They knew what they were doing," Blast said behind her. His voice had changed—flat, controlled, the cheerful energy gone like someone had cut the power. "This wasn't random."
She walked deeper into the wreckage.
The vases were gone. Every single one. Ceramic, glass, crystal—the collection she'd built over four years, piece by piece, from estate sales and wholesalers and the antique shop on Eighteenth Street where the owner saved her the good pieces because he knew she'd give them homes.
Reduced to glittering shards that crunched under her shoes.
The ribbon rack was overturned. Spools unwound across the floor in tangled rivers of satin and silk, soaking in bleach that was already eating through the fabric.
Her wire cutters—her grandmother's wire cutters, the pair she'd inherited when she was seventeen and kept sharp through a decade of daily use—were bent in half and left on the counter like a taunt.
Her display shelves had been ripped from the walls. The brackets torn out, leaving ragged holes in the plaster. The photos were smashed—her and Mrs. Orozco, her and the Delgado family, her and the neighborhood kids who came in every Saturday for the free daisies she kept in a bucket by the door.
Four years. Four years of early mornings and late nights and hands pricked bloody from roses and aching from wire. Four years of building something beautiful in a place that needed beauty.
Gone.
"Becca." Blast was beside her. Not touching her—giving her space, giving her room to feel this without someone else's hands trying to hold her together. "I'm sorry."
She didn't answer. She was looking at the register.
Something was taped to the counter. White paper, crisp and clean against the destruction, untouched by the bleach and the glass and the methodical demolition of her life.
The developer's buyout offer.
Someone had written across the top in thick black marker, the letters blocky and aggressive:
LAST CHANCE.
Becca stared at the words.
She'd seen this offer before. It had sat on her counter for weeks—unsigned, undiscarded, a constant reminder that someone with money and lawyers and professional arsonists wanted what she had and would burn the world to get it.
She'd thought about signing it. Late at night, when the black sedan rolled past and the smoke smell crept under her door and the fear was so thick she could taste it. She'd thought about taking the money, walking away, starting over in some neighborhood where nobody wanted to burn her out.
She thought about it now.
The number was generous. More than generous—obscene. Enough to open three shops in three different neighborhoods. Enough to walk away clean, start fresh, pretend that Pilsen and the fires and the man in leather behind her were just a bad dream she'd woken up from.
All she had to do was sign.
All she had to do was give up.
She picked up the offer.
The paper was smooth. Expensive. The kind of stationery that cost more than most of her weekly flower orders. Professionally printed, legally binding, the kind of document that turned lives into line items and neighborhoods into real estate portfolios.
Becca thought about Mrs. Orozco's carnations.
About Rosa, who'd called her crying because she was the only person left to call.
About Lucia's sunflowers and Mrs. Delgado's quincea?era roses and the Kowalski funeral spray she'd built with hands that shook because Mr. Kowalski had been part of this neighborhood for seventy-two years and now he was gone and so was the block he'd loved.
She thought about the families in the apartment above Reyes Grocery—the mother frozen in smoke, the baby screaming, the father gathering his children on the sidewalk while their home burned above them.
She thought about Blast. About his scarred hands and his manic grin and the way he'd walked into her shop four times in a week because he couldn't stay away from a woman who arranged flowers while her world caught fire.
Becca tore the offer in half.
The sound was sharp. Final. It cut through the ruined shop like a blade, and the satisfaction of it hit her so hard her eyes burned.
She tore it again. And again. Until the buyout offer was confetti in her hands, drifting down to land on the bleach-soaked floor beside a crushed rose that had been perfect three hours ago.
"Becca." Blast's voice was careful.
She turned to face him.
Something had shifted inside her. She could feel it—a tectonic realignment, the tipping point where fear became fury and grief became purpose. Her hands weren't shaking anymore. Her voice, when it came, was steady as steel.
"Jay Sikora did this."
"Yes."
"The one who leaves accelerant cans on doorsteps. The one who followed me home. The one who enjoys this."
"Yes."
"Then I want you to find him." She stepped toward Blast, glass crunching under her feet, bleach fumes burning her eyes, surrounded by the corpse of everything she'd loved. "I want Jay Sikora to understand that some things don't burn."
The silence in the ruined shop was absolute.
Blast looked at her the way he'd looked at the safehouse perimeter the night Reznik came—with the cold, focused attention of a man calculating exactly how much destruction was required to solve a problem permanently.
But underneath the calculation, something else. Something fiercer.
Pride.
"Consider it done," he said.