Chapter Twenty-Three #2
Diana left laughing, and Becca stood alone in her shop for a moment. The late sun slanted through the front window, lighting up the cooler display — all those colors glowing through the glass, alive and bright and exactly where they belonged.
She thought about the morning she'd reopened. The neighborhood filling the shop, the orders pouring in, the rhythm of a life she'd fought to keep. She thought about the burned buildings and the buyout offers and the black sedan that used to cruise past her window like a countdown.
The sedan was gone. The buildings were rebuilding. The countdown was over.
She untied her apron, hung it behind the counter, and locked up.
Blast was parked at the curb, right between the murals — the painted flowers on the wall behind him lining up with the real ones visible through her shop window. He sat on his bike with the easy posture of a man who had nowhere else to be and no interest in being anywhere else.
"Good day?" he asked.
"The best." She took the helmet he offered and strapped it on. "Three quincea?era orders, a wedding consultation, and Mrs. Orozco's weekly carnations."
"The empire expands."
"The empire pays its rent." She swung onto the bike behind him, her arms coming around his waist with the ease of someone who'd done this a hundred times. "Take me home."
"Yes, ma'am."
He kicked the engine to life, and Becca pressed her face against his back as the bike pulled away from the curb. The rumble moved through her body — chest to spine, spine to bones, the vibration settling into the places where tension used to live and smoothing them flat.
They rode through Pilsen.
Past the murals glowing in the late sun.
Past Rosa's new apartment, where a window box of geraniums sat on the sill.
Past the community workspace going up in the old shoe repair building, where someone had hung a hand-painted sign that said COMING SOON.
Past the laundromat lot, where the foundation of something new was already taking shape — a neighborhood clinic, funded by a collective that had formed after the fires.
Not because someone told them to. Because the people who stayed decided that what came next should be better than what was lost.
The block was scarred. It would always be scarred. But scars weren't damage.
Scars were proof of survival.
Blast turned onto Ashland, heading south toward the compound, and Becca watched the city stream past — brick two-flats and tavern neon and the L train thundering overhead. Chicago in the golden hour, all hard edges and warm light, beautiful in the way that only real things could be.
She held on tighter.
The man in front of her was loud and scarred and wired for destruction, and he smelled like leather and motor oil and the daisies he'd tucked into his saddlebag because he'd never stopped buying flowers he didn't need.
The compound appeared through the dusk. Lights on. Bikes in the lot. The faint sound of music and brothers' voices carrying across the fence.
Home.
Becca closed her eyes and let the engine's rumble carry her the last hundred yards, feeling the warmth of the man she'd claimed and the wind off the lake and the particular peace of a woman who'd found her place in the world twice — once through flowers, once through fire.
Both times, she'd stayed.
Both times, the staying was the point.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I hope you enjoyed BLAST! But no matter how you felt about it, I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you’d like to leave a review, here is a link to the amazon page:
www.amazon.com/dp/B0H59YRBX6
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READ ON FOR A SNEAK PEEK OF DEADLY PERMAFROST, THE FIRST BOOK IN THE NORTH STAR SAVAGES MC SERIES
SNEAK PEEK: DEADLY PERMAFROST
Chapter 1
The poachers had made their first mistake when they ran trap lines through Boundary Waters without permission.
They made their second mistake when they told Tundra to go fuck himself.
Permafrost killed the engine on his Harley and swung off the bike in one fluid motion, his boots crunching through the frost-hardened pine needles that carpeted the forest floor.
October in northern Minnesota meant temperatures that would kill a man by morning if he wasn't prepared, and these three assholes standing in front of their rust-bucket truck clearly weren't from around here.
California plates. City jackets. Hands already shaking from the cold.
They had no idea what cold really meant.
"Asked you nice the first time." Tundra's voice carried that Finnish flatness that made everything sound like a death sentence. He stood with his arms crossed, shrapnel scar catching the weak afternoon light, looking like he could wait out a glacier. "Now I'm asking with my president present."
The biggest of the three poachers—a thick-necked bastard with a patchy beard and prison ink crawling up his hands—stepped forward like he had something to prove. "Look, man, we don't know what kind of hillbilly bullshit you're running out here, but these are public lands. We got every right—"
"No." Permafrost's voice cut through the clearing like a blade through ice. One word. Quiet. Final.
The poacher's mouth snapped shut.
Permafrost moved forward, and his brothers parted for him without conscious thought—Tundra to his left, Ironside to his right, the massive Swede's missing fingers not slowing him down as he palmed the sledgehammer he'd pulled from his bike.
Behind them, Ice and Whiteout formed a second line, blocking any retreat to the truck.
Five Savages. Three poachers. Math even a flatlander could understand.
"This is Savage territory." Permafrost stopped three feet from the big talker, close enough to see the fear starting to bloom behind his eyes.
Good. Fear kept men alive—when they were smart enough to listen to it.
"Everything north of Hibbing to the border.
Everything from the Iron Range to the Boundary Waters.
You want to breathe this air, you ask permission first."
"We didn't know—"
"Now you do." Permafrost let the silence stretch, watching the man's throat work as he swallowed.
Twenty years of running this club had taught him that violence was a tool, not a pleasure—but like any tool, it needed to be demonstrated before men believed in its effectiveness.
"You've got illegal trap lines strung across six miles of wilderness that belongs to me.
Steel-jaw traps that'll take the leg off a wolf, a dog, or a man's kid walking through the wrong stretch of forest."
The poacher's face went pale. "We were just—the pelts are worth—"
"I don't give a damn what they're worth." Permafrost's voice never rose. It never had to. "You're going to pull every trap. Every snare. Every piece of shit you've scattered across my territory. And then you're going to get in that truck, drive south until you hit Iowa, and never come back."
"And if we don't?"
The question came from the skinny one in the back—younger, stupider, that particular brand of reckless that came from never having faced real consequences.
Permafrost didn't answer. He just looked at Ironside.
The big Swede moved faster than a man his size should be able to, sledgehammer swinging in a controlled arc that shattered the truck's driver-side window into a thousand glittering pieces.
The sound was catastrophic in the forest silence—an explosion of glass and violence that made all three poachers flinch backward like they'd been shot.
"That's one window," Permafrost said, his voice still calm. Still quiet. "You've got five more, plus a windshield. Ironside's got all day."
The big talker's hands were up now, palms out, the universal gesture of a man who'd just realized he was outmatched. "Okay. Okay, Jesus Christ, we'll pull the traps. All of them. We're going, alright? We're gone."
"Smart choice." Permafrost stepped back, giving them room to scramble for their ruined truck. "Tundra, you and Ice follow them. Make sure every trap comes up. They miss one, break something that doesn't heal."
Tundra nodded once, already moving toward his bike with the easy grace of a man who'd spent his life in terrain that killed the unprepared. "On it, Prez."
The poachers couldn't load into their truck fast enough, the skinny one cutting his hand on the shattered window in his haste.
Permafrost watched them go with those cold blue eyes that had never learned to warm, cataloging faces and plates and the particular quality of fear in men who'd learned a lesson they wouldn't forget.
This was what he did. What he'd been doing for twenty years, since the mines closed and killed his town and left behind men with nothing but their hands and their rage.
He'd built the North Star Savages from those ashes—gave them purpose, gave them family, gave them something worth fighting for when the world had written them off.
The engine rumble faded into the forest as Tundra and Ice followed the retreating truck. Permafrost turned to find Whiteout already scanning the tree line with those thousand-yard sniper's eyes, and Ironside cleaning glass fragments off his sledgehammer with a rag.
"Flatlanders." Ironside's Swedish accent thickened with contempt. "They think Minnesota is just cold Wisconsin."
"They'll learn." Permafrost moved back to his bike, leather creaking in the cold air. "Or they'll die. Either way, not our problem anymore."