Chapter 20
He walked The Pines with Tamsin for the last time.
Not the way they'd walked it before—not cleaning, not boarding, not tearing scorched drywall out of room nine. This was different. This was a woman walking a man through the killing ground she'd built and lived in and bled for, room by room, showing him where the fight would happen.
"Connecting door between one and two opens inward," she said, pushing it to demonstrate. "Between three and four, outward. That matters—if you're coming through three, the door swings toward the lot and gives you cover. Coming through four, it swings into you."
Buckshot followed her through the rooms. She moved through her own motel the way she always moved—straight-backed, squared-off, keys on her belt, weight set like a woman walking her fence line. But today there was something harder in it. Something final.
"Crawlspace under four." She dropped to one knee and pulled up the carpet corner she'd cut and joined herself, revealing the access panel underneath.
"Goes under four, five, and six. Tight, but a man can move through it.
If someone needs to get behind the office without crossing the lot, this is how. "
"You never told me about the crawlspace."
"You never needed it before."
She showed him the sightline from the ridge—the same vantage Cottonmouth had used during the Tillman fight, the same ridge Buckshot had walked to put Vance down.
She showed him where a man parked when he wanted his truck facing out, and where the blind spot was between the dumpster enclosure and the pool fence, and which room door you could see from the office window and which ones you couldn't.
Spillway walked the lot behind them, quiet, precise, translating her knowledge into geometry. He set the positions off her walkthrough the way a dam operator set release gates—calculated, controlled, nothing moving until the order came.
"Brothers in three, seven, and fourteen," Spillway said, marking the doors with chalk. "Three covers the office approach. Seven covers the truck lane. Fourteen gives us the far end and the access road."
"Cottonmouth on the ridge," Buckshot said.
"Cottonmouth on the ridge. Bikes staged in the hollow behind the tree line—out of sight, out of earshot." Spillway looked at the lot, then at the office. "Nothing visible but her truck and the office light. Looks like a woman waiting to sign papers."
"Looks like a woman with no options," Tamsin said. "That's the point."
Buckshot watched her stand in her own parking lot with the afternoon sun on her face and the weight of what was coming settled into every line of her body, and the thing he felt wasn't fear. It was the terrible, specific ache of loving someone who was exactly brave enough to get herself killed.
They drove back to the compound for the armory.
Proof had the bench laid out—shotguns, handguns, magazines, the tactical gear that lived in the basement for days like this.
Buckshot loaded beside him in silence, the familiar rhythm of brass and steel and the smell of gun oil filling the small space.
This was the part he understood. The preparation.
The moment before the moment, when everything was clean and counted and ready.
He picked up the short shotgun—the one Tamsin had used since that first morning, the one she'd fired through connecting doors and across pool enclosures, the weapon she'd become as familiar with as her own hands—and loaded it.
Proof watched him do it. "She's ready," he said quietly.
"I know she's ready."
"Then stop loading that gun like you're loading a coffin."
Buckshot looked at him. Proof's chemical-burned forearms were crossed, and his face had the steady, tested look of a man who'd spent a lifetime checking things twice because bad product killed.
"She's been ready since the night she opened Sharp's face with a keyring," Proof said. "You're the one who's not ready. And that's fine. But don't put that on her."
Buckshot finished loading the shotgun and set it on the bench and said nothing, because Proof was right and saying so would have meant admitting the thing he'd been carrying since the map with the circled X: that the bravest woman he'd ever known was going to sit behind a desk and wait for a man who wanted her dead, and the only thing standing between her and that man was Buckshot's ability to come through a wall fast enough.
He found Tamsin on the deck at dusk.
She was standing at the rail looking at the cove, the water going bronze in the last light, her hands wrapped around a mug of coffee that had gone cold.
Her hair was down for once—loose around her shoulders, dark blonde in the fading sun—and the scar through her eyebrow caught the light and the set of her jaw was the set of a woman who had already decided everything that needed deciding.
He came up behind her. Put the short shotgun on the rail beside her coffee. Put his hands on her hips.
She leaned back into him.
"Don't," she said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't ask me not to do this."
"I wasn't going to." He paused. "I was going to try once, and then I was going to stop, and you were going to look at me until I stopped, and then we were going to do it your way. So I'm skipping the part where I try and going straight to your way."
She almost smiled. "You're learning."
"You're teaching."
She turned in his arms. Looked up at him with the bronze light on her face and the shotgun on the rail beside her and the whole end of this thing sitting between them like a held breath.
"If it goes wrong—" he started.
"Laundry block. Hold it. I know."
"If it goes wrong and you can't get to the laundry—"
"It won't go wrong."
"Tamsin."
"It won't go wrong because you'll be in the wall behind me and Cottonmouth will be on the ridge above me and six brothers will be in the rooms around me.
And because the man who's coming has never stood on his own ground, and I have.
I've been standing on mine since the night you blew out my office window. "
He kissed her. Not hard, not desperate—slow, deep, the kind of kiss that said everything he couldn't say about tomorrow and the desk and the man in the truck.
She kissed him back the same way, her hands fisted in his shirt, and when they broke apart her eyes were bright and her chin was up and she was the most terrifying thing he'd ever loved.
They rode to The Pines in the dark.
The brothers went in quiet. Through the maintenance corridor, through the connecting doors, into the rooms Spillway had marked.
Cottonmouth took the ridge with a rifle and a radio and the cold patience of a man who'd spent his whole life giving one warning and meaning it.
The bikes went into the hollow behind the tree line, hidden in the brush where the sound of the engines wouldn't carry to the highway.
By the time the lot was staged, it was exactly what Spillway had designed: nothing visible but Tamsin's truck and the office light burning yellow in the dark. A woman alone, waiting to sign papers. A motel with no options and no defenses and nobody coming to help.
Buckshot put himself in the wall between the office and room one. The connecting door was closed. On the other side of it, Tamsin sat behind her desk with the deed papers and the short shotgun in her lap and the same steady, squared-off posture she'd held since the night he met her.
He pressed his hand flat against the wall. On the other side, he could hear her breathing. Steady. Even. Ready.
The radio crackled. Cottonmouth's voice, low from the ridge.
"Four vehicles. Turning off the highway. Lights on. Moving slow."
Buckshot's hand stayed on the wall. On the other side, Tamsin's breathing didn't change.
"Lead truck is a crew cab," Cottonmouth said. "Passenger seat. A man who has never once been seen on his own ground."
Donnie Pruitt was coming to collect his property.
He had no idea what was waiting for him.