Burial's Vengeance (Delta Destroyers MC #6)

Chapter One

The phone rang while Burial was cleaning blood off his boots.

Not his blood. Never was, these days. He sat on the concrete floor of the compound garage, rag in one hand, the remnants of a run gone sideways staining the leather, and let it ring twice before he fished the phone from his cut.

Unknown number. Greenville area code.

He answered the way he answered everything—quiet, unhurried, like a man who had all the time in the world because he'd spent ten years learning that the dead weren't in any rush.

"Yeah."

"Is this—" A woman's voice, clipped and shaking. "The man who ordered the funeral arrangements. For the Murphy service."

Burial went still.

He knew that voice. Knew it from exactly two conversations, both of them across a flower shop counter while he pointed at arrangements for brothers who'd gone into the ground.

Diane Leary. The florist with the callused hands and the sharp tongue who'd told him carnations were for gas stations and if he wanted to honor the dead, he'd use lilies.

"It's me," he said. "What happened?"

"Two men." Her breath came ragged through the phone. "They locked me in my own shop. Told me to sign a lease transfer or they'd break every finger on my right hand."

Burial was already moving. Boot rag dropped, keys in hand, crossing the garage toward his bike with the long stride of a man who'd learned to cover ground without running.

"Where are you now?"

"Behind the laundromat. Next to my shop." A sound that might have been a laugh if it had any air in it. "I hit one of them with a vase. Ceramic. The big one with the roses on it."

"You still there?"

"I'm still here." The shaking had hardened into something else. Fury, maybe. The kind that hadn't processed into fear yet. "I didn't know who else to call. You're the only person I know who looks like he handles the kind of trouble that locks doors."

Burial threw a leg over his bike and kicked the engine to life. The V-twin's rumble filled the garage, echoing off concrete and chrome.

"Stay where you are. Twenty minutes."

He made it in eighteen.

Greenville's south side sprawled in the dark, half the storefronts boarded, the other half lit by the kind of fluorescent glow that said open but barely.

Burial knew these streets the way he knew every street in Destroyer territory—from the back, from the rear of formation, watching what crept up behind the brothers while they looked forward.

The laundromat sat three doors down from Leary's Flower Shop, its windows fogged with dryer heat. He pulled around back and killed the engine, letting the silence settle before he moved.

She was exactly where she said she'd be.

Diane Leary stood pressed against the cinder-block wall, garden clogs still on her feet, a cut across her palm dark with drying blood. Her hair had come loose from whatever she'd tied it in, and her chest heaved with breaths she was forcing slow, forcing steady.

But her eyes.

Her eyes burned with something that hadn't cracked yet.

Burial swung off the bike and crossed to her, his boots crunching on gravel. Up close, she was smaller than he remembered—average height, strong from work he could see in her shoulders, dirt still under her nails from the arrangements she'd been building before everything went sideways.

"Let me see." He reached for her hand without asking.

She let him take it. The cut was clean, shallow, already clotting. Glass, probably, from the vase she'd shattered on someone's skull.

"He went down," she said. "The big one. I hit him hard enough that he dropped, and while the other one was figuring out what happened, I ran." Her jaw tightened. "They locked my front door from the inside. I had to go out the back."

"You did right."

"I did what I had to." She pulled her hand back, not rough, just done being examined. "They wanted my building. Not to buy it—to take it. Lease transfer, they said. Sign now or we make you sign later."

Burial studied her face in the dim light bleeding from the laundromat windows.

The woman who'd sold him funeral flowers had never looked soft, exactly—her hands told the story of someone who hauled her own weight, and her mouth had the set of a person who'd stopped expecting help a long time ago.

But right now, standing in garden clogs with blood on her palm and fury in her eyes, she looked like something else entirely.

She looked like someone who'd thrown a vase at a man twice her size and meant it.

"Wait here," he said. "I need to see inside."

"They're gone. I heard them leave while I was—"

"I need to see inside."

She didn't argue.

The flower shop's back door was still unlocked from her escape. Burial pushed through into darkness that smelled like crushed petals and refrigerant, moving through the space with the quiet attention he gave every aftermath.

The display cases had been knocked sideways. Flowers scattered across the floor, stems broken, water pooling on tile. The front door was locked from the inside, just like she'd said—deadbolt thrown by men who'd expected to take their time.

A playing card sat on the register. Jack of spades, its face marked with something dark.

Burial picked it up, turned it over. One word written on the back in black marker: Signed.

He put the card in his pocket and kept moving.

The cooler in back had been left open, the cold air leaking out, the arrangements inside already wilting in the Delta heat. Two days of work, maybe three, dying because someone wanted a building.

He'd seen this before. Different details, same shape. Men who wanted something deciding that taking it was easier than paying, and finding a woman alone with no one to call.

Except she had called. She'd called him.

Burial walked back out the way he'd come, the smell of dying flowers following him into the alley.

Diane hadn't moved. She stood against the wall with her arms crossed, watching him the way she'd probably been watching for the men to come back.

"Two days of arrangements," he said. "Maybe three."

"Funeral and a wedding." Her voice was flat. "The funeral's Saturday. The wedding's Sunday." A breath that shuddered despite her control. "The cooler?"

"Open. They left it that way."

She closed her eyes. Just for a second—a crack in the fury that showed the exhaustion underneath. Then the eyes opened again, hard and clear.

"Who are they?"

"Raymond Hebert." Burial said the name the way he'd say any name attached to a grave. "Runs gambling out of Greenville. Cards, dice, sports betting. Twelve sites across the Delta, maybe more."

"I don't gamble."

"He doesn't care." Burial pulled out his phone. "He wants your building. Back half connects to the alley network—perfect for a permanent high-stakes room. The kind of anchor site that turns a scattered operation into something fixed."

"So he just—what? Sends men to take it?"

"He sends men to make you want to leave. Then he makes a fair offer to a woman who can't wait to sell." Burial met her eyes. "The vase changed the timeline. Now he knows you're not going to fold."

"I'm not."

It wasn't a statement of intention. It was a statement of fact, delivered with the flat certainty of a woman who'd been here before—maybe not with gambling bosses and locked doors, but with the specific weight of someone trying to take what she'd built.

"I know," Burial said. And then, because the soft-voiced gravedigger had never been a man who wasted words: "That's why I'm calling my president."

He stepped away from her, thumb finding Cottonmouth's number. The line rang twice before that slow Delta drawl filled his ear.

"Burial."

"We have a problem." He kept his voice level, the way he kept everything level. "Raymond Hebert's gambling operation. They moved on a building in Greenville tonight—flower shop on the south side. Owner's standing next to me with a cut on her hand from the vase she broke on one of his collectors."

A pause. Burial could hear the compound in the background—low voices, the clink of bottles, brothers settling in after the run.

"She throw it hard?"

"Hard enough that he dropped."

"Good." Another pause. "The building's in our territory?"

"Greenville's south side. Been watching it from the rear for three years. Never had trouble until tonight."

"And now?"

Burial looked at Diane. She was watching him with those burning eyes, listening to a conversation she could only hear half of, her chin lifted like a woman ready to fight whatever came next.

"Now Raymond Hebert has marked a building in Destroyer territory," he said. "A woman who throws vases is bleeding in her garden clogs. And the Destroyers have a problem that isn't going to wait until morning."