Chapter Two
Diane opened the shop at eight because the Sunday church arrangements weren't going to build themselves.
The front window was still intact—small mercy—but the display cases lay on their sides, ceramic shards scattered across tile she'd mopped three days ago.
Crushed petals stuck to everything. The smell of dying flowers mixed with the copper tang of her own blood, dried brown on the bandage wrapped around her palm.
She swept one-handed, the broom handle braced against her hip, and refused to think about how much the replacement cooler was going to cost.
Keep moving. Keep working. Don't give them a single day.
The church arrangements needed white roses, baby's breath, and the specific shade of cream ribbon that Mrs. Patterson had requested for her daughter's baptism. Diane had the roses in the back cooler—the one they hadn't touched—and enough ribbon to finish if she didn't make mistakes.
She couldn't afford mistakes. She couldn't afford anything, really, but mistakes least of all.
By nine, she'd cleared the worst of the debris.
By nine-thirty, she'd salvaged what she could from the ruined cooler—three arrangements beyond saving, two more that might survive if she worked fast. The funeral was Saturday.
The wedding was Sunday. She had forty-eight hours to rebuild what two men had destroyed in fifteen minutes.
The bell over the door chimed at ten.
Diane's hand went to the scissors on her workbench before she recognized the silhouette.
Burial stood in the doorway, morning light cutting around him, that long white scar across his jaw catching the sun. Another man stood behind him—shorter, broader, with a river map tattooed up his forearm and the patient eyes of someone who'd learned to wait.
"You're open," Burial said.
"I'm always open."
He stepped inside, and the other man followed. The shop felt smaller with them in it, their leather cuts and road dust filling the space between flower buckets and ribbon spools.
"This is Outlaw." Burial gestured to the man behind him. "VP. He wanted to see the building."
The one called Outlaw was already moving through the shop, his gaze tracking the damage with the quiet attention of someone cataloging evidence. He paused at the cooler, ran a hand along the seal she'd tried to repair with duct tape and prayer, then continued to the back without asking permission.
Diane watched him go, then turned to Burial.
"He always this friendly?"
"He's deciding whether your building is worth dying for."
The words landed flat, no drama, no threat. Just fact. Diane picked up her scissors and went back to trimming stems because her hands needed something to do that wasn't shaking.
"And what did you decide?"
Burial didn't answer immediately. He was looking at the workbench—not at her, but at the arrangement she'd been building when the men came. Half-finished, stems still in water, the lilies drooping but alive.
"You were working on this when they locked the door."
It wasn't a question. She nodded anyway.
"Funeral spray. Mrs. Delacroix's mother." The scissors snicked through a stem. "Ninety-three years old. Survived two husbands and a stroke. Her daughter wanted something that looked like a garden, not a cemetery."
"Did you finish it?"
"I will." Another stem. "After I fix the cooler and salvage the wedding centerpieces and figure out how to pay for a new display case." She looked up at him. "I don't stop working because someone breaks my things."
Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile—she wasn't sure this man smiled—but a softening around the eyes that made the scar less harsh.
"No," he said. "I don't imagine you do."
Outlaw returned from the back, his boots heavy on the tile. He exchanged a look with Burial that Diane couldn't read, then turned to her.
"The alley access," he said. "You know why he wants it?"
"Your friend explained last night. Gambling operation needs a permanent room."
"Not just any room. Your back wall shares with two other buildings.
Three exit routes, none of them visible from the street.
Raymond Hebert has been running a rotating network for twenty years—twelve sites, never staying long enough to get pinned down.
A fixed location with that kind of access would change his operation completely. "
Diane set down her scissors.
"So he's not going to stop."
"He's not going to stop."
The words settled over her like Delta heat, heavy and inescapable. She'd known, of course. Known from the moment those men locked her door and told her to sign. But hearing it spoken aloud, in the flat voice of a man who clearly understood exactly what Raymond Hebert was capable of—
"How many men does he have?"
"Fifteen, maybe twenty." Outlaw's gaze was steady. "Collectors, site managers, close muscle. His chief debt collector is a man named Mike Thibodaux—he's the one you hit with the vase. The other was probably a runner, nobody important."
"Thibodaux." She tested the name. "He's going to be angry."
"He's going to be in the hospital for a few days. Concussions take time." A ghost of something that might have been approval crossed Outlaw's face. "You hit him hard."
"I hit him with everything I had."
"Good." Outlaw looked at Burial. "She's got spine. That helps."
"I know."
The two words carried weight Diane didn't fully understand. She watched Burial watching her, those grave-quiet eyes tracking her the way they'd tracked the damage in her shop—seeing things, cataloging things, drawing conclusions she couldn't follow.
"What exactly are you proposing?" she asked.
"Raymond Hebert is a problem," Burial said. His voice stayed soft, unhurried, like they were discussing flower arrangements instead of men who broke fingers. "He's been bleeding Greenville for twenty years, and last night he moved on a building in Destroyer territory. That makes him our problem."
"And me?"
"You're the woman who owns the building." He stepped closer—not threatening, just present. "You can run. Sell to Raymond, take whatever he offers, start over somewhere else. Nobody would blame you."
"But you don't think I should."
"I think you'd rather break every vase in this shop on his skull than give him what he wants."
Diane felt her mouth curve despite herself. "I only had the one vase."
"We can get you more."
She laughed—a sharp, surprised sound that echoed off the tile and the empty display cases and the flowers dying in buckets she couldn't afford to replace. The gravedigger with the soft voice and the scarred jaw had made her laugh in a shop that still smelled like last night's violence.
"What do you need from me?"
"Nothing." He held her gaze. "I'm not asking you to fight. I'm not asking you to leave. I'm asking you to let me watch your back door."
"Just the back door?"
"For now."
The distinction landed somewhere in her chest and stuck there.
Every man who'd ever wanted something from her had wanted everything—her time, her attention, her gratitude, her body. They wanted her to need them, to depend on them, to fold herself into whatever shape made them feel necessary.
This man was asking to watch her back door.
Not to save her. Not to own her. Just to stand between her and whatever might come through.
"Why?" The word came out rougher than she intended. "You don't know me. You've bought funeral flowers twice."
"Three times." His eyes held hers. "The third was for a brother who died because the sheriff wouldn't investigate. I buried him myself, with a spade I'd used for ten years in a parish where the floods kept washing the dead back up."
She didn't know what to say to that. Didn't know how to respond to a man who talked about burying his own dead like it was just another part of his day.
"That's why I left the parish," he continued. "Because some burials demand answers. And that's why I'm here—because a woman who throws vases at men twice her size shouldn't have to fight alone."
Diane looked at him—really looked. Past the scar, past the leather cut, past the road name that told her he'd chosen to be defined by the thing he did best.
What she saw was a man who handled the aftermath. Who came in after the violence was done and dealt with what was left. Who carried the weight of things other people couldn't bear to touch.
And who was standing in her flower shop, asking only to watch her back door.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"You can watch the back door." She picked up her scissors and turned back to the lilies. "But I'm not leaving my shop, and I'm not closing early, and I'm not hiding in some safehouse while my arrangements die in broken coolers."
"I didn't ask you to."
"Good." She snipped a stem with more force than necessary. "Because I wouldn't have listened."
Burial didn't argue. Didn't push. Just found a spot near the back window where he could see the alley and the street and everything that might come from either direction, and settled in like a man who knew how to wait.
Diane went back to work.
The lilies needed trimming. The roses needed water. The church arrangements needed to be finished before Sunday morning, and she had a funeral spray to complete for a ninety-three-year-old woman who'd survived two husbands and a stroke.
Behind her, a gravedigger stood watch in a flower shop, his soft voice and scarred jaw making no sense together—a man who buried things for a living looking at her funeral arrangements like he was seeing something he'd forgotten existed.
She hadn't asked for a protector. Hadn't wanted one. Had spent thirty-three years proving she could handle whatever the world threw at her, one broken cooler and smashed vase at a time.
But he hadn't asked to protect her.
He'd asked to watch her back door.
And the distinction mattered to her more than she expected.