Chapter Three
Burial spoke last in church.
He always did. Let the brothers weigh in first—Hollow with his flat assessment of force required, Crossroad mapping escape routes, Levee cataloging what hardware they'd need.
The chapel filled with voices while Burial sat at the back of the table, watching, listening, waiting the way a rear guard always waited.
When the room finally went quiet, Cottonmouth turned those river-mud eyes toward him.
"Burial. What do you see?"
He took a breath. Let it out slow.
"Raymond Hebert's been spreading through Greenville for twenty years," he said. "Twelve gambling sites, rotating locations, never stays anywhere long enough to get pinned. His collectors work on reputation—baseball bats and blowtorches. Most people pay before it gets that far."
"How many men?" Hollow's voice was gravel and silence.
"Fifteen, maybe twenty. Split between collectors, site managers, and close muscle." Burial pulled the playing card from his cut and laid it on the table. Jack of spades, Signed written on the back. "This was on the flower shop register. His calling card."
Crossroad picked it up, turned it over. "Confident bastard."
"He can afford to be. Twenty years without serious challenge makes a man believe his own luck." Burial leaned forward. "But this move on the building—that's different. Rotating sites are smart. Hard to hit, hard to pin down. A permanent location means he's planting a flag."
"In our territory." Cottonmouth's voice carried the weight of a man who'd already decided what that meant.
"In our territory."
Levee shifted in his chair, his big hands flat on the table. "You said three key men. Who are we looking at?"
Burial had been waiting for this. He'd spent the ride back from Greenville turning over what he knew, what he'd heard, what the brothers who worked the south side had pieced together over years of watching Raymond's operation creep across the Delta.
"Mike Thibodaux runs debt collection. Big, heavy-fisted, handles the baseball-bat work. He's the one the florist hit with the vase—probably still in the hospital with a concussion."
A few brothers chuckled. Burial didn't.
"Andre Guidry manages the site rotations. Sharp, quick-thinking, keeps the twelve locations moving so nobody stays in one place too long. He's the logistics that turns Raymond's reputation into a functioning business."
"And the third?" Cottonmouth asked.
"Landry Brossett." Burial let the name sit for a moment. "Personal enforcement. When Raymond wants someone to suffer specifically, Brossett's the one he sends. Blowtorch work. Property destruction. The kind of cruelty that makes examples."
The chapel went quiet.
Burial had seen it before—that moment when brothers understood exactly what they were dealing with.
Not just a gambling operation, not just a territorial dispute, but a twenty-year machine built on pain and fear that had finally decided to expand into ground the Destroyers had been watching for a decade.
"Here's what I see," he said, and every man leaned in.
He laid it out the way he laid out every aftermath—piece by piece, layer by layer, the way a gravedigger reads soil to find what's underneath.
"Raymond's operation has been bleeding Greenville unchecked because nobody's pushed back hard enough to make him rethink.
The rotating sites keep him mobile, but they also keep him scattered.
A permanent location in the flower shop's building would change that.
Three exit routes, alley access, a fixed anchor for his whole network. "
He paused.
"But it also makes him predictable. He wants that building. Wants it bad enough to send men to lock a woman inside and threaten her fingers. That kind of want makes a man sloppy."
"The woman." Outlaw's voice was careful. "She's not going to run?"
"No." Burial heard the certainty in his own voice and didn't try to soften it. "She opened her shop at eight this morning with a bandaged hand and broken coolers. Spent three hours salvaging arrangements for a funeral on Saturday. She's not running."
"Spine," Hollow said. It wasn't quite approval, but it was close.
"Spine," Burial agreed. "And stubbornness. She told me she's not leaving, not closing, not hiding. She's going to keep building her funeral sprays and wedding centerpieces until someone stops her."
"Or until Raymond sends Brossett," Levee said quietly.
The name hung in the air like smoke.
Burial had heard stories about Landry Brossett. The blowtorch work. The way he took his time. The specific pleasure he seemed to find in making sure people understood exactly why they were suffering.
"That's why we move first," Burial said. "Raymond's down his chief collector—Thibodaux's going to be out for days, maybe a week. Guidry keeps the sites running, but he's not muscle. Brossett handles personal grudges, not routine enforcement."
"You're saying there's a window," Cottonmouth said.
"I'm saying Raymond just lost his heavy hand, and his hammer's busy elsewhere. If we hit him now—hard, fast, before Thibodaux recovers—we can take pieces off the board while he's scrambling to fill the gap."
Cottonmouth was silent for a long moment. Burial watched him think, watched those river-mud eyes calculate the cost of action against the cost of waiting.
"Greenville's south side," the president said finally. "That's your ground, isn't it?"
"Been watching it from the rear for three years." Burial met his eyes. "I know every back alley, every cut-through, every building Raymond's people use for staging. Nobody sees what's creeping up behind better than the man who rides last."
"Then you're operational lead." Cottonmouth's voice carried the weight of a decision made. "Your territory, your call. Take what you need—brothers, hardware, whatever it costs. Raymond Hebert just bet against the wrong house."
Burial felt the weight settle onto his shoulders. Not unwelcome—he'd carried weight his whole life. But this was different. This wasn't just protecting territory or eliminating a threat.
This was the woman with the bandaged hand and the burning eyes.
The brothers dispersed with the usual noise—chairs scraping, boots on concrete, the low rumble of voices planning violence. Burial stayed seated, staring at the playing card on the table.
Signed.
Raymond Hebert thought he'd already won. Thought a vase to the skull was a setback, not a statement. Thought the woman who threw it would fold under enough pressure, sign over her building, disappear into whatever hole scared people disappeared into.
He was wrong.
Outlaw paused at the door, looking back. "The florist. You're going back to her shop?"
"Someone needs to watch the back door."
"And that someone's you?"
Burial didn't answer. Didn't need to. Outlaw's eyes held something that might have been understanding, or might have been warning. Hard to tell with a man whose patience ran as deep as the river he'd grown up on.
"Be careful," Outlaw said. "The ones who throw vases are the ones who stick."
Then he was gone, and Burial was alone with the playing card and the weight of what he'd just taken on.
He thought about Diane Leary.
The way she'd held the scissors while he talked, trimming stems with a precision that never wavered.
The way she'd laughed—sharp and surprised—when he'd offered to get her more vases.
The way she'd looked at him when he'd said he only wanted to watch her back door, like she was trying to figure out if he was lying.
He wasn't lying. He didn't know how to lie, not about things that mattered. Ten years of gravedigging had burned the pretense out of him—when you spent your days putting people in the ground, you learned that words were either true or they weren't, and the dead didn't care which.
But he also wasn't telling the whole truth.
Because watching her back door meant watching her. Meant standing in her flower shop while she built arrangements from dying stems. Meant breathing air that smelled like lilies and roses and the specific green of things still growing.
Meant caring about something temporary.
That was the part he didn't know how to handle.
The gravedigger in him understood endings.
Understood that everything went into the ground eventually—people, buildings, whole ways of life that the Delta had swallowed without blinking.
He'd made peace with that a long time ago.
Stopped fighting it. Stopped pretending that anything he built or loved would last.
And then a woman had thrown a vase at a man twice her size and called him because he looked like he handled trouble.
Burial stood, pocketed the playing card, and headed for the door.
The club had his back. Cottonmouth had given him operational lead. The brothers would ride when he called, fight when he needed them, help him dismantle a twenty-year gambling operation piece by piece until Raymond Hebert understood exactly who owned Greenville's south side.
But none of that was why his boots were already carrying him toward his bike.
He was going back to a flower shop because a woman with dirt under her nails and fire in her eyes had his attention in a way that a man who buries things for a living had no idea how to handle.