Chapter Four
The van was half-loaded when the front window exploded.
Diane dropped the bucket of roses she'd been carrying and hit the floor behind the counter, glass raining across tile she'd mopped that morning.
Three shapes came through the hole where her display window used to be—men in dark clothes, moving fast, one of them swinging a baseball bat into her repaired cooler before she could draw breath to scream.
The sound it made—metal crumpling, glass shattering, the wet spray of water and dying flowers—was worse than the window.
"Where is she?" One of them. Not Thibodaux—she'd have recognized his bulk. Someone new. Someone angry.
Diane pressed herself against the counter and reached for the scissors she'd left on her workbench. Her hand closed on nothing. The scissors were on the other side of the shop, ten feet of open floor between her and anything resembling a weapon.
The cooler died with a groan of twisted metal. Two days of work. The funeral arrangements for Mrs. Delacroix's mother. The wedding centerpieces she'd rebuilt from salvage. All of it crushed under a baseball bat while she crouched behind her own counter and couldn't do a damn thing to stop it.
"Check the back!"
Footsteps. Someone kicking through debris. The bell over the door—still intact, somehow—chimed as another man came through the front.
Diane's hands were shaking.
She pressed them flat against the floor and forced herself to breathe. Think. Move. Do something.
The back door. If she could reach it—
"Found her."
A hand grabbed her hair and yanked. Diane came up swinging, her fist connecting with something that grunted, but then there were two of them and she was being dragged across broken glass and crushed petals to the center of her ruined shop.
"Hold her still."
The one giving orders was younger than she'd expected. Sharp-featured, quick-eyed, with the specific calm of a man who'd done this before. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a playing card.
Jack of spades. Last hand written on the back.
He set it on the register, right where the last one had been.
"Mr. Hebert wants you to understand something." His voice was almost pleasant. "The building isn't a request. It's an inevitability. You can sign the papers now, or you can watch everything you've built get destroyed piece by piece until signing is the only thing left."
"Go to hell."
The words came out before she could stop them. The man smiled—a thin, patient expression that made her stomach turn—and nodded to the one holding her.
The fist caught her in the ribs.
Diane doubled over, gasping, her vision going white at the edges. Before she could recover, they were dragging her toward the back, toward the van she'd been loading, and she understood with sudden terrible clarity that the shop was just the opening act.
Then she heard the engines.
Not one bike. Not two. A thunder of V-twins that shook the broken windows in their frames and announced exactly who was coming.
The man giving orders went pale. "Move. Now."
They dropped her and ran.
Diane hit the floor hard, her ribs screaming, but she was already crawling toward the back door because the bikes were getting closer and she'd be damned if she was going to lie here bleeding while Burial came to save her.
She made it to the alley in time to see the chase begin.
Three of Raymond's men sprinting for a car parked two blocks down. Burial's bike cutting across the intersection behind them—not chasing, she realized. Herding. Pushing them away from their escape route, forcing them down streets they didn't know as well as he did.
Two more bikes appeared ahead, blocking the car. The men scattered on foot.
Burial's engine roared past her hiding spot, and for one heartbeat she saw his face—cold, focused, completely without mercy. The soft-voiced gravedigger who'd asked to watch her back door was gone. What remained was something older, harder, built for exactly this kind of work.
Then he was past, and she was alone in the alley with blood on her lip and glass in her hair and the sound of violence echoing through Greenville's south side.
The safehouse was a funeral home.
Of course it was.
Diane sat in the chapel—dusty pews, faded curtains, empty casket displays that hadn't held anything in years—and tried to make her hands stop shaking. The cut on her lip had stopped bleeding. Her ribs ached but weren't broken. She'd checked, pressing fingers against her side until she was sure.
The building smelled like old flowers and older grief. Dust motes floated in the light from boarded windows. Somewhere in the back, she could hear Burial moving through rooms, checking doors and windows with the methodical care of a man who knew this place.
Of course he knows this place. He's a gravedigger. He probably knows every funeral home in the Delta.
The thought should have been funny. It wasn't.
Burial appeared in the chapel doorway, his boots silent on the worn carpet. He'd wiped the blood off his knuckles—she'd seen it earlier, when he'd helped her into the car that brought her here—but the evidence of violence still clung to him in ways she couldn't name.
"Building's secure," he said. "Brothers are watching the perimeter."
"The men who—"
"Gone." His jaw tightened. "Two got away. Crossroad's tracking them."
Diane nodded. Her hands were still shaking. She pressed them flat against the dusty pew and willed them to stop.
"My shop."
"Damaged. Not destroyed." He crossed the chapel, his footsteps echoing in the empty space. "The cooler's gone. Window's gone. But the structure's intact. We can rebuild."
We.
She didn't have the energy to question the word. Not now. Not with the ghost of Raymond Hebert's playing card still burning in her memory.
Last hand.
"The arrangements I was loading." Her voice came out rough. "The funeral delivery. Mrs. Delacroix's mother—she died on Tuesday. Ninety-three years old. Survived everything. And I was bringing her flowers that her daughter picked out two weeks ago, before the cancer took her, and now they're—"
Her voice broke.
She hadn't cried when they broke the window. Hadn't cried when they hit her. But thinking about Mrs. Delacroix waiting for flowers that would never come, flowers that were crushed on the floor of a shop that smelled like violence instead of grief—
Burial sat down beside her on the dusty pew.
He didn't say anything. Didn't offer comfort or platitudes or any of the things people said when they didn't know what else to do. He just sat there, solid and quiet, his shoulder an inch from hers.
"I make beautiful things for ugly days," Diane said finally. "That's what a florist does. Someone dies, someone gets married, someone's baby gets baptized—and I make the flowers that help people feel like the world still has beauty in it."
She looked around the chapel, at the empty casket displays and the faded curtains and the dust that had settled over everything.
"I build funeral arrangements. I should feel at home in a room designed for grief.
" She laughed, and it came out broken. "But the flowers I lost tonight were for someone's mother.
Someone's grandmother. Someone who survived ninety-three years of Delta heat and hard living, and her daughter picked those flowers because she wanted something that looked like a garden instead of a cemetery. "
Her hands had finally stopped shaking. Now they just felt empty.
"That's the loss I can't sweep up," she said quietly.
"The cooler, the window, even the shop—I can rebuild all of that.
But Mrs. Delacroix is burying her mother tomorrow, and I won't be there with the flowers her daughter picked out.
And no amount of insurance money or new coolers or rebuilt windows will fix that. "
Burial was quiet for a long moment.
Then: "The Delacroix service. What time?"
"Ten in the morning. First Baptist on Maple."
"And the arrangements she ordered?"
"White roses. Baby's breath. Cream ribbon." Diane shook her head. "The roses were in the cooler. They're gone."
"There are other roses."
She turned to look at him. His face was half-shadowed in the dim light, the scar across his jaw a pale line against darker skin. His eyes held hers with that grave-quiet steadiness she was starting to recognize as the truest thing about him.
"The brothers will watch the shop tonight," he said. "Tomorrow morning, before dawn, we'll find roses. White ones. And baby's breath, and whatever ribbon you need."
"You can't just—"
"I can." His voice was soft, certain. "A woman who builds funeral arrangements for a living shouldn't have to explain why missing a service matters. She shouldn't have to justify the grief of a loss that isn't hers."
Diane's throat tightened.
"Mrs. Delacroix's mother gets her flowers," Burial said. "That's not negotiable. Everything else—Raymond Hebert, the shop, the war that's coming—all of that can wait until after you've done the thing that matters."
She stared at him.
This man. This gravedigger with the soft voice and the scarred jaw, who'd chased down Raymond's men through streets he knew by heart and then sat beside her in a dusty chapel and listened to her grieve a loss that had nothing to do with broken windows or destroyed coolers.
He understood.
Somehow, impossibly, he understood exactly what she'd lost tonight and why it mattered more than everything else combined.
"Thank you," she said. The words felt inadequate.
"Don't thank me yet." He stood, offering her his hand. "We've got a lot of work to do before ten o'clock tomorrow. And you're going to need to teach me what baby's breath looks like."
Diane took his hand and let him pull her to her feet.
Her ribs still ached. Her lip was swollen. Her shop was in ruins and a gambling boss wanted her building and she was standing in a closed funeral home with a man who buried people for a living.
But tomorrow morning, Mrs. Delacroix would have flowers for her mother's funeral.
That loss, at least, was one she could still fix.
And that was the loss she couldn't sweep up.