Chapter Sixteen
Diane had never been inside the chapel.
She'd walked past it a dozen times—the heavy double doors, the faded manager's office sign still visible beneath layers of paint, the low hum of voices that went silent whenever she got too close.
Church was brotherhood business. The chapel was where decisions were made that the old ladies heard about after, delivered in flat voices by men who'd already decided what the cost would be.
Today, the doors were open for her.
Burial walked her in with his hand on the small of her back—not guiding, just there.
The room was smaller than she'd expected.
An old oak table dominated the center, scarred with decades of use.
Chairs crowded around it, most of them already occupied by brothers in leather cuts who turned to watch her enter.
Nobody spoke.
Cottonmouth sat at the head, his river-mud eyes tracking her the way they tracked everything—slow, thorough, missing nothing.
Outlaw sat to his right, patient as the river he'd grown up on.
Hollow was a stone wall at the far end. Crossroad leaned back in his chair, his road-rash arm resting on the table.
Levee's big hands lay flat on the wood, steady as the earthen walls he used to build.
And the chair at the back was empty.
Burial's chair.
He pulled a second one beside it and held it for her. Diane sat, feeling the weight of every pair of eyes in the room.
"She's here because she knows the ground," Burial said. No preamble. No justification. Just fact, delivered in that soft voice that made every brother lean forward to hear.
Cottonmouth studied her for a long moment. Then he nodded once, and the room exhaled.
"Let's hear it," the president said.
Hollow went first. Force assessment—Raymond's remaining muscle, the hired hands he'd scraped together since losing Thibodaux, Guidry, and Brossett. Numbers were thin. Maybe eight men, none of them loyal enough to die for a boss who'd sent his best people to do that already.
Crossroad followed. Escape routes, police response times, the window they'd have between the first sound of violence and the first sound of sirens.
Levee cataloged hardware. What they had, what they'd need, what could go wrong if Raymond's hired guns carried anything heavier than pistols.
Outlaw laid out the political aftermath—how the south side would react, which businesses would need reassurance, what the club's presence needed to look like once the dust settled.
Then the room went quiet, and every head turned toward the back.
Burial stood.
He moved to the table the way he moved through everything—unhurried, deliberate, a man who'd spent his life watching from the rear and had learned that the view from behind showed things the front couldn't see.
He spread Diane's map across the oak surface, weighting the corners with a knife, a phone, a bullet, and an empty glass.
"Raymond's primary site," he said, tapping the center of the map. "The warehouse on Calhoun, three blocks south of Diane's shop. He's been running high-stakes games out of the second floor for two weeks—ever since Guidry died and the rotation stopped."
"He's gone fixed," Outlaw said.
"He had no choice. Guidry was the one who kept the sites moving. Without him, Raymond's down to one location." Burial's finger traced the streets around the warehouse. "Front entrance here. Side door here. Loading bay on the north side."
"Standard breach," Hollow said. "Hit the front, cover the sides, flush him out."
"That's what he expects."
The room stilled.
"Raymond Hebert has spent twenty years watching the front door of every room he sits in.
" Burial's voice dropped, and every brother leaned closer.
"He's a gambler. He reads faces. He watches what's coming at him and calculates the odds before it arrives.
His whole life has been built on seeing the threat before it hits. "
Burial looked up from the map.
"He's never once thought about what's behind him."
Diane watched the brothers process this. Watched the plan take shape on their faces the way flowers took shape under her hands—piece by piece, each element falling into place until the whole thing bloomed.
"The alley network," Crossroad said slowly. "Behind the warehouse."
"Behind every building on that block." Burial traced the alleys with his finger.
"Three parallel passages connecting Calhoun to Industrial.
Service entrances, loading docks, fire exits—all of them accessible from the rear.
Raymond's muscle is positioned for a front-door defense because that's how Raymond thinks. He watches the front."
"And you hit the back," Cottonmouth said.
"I take a crew through the alley network while the brothers hit the front." Burial met the president's eyes. "Raymond's hired muscle folds when they realize the threat isn't just coming through the door they're watching. It's already behind them."
"The Tail Gunner's approach," Outlaw said quietly.
"It's what I do."
Cottonmouth's gaze shifted to Diane.
"And the florist?"
Diane straightened in her chair. Every eye in the chapel was on her now—not with suspicion, not with dismissal, but with the focused attention of men who understood that the woman sitting in their church knew something they needed.
"Timing," she said.
She stood and moved to the map, her finger finding the streets she'd driven a thousand times.
"The south side has rhythms. Delivery trucks clear the warehouse district by seven PM. Bar traffic on Calhoun peaks at nine, dies by eleven on weeknights. The residential blocks go dark by ten—porch lights off, curtains drawn, people inside."
Her finger traced the route from the compound to the warehouse district.
"Between eleven-thirty and midnight, there's a dead window. No traffic. No deliveries. No foot traffic. The only people on these streets are the ones who don't want to be seen." She looked at Cottonmouth. "That's your window. Thirty minutes of empty streets between here and Raymond's front door."
"How do you know this?" Levee's voice was genuinely curious.
"Because I've been loading my van at five AM for six years," Diane said. "And a woman alone in a van learns to know exactly when the streets are safe and when they're not."
Levee nodded, something like respect settling into his expression.
"There's one more thing." Diane tapped the map at a point two blocks east of the warehouse. "The back alley that leads to Raymond's rear entrance runs past this building. It's a church—Pastor Simmons' place on Oak Street. He runs grief counseling for gambling addicts on Tuesday nights."
"Tuesday night," Crossroad said. "That's tonight."
"Counseling ends at ten. The parking lot clears by ten-thirty." Diane met Burial's eyes across the table. "By eleven, the whole block is empty. And the alley behind the church connects directly to Raymond's back door."
The chapel went quiet.
Burial was looking at her with something that burned hotter than pride. Something possessive and fierce and absolutely certain—the look of a man watching the woman he'd claimed prove exactly why she was worth claiming.
"Tonight," Cottonmouth said. The word landed like a gavel.
The room erupted into controlled motion.
Brothers pushing back from the table, voices low and urgent, the specific energy of men shifting from planning to execution.
Hollow disappeared toward the armory. Crossroad was already on his phone, coordinating the brothers who'd take the front approach.
Levee moved with quiet purpose toward the garage.
Diane stayed at the table, her hand still resting on the map.
Burial crossed to her.
"You just gave the Destroyers a battle plan," he said.
"I gave you a delivery route." She smiled, but her eyes were serious. "That's all I've ever done. Deliver things to the people who need them."
"This isn't flowers."
"No." She held his gaze. "This is better. This is the end of the man who tried to take everything I built. And I drew you the map."
His hand came up to her face—calloused fingers tracing her jaw, her cheekbone, the curve of her ear.
The lightest gesture she'd ever seen from a man who worked with spades.
Around them, the chapel emptied, brothers filing past without a glance because the Tail Gunner touching his woman's face before a ride was as sacred as anything that happened in church.
"Stay here," he said. "At the compound. I'll come back through the front door."
"You promised."
"I promised."
She caught his hand, pressed her lips to his scarred knuckles. Tasted leather and road dust and the specific warmth of a man who was about to ride into the last fight.
"End it," she said. "And come home to me."
Something passed through his expression—not the grave-quiet calm, not the rear-guard patience. Something newer. Fiercer. The look of a man who finally had something in front of him worth fighting forward for.
"Count on it."
He kissed her once—hard, fast, claiming her mouth the way he'd claimed everything since the night she threw a vase—and then he was gone, his boots echoing through the chapel and out into the compound where the bikes were already rumbling to life.
Diane stood alone at the oak table, her map still spread across its surface. The knife, the phone, the bullet, and the empty glass pinning its corners like the four walls of a room she'd helped build.
Through the chapel doors, she heard the engines thunder. One by one, then all at once—a wall of sound that shook the old cotton gin to its bones. The Destroyers riding out to end a twenty-year operation that had finally bet against the wrong house.
And somewhere in that formation, riding last the way he always rode, a gravedigger was heading toward a back door with a map his woman had drawn from six years of flower deliveries.
She pressed her palms flat against the table and breathed.
The arrangements in her flower corner were finished.
The compound was quiet. The old ladies would gather soon—Jolene, Nora, Megan, Grace, Ruth—the way they always gathered when the brothers rode out.
They'd wait together, the way women who loved dangerous men had always waited, with coffee and silence and the specific faith that came from choosing this life with their eyes open.
Diane would wait with them.
Not because she was helpless. Not because she couldn't fight. But because she'd done her part—drawn the map, set the timing, given the Destroyers the one thing Raymond Hebert never saw coming.
A florist who knew every back door in Greenville.
She left the chapel and walked toward the light spilling from the main room, where five women were already waiting with the quiet strength of people who'd learned that love and war lived in the same room.
The bikes were already fading into the Delta dark, heading south toward Greenville and the last hand Raymond Hebert would ever play.