Chapter 15
The call came at three in the afternoon.
Paige was in the compound's kitchen, helping Carly prep for the evening meal, when her phone buzzed with a number she didn't recognize. She almost let it go to voicemail. Almost.
"Ms. Kincaid?" A woman's voice, elderly, trembling. "This is Helen Marsh, from the property next to yours? I didn't know who else to call, but—there's fire trucks everywhere, and they said—they said your inn—"
The words kept coming, but Paige had stopped hearing them.
She was already moving.
Channel found her in the garage, swinging onto the back of his bike before he could ask what was happening.
"Paige. What—"
"The inn." The words came out flat, detached, like they belonged to someone else. "Trask burned my inn."
She watched his face shift—confusion to understanding to something dark and furious—and then he was on the bike, engine roaring to life, and they were tearing out of the compound like hell itself was chasing them.
The ride was a blur. Coastal highway, salt wind, the roar of the engine drowning out everything except the single thought pounding through her skull: Four years. Four years of my life. Gone.
She smelled the smoke before she saw the flames.
The Tidewaters Inn was an inferno.
Paige climbed off the bike and stood at the edge of her property, watching fire consume everything she'd built. The Victorian she'd restored board by board. The porch where she'd served morning coffee to guests who became friends. The rose garden where she'd killed a man defending her home.
All of it. Burning.
Fire trucks lined the access road, crews spraying water onto flames that had already won.
It was too late—had been too late before they even arrived.
This wasn't an accidental fire or a smoldering ember that got out of control.
This was total destruction. Deliberate. Professional. A message written in ash and ruin.
"Ma'am, you can't be here—" A firefighter approached, hand raised.
"It's my property." Paige's voice came out strange, hollow. "It's mine."
The firefighter's face softened with pity. Paige wanted to scream at him. Wanted to tell him she didn't need his sympathy, didn't need his careful words about insurance claims and rebuilding. She needed someone to pay.
Channel appeared at her side, a solid wall of heat and leather. His hand found hers, gripping tight, and she held on because it was the only thing keeping her from flying apart.
"How bad?" he asked the firefighter.
"Total loss, I'm afraid. Structure was fully involved by the time we arrived. Nothing we could do but contain the spread." The man shook his head. "We found evidence of accelerant. Multiple points of origin. This wasn't an accident."
"No." Paige's voice cut through like a blade. "It wasn't."
They let the fire burn itself out.
Paige stood at the edge of the destruction as the sun set, watching flames give way to smoke give way to ruins. The Victorian's skeleton emerged from the ash—blackened beams, collapsed walls, the ghost of everything she'd poured herself into.
And spray-painted across what remained of the foundation, bright red letters that had somehow survived the blaze:
NEXT TIME IT'S YOU
Channel's arm came around her shoulders, pulling her against his side. "Paige. Talk to me."
She should be crying. That's what normal people did when their lives went up in smoke. They collapsed and wept and let the grief pour out of them like water from a broken vessel.
But Paige wasn't crying.
She was burning.
"I built this place with my own hands." Her voice was steady, almost conversational, which should have scared her more than it did.
"Spent eighteen months on the renovation.
Learned how to restore crown molding and refinish hardwood and repair plaster work that was a hundred years old.
I scraped and painted and sanded until my fingers bled, because I wanted to prove I could make something beautiful.
Something peaceful. Something that had nothing to do with violence. "
"I know."
"I buried the soldier here. That's what I told myself. I took all the parts of me that knew how to hurt people, how to hunt them, how to make them afraid—and I buried them under flowered bedspreads and welcome baskets." She laughed, the sound bitter and sharp as broken glass. "What a fucking joke."
"Paige—"
"They didn't just burn a building, Everett." She turned to face him, and whatever he saw in her eyes made him go still. "They burned the grave. The lie I'd been telling myself for four years. That I could be something other than what I am."
"And what are you?"
The question hung in the smoke-thick air. Paige looked back at the ruins of her peace—the Victorian reduced to bones, the creek reflecting flames like it was bleeding—and felt something shift inside her. Something old and cold and patient, stretching awake after a long sleep.
"I'm the woman who's going to make them regret this."
Channel drove them back to the compound in silence.
Paige sat behind him, arms wrapped around his waist, but she wasn't really there. She was somewhere else—somewhere dark and calculating, running scenarios the way she used to run them in theater. Trask had sent a message. Fine. She had a message of her own to deliver.
The compound was chaos when they arrived. Word had already spread—brothers gathering in the main hall, voices raised in anger, the particular energy of men preparing for violence. Anchor met them at the door, his weathered face hard with fury.
"We just got confirmation," he said. "Rawlins. Trask's message specialist. He's been bragging about it to anyone who'll listen. Says it's a preview of what's coming."
"Where is he?" Paige's voice cut through the noise like a knife.
Anchor looked at her—really looked, seeing whatever Channel had seen in the ash and smoke. His expression shifted from anger to something that might have been respect.
"We're tracking him now. Safehouse on the waterfront. He's celebrating with some of Trask's remaining crew."
"Good." Paige felt her lips curve into something that wasn't quite a smile. "I want him."
The room went quiet. Brothers who'd been shouting fell silent, turning to look at the woman who'd just claimed a kill in front of the whole club.
Hurricane stepped forward, his cold smile flickering with something like appreciation. "That's not how this works, sweetheart. Club handles club business."
"He burned my inn." Paige met his gaze without flinching. "He destroyed four years of my life and left a threat painted on the ashes. That makes it personal."
"Personal gets people killed."
"Personal gets things done." She stepped closer, close enough that a lesser man would have backed up.
Hurricane didn't move, but something shifted in his eyes.
"I've been hunting men like Rawlins since I was twenty-two years old.
I've interrogated insurgents, dismantled trafficking rings, and tracked targets across three countries.
Don't tell me I can't handle one piece of shit who likes to burn buildings. "
Silence. Then Anchor's voice, low and steady: "Channel. Your woman. Your call."
Everyone turned to Channel. Paige felt his presence at her back—solid, warm, the weight of his hand settling on her hip in a gesture that was both possessive and protective.
"She's earned the right," he said. "More than earned it. And she's better at this than half the men in this room." A pause, heavy with meaning. "We ride together. She takes the lead."
Hurricane looked at Anchor. Anchor looked at Paige. Something passed between them—acknowledgment, maybe, or the final recognition that she wasn't a guest or a burden or a woman to be protected.
She was one of them.
"Tomorrow morning," Anchor said. "We hit the safehouse at dawn. Paige takes point on Rawlins." His gaze swept the room, brooking no argument. "Anyone has a problem with that, they can take it up with me."
No one did.
Channel found her on the dock an hour later, staring at the water with empty eyes.
"You don't have to do this," he said quietly, settling beside her. "The brothers can handle Rawlins. You don't have to—"
"Yes. I do."
"Why?"
Paige turned to look at him, and the woman looking back wasn't the innkeeper who'd served him coffee that first night. Wasn't even the soldier who'd held a sector in her rose garden. This was someone older, colder—someone forged in places where the rules didn't apply.
"Because for four years, I pretended I could run from what I am. I built a beautiful lie and lived inside it, and I almost believed it." She looked back at the water, dark and endless. "Rawlins burned the lie. Now there's nothing left but the truth."
"And the truth is?"
"That I'm not someone who hides from violence. I'm someone who walks toward it." Her hands curled into fists at her sides. "Rawlins thought burning my inn would break me. Send a message that I can't fight back. But all he did was wake up something I spent four years trying to kill."
Channel reached for her hand, uncurling her fist, threading his fingers through hers. "I've been where you are. After Dale. The rage that feels like the only thing keeping you alive."
"Is that what this is?"
"Partly." He pulled her closer, wrapping his arm around her. "But it's also justice. Rawlins destroyed something that mattered to you. He doesn't get to walk away from that."
"No." Paige leaned into him, drawing warmth from his body while the cold thing inside her settled deeper into her bones. "He doesn't."
"Just promise me something."
"What?"
"When it's done—when Rawlins is handled—you don't disappear into the cold." His voice was rough, vulnerable in a way that cut through the rage. "You come back to me. The real you, not just the soldier."
Paige closed her eyes, feeling the weight of his words. He was asking for something she wasn't sure she could give. The soldier was awake now, and the soldier didn't know how to be anything else.
But she'd try. For him. For what they were building together.
"I'll try," she said.
"That's all I ask."
They sat together in the darkness, the water lapping at the dock pilings, the compound buzzing behind them with preparations for tomorrow's assault. The inn was ash. The peace was gone.
But the soldier was back.
And she wanted Rawlins to understand exactly what he'd destroyed. Every detail. Every year of work and hope and healing that he'd reduced to cinders with a match and a can of gasoline.
She wanted him to know who was coming for him.
And she wanted to be the one who taught him.