Chapter Four
The awning was on fire.
Grace stood in the doorway of her bakery, keys still in her hand, watching flames crawl up the canvas she'd spent two months saving for.
The window beside her was a jagged mouth of broken glass—the second one in three days—and somewhere on the street behind her, motorcycle engines were revving like a pack of wolves celebrating a kill.
"Next time it's the building!" Wade Sims' voice carried over the noise. "You've got three days to sign the papers, bitch!"
She didn't turn around. Didn't give him the satisfaction.
Instead, she grabbed the fire extinguisher from just inside the door and started spraying, because that awning had cost her four hundred dollars and she'd be damned if some Tupelo meth dealer was going to take it without a fight.
The foam hit the flames. The flames hissed and sputtered. And then new engines joined the chorus—different bikes, a harder sound—and Grace heard shouting that had nothing to do with her.
She kept spraying until the fire was out, then turned around to find chaos.
Three bikes were tearing down the street away from her block, Sims' massive frame recognizable even from behind. And chasing them—close, aggressive, eating up the distance—were two more bikes with riders in different cuts.
Destroyers.
A third bike skidded to a stop in front of her building, and Crossroad was off it before the engine died.
"You hurt?"
"No."
"Get on."
"I'm not leaving my—"
"They're coming back." His voice was flat, certain. "Sims is leading us away so his boys can circle around. Get on the bike, Grace. Now."
She wanted to argue. Wanted to tell him she'd just put out a fire with a kitchen extinguisher and she wasn't running from anyone.
But she wasn't stupid. And the look in his eyes said this wasn't negotiable.
She got on the bike.
His hand found her thigh for one hard second—pressing, positioning—and then they were moving, the street blurring past as he accelerated toward the chase.
Grace had been on motorcycles before. She'd dated a guy with a Harley for six months, back when she was waitressing and still thought bad boys were exciting instead of exhausting.
This was nothing like that.
Crossroad drove like the bike was an extension of his body, like the streets of Greenville were a language he'd been speaking since birth.
He took corners that should have thrown her off, accelerated through gaps that shouldn't have existed, and all she could do was hold on and trust that he knew what he was doing.
The two Destroyer bikes ahead of them had Sims' crew pinned on a straight shot toward the highway.
But instead of following, Crossroad cut left, then right, then left again—a pattern that made no sense until suddenly they were ahead of the chase, blocking the intersection where Sims was about to turn.
The Kings' lead rider saw them too late. He tried to brake, tried to swerve, and ended up laying his bike down in a shower of sparks and screaming metal.
Sims didn't stop to help. He blew past his fallen man, took the only open street left, and disappeared into the darkness with the other Destroyers on his tail.
"Hold on!" Crossroad shouted, and then they were chasing too, the wind tearing at Grace's hair and the engine roaring beneath her.
The pursuit led them out of Greenville proper and onto the back roads south of town—narrow blacktop cutting through cotton fields and past abandoned farmhouses.
Grace had driven these roads a hundred times, but never like this.
Never at seventy miles an hour with the headlights of enemy bikers flickering in the mirrors.
Crossroad took a turn she didn't even see coming, and suddenly they were on a gravel road that rattled her teeth and threw dust into the darkness behind them. Another turn, another road, a cut-through between two fields that she would have sworn was just a tractor path.
He knew every inch of this country. Every road, every shortcut, every gap in the landscape that could swallow a motorcycle and spit it out somewhere unexpected.
The Kings didn't know any of it.
One by one, the enemy bikes fell behind—lost at intersections, trapped on dead ends, herded like cattle toward destinations they couldn't see coming. By the time Crossroad finally slowed down, there were no headlights in the mirrors at all.
Just darkness. Cotton fields. The distant lights of a building she didn't recognize.
"Where are we?"
"Safehouse." He pulled into a parking lot that had weeds growing through the cracks, stopping in front of a building that might have been a truck stop twenty years ago. "Shut down when the highway moved. Club uses it when we need somewhere the road doesn't go."
Grace climbed off the bike on shaky legs. The adrenaline was still coursing through her, making everything too sharp, too bright. She could smell smoke in her hair—her awning, her building, her life going up in flames while she ran.
"I need to go back."
"No."
"My bakery—"
"Is being watched." Crossroad was already moving toward the building, checking windows, testing the door. "Brothers are on the block. Nobody's touching what's left."
"What's left." The words tasted like ash. "There might not be a 'what's left' by morning."
He stopped. Turned. The look he gave her was hard to read in the darkness, but his voice was certain.
"The building's still standing. The fire was the awning—that's it. Sims wanted to scare you, not burn you out. Not yet."
"Not yet." She laughed, and it came out bitter. "That's comforting."
"It's not meant to be comforting. It's meant to be accurate." He got the door open and gestured her inside. "Come on. We're not standing in the open."
The truck stop's interior was dusty, abandoned, but not derelict. Someone had been maintaining it—there was a generator humming somewhere, lights flickering on as Crossroad hit switches, a couch that looked recently cleaned.
"Club property?" she asked.
"Club necessity." He was moving through the space, checking rooms, doing whatever it was that men like him did when they were securing a location. "Every Road Captain needs bolt-holes. Places the regular roads don't reach."
"And you just happen to have one outside Greenville."
"I have one everywhere." He emerged from a back room, apparently satisfied. "I used to fuel my uncle's rig here when I was sixteen. Knew the place was empty. Told Cottonmouth it might be useful someday."
Grace sank onto the couch, suddenly exhausted. The adrenaline was crashing, leaving her hollowed out and shaky. She looked down at her hands and saw they were gray with soot, her forearms streaked where sweat had cut through the ash.
She was covered in her own awning.
"Hey." Crossroad crouched in front of her, and his hand—rough, warm—wrapped around her wrist. "You're okay."
"I'm not okay." She pulled her hand back, needing the distance. "I'm sitting in an abandoned truck stop covered in the remains of my business while some prison gang decides whether to burn down everything I've worked for. That's not okay."
"You're alive. You're not hurt. The bakery's still standing." His voice was steady, but there was something underneath it. Something that sounded almost like anger. "That's the definition of okay."
"By your standards, maybe."
"By any standards that matter."
She looked at him—really looked—and saw what she'd been too panicked to notice during the chase. The tension in his jaw. The coiled energy in his shoulders. The way his eyes kept moving to the windows, the door, back to her face.
He was furious. Not at her—at the situation. At Sims. At the fact that she'd been in danger and he hadn't been there fast enough to prevent it.
"You got there quick," she said.
"Not quick enough." The words came out clipped. "Should have had someone on the block. Should have known he'd escalate this fast."
"You can't be everywhere."
"I can be where you are." He caught himself, seemed to hear what he'd said. Something flickered across his face—surprise, maybe, at his own words. "I mean—the bakery's the target. Makes sense to focus protection there."
"Uh-huh." Grace didn't buy the save for a second, but she let it go. She was too tired to push. "How long are we stuck here?"
"Until I'm sure Sims isn't circling back. Could be a few hours."
A few hours. In an abandoned truck stop. With a man who looked at her like she was something he couldn't figure out and couldn't stop trying.
"There better be coffee," she said.
"There's coffee." The corner of his mouth twitched. "Not as good as yours."
"Nothing's as good as mine."
"I'm starting to figure that out."
He stood, moving toward what must have been the truck stop's old kitchen area. Grace watched him go, cataloging the way he moved—efficient, purposeful, always checking angles even when he was just crossing a room.
The man didn't know how to turn off.
"Crossroad."
He stopped. Turned.
"If you think I'm hiding in this truck stop while my bakery burns," she said, "you don't know me yet."
The look he gave her was long, measuring. Heat and frustration and something else—something that made her stomach tighten in ways that had nothing to do with fear.
"I'm starting to," he said quietly. "And that's what scares me."
Then he disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Grace alone with the dust and the silence and the growing certainty that whatever was happening between them was going to be a lot harder to put out than a burning awning.