Chapter Thirteen
The call came while Grace was elbow-deep in pie dough, and she knew from Crossroad's face before he said a word.
He was in the kitchen doorway—the place he always stood when he had news, one hand on the frame, body angled toward her like he was bracing for her reaction. Phone still in his hand. Eyes hard.
"Tell me," she said.
"Fitch hit your block."
The rolling pin stopped.
"Two businesses. The laundromat that reopened last month and the flower shop on the corner." His voice was flat, controlled, delivering damage reports the way he delivered route plans—precise and stripped of anything that would slow down the information. "Both torched. Total loss."
Grace set down the rolling pin. Wiped her hands on her apron. Took one breath, then another.
"My bakery?"
"Standing. But he left something." A pause she didn't like. "A Copperhead Kings cut nailed to your front door. Message underneath: The block belongs to Tupelo. Rebuild and burn."
The anger hit her like an oven blast—not the hot, wild fury from the night Sims shoved her through the display case.
This was different. Structural. The deep, load-bearing anger of a woman watching someone try to burn the ground she'd built her life on, and knowing the ground was bigger than just her bakery.
Mrs. Patterson's flower shop. The woman had been selling carnations and funeral sprays on that corner for twenty years. She'd brought Grace a bouquet on opening day—yellow roses, a card that said Welcome to the block, honey.
The laundromat. New owners, a young couple who'd sunk their savings into machines and a fresh coat of paint. They'd been open six weeks.
Gone. Both of them. Because Darnell Price was down two officers and his cousin was the only weapon he had left, and Nolan Fitch's weapon of choice was fire.
"I need to see it," Grace said.
"No."
"That's my block, Crossroad. Those are my neighbors. Mrs. Patterson has been on that corner since before I was born, and if her shop is—"
"I know whose shop it is." His voice didn't rise, but something underneath it shifted—the possessive edge that had been sharpening for days, the tone of a man who'd stopped pretending his need to protect her was purely tactical.
"And I'll take you to see it. But not right now.
Fitch is reckless and he's proving a point, and I'm not putting you on that block until I know he's not circling back. "
She wanted to argue. Wanted to grab her keys and drive to Greenville and stand in front of whatever was left and refuse to leave, the way she'd refused to leave the night this started.
But she wasn't stupid. And the look in his eyes said this wasn't about control—it was about the fact that last night she'd been in his arms and this morning someone had nailed a death threat to her door, and the distance between those two things was making him dangerous.
"When?" she asked.
"This afternoon. With brothers."
"Fine." She picked up the rolling pin. "But I'm going. Argue with me and I'll go without you."
"I'm not arguing." He crossed the kitchen and took her face in both hands—flour on his palms, dough under her nails, neither of them caring.
"I'm telling you that I will burn Nolan Fitch alive before I let him touch what's yours.
And then I'm taking you to see your block. In that order of priority."
The kiss he gave her was hard and brief and tasted like a promise that had nothing to do with tenderness.
Then he was gone, boots echoing down the hallway, already on the phone with Outlaw.
Grace stood alone in her kitchen and finished the pie.
They rode to Greenville in formation—six bikes, Crossroad at the front, Grace on the back of his Harley with her arms around his waist and smoke visible on the horizon before they crossed the county line.
She smelled it first. That acrid, chemical smell of a building fire's aftermath—scorched wood, melted plastic, the bitter tang of things that were never meant to burn being consumed anyway. It crawled into the back of her throat and sat there like grief.
The block was worse than she'd imagined.
Mrs. Patterson's flower shop was a blackened shell. The front wall still stood, barely, the window frames gaping like empty eye sockets. The sign—hand-painted, the old woman's pride—was a charred rectangle hanging from one hinge.
The laundromat across the street was gone entirely. The roof had collapsed, the machines visible through the rubble like metal skeletons. Water from the fire department's response pooled in the gutters, gray with ash.
And between them, untouched except for the cut nailed to the front door, sat Kelley's bakery.
Grace climbed off the bike and walked toward it.
Her window was intact—the new one, replaced after Sims. Her awning was intact—the new one, replaced after the fire. The door was intact, except for the nail holes where someone had hammered a leather vest into the wood like a trophy.
She pulled the cut off the door. Looked at the snake patch, the Copperhead Kings colors, the leather that smelled like gasoline and cruelty.
Then she dropped it in the gutter and ground it under her heel.
"That's his message," she said. "Here's mine. I'm still here."
Crossroad was beside her. She could feel him without looking—the tension radiating off him like heat, the barely controlled fury of a man surveying damage to something he considered his.
Not the building. Her. The block she'd built her life on, the neighbors she'd fed, the corner of Greenville she'd claimed with biscuits and stubbornness—all of it was his now because she was his, and watching it burn was doing something to him that was harder to contain than any firefight.
"Inside," he said. "I want to check the building."
They went through the bakery together. Everything was where she'd left it—ovens cold, surfaces clean, the prep station ready for a morning that hadn't come. Fitch hadn't entered. Hadn't needed to. The message was the burning buildings on either side—a frame for the target he'd come back for.
"He's stupid," Grace said, running her hand along the counter. "Sims was mean and Roby was smart, but Fitch is just stupid. He burned two buildings to make a point he could have made with one, which means he hit twice because he wanted to, not because he needed to."
Crossroad was watching her from the doorway. That assessing look—the one that said he was recalculating something.
"Go on."
"Sims was systematic. Hit my building because it was the tactical target.
Roby was strategic—coordinated attacks, two fronts, supply-chain logic.
" She turned to face him. "Fitch is personal.
He burned Mrs. Patterson's shop because it was next to mine.
He burned the laundromat because it was across the street.
He's not thinking about territory—he's thinking about fear.
About making me watch my neighbors lose everything so I'll fold. "
"And will you?"
She gave him a look that could have peeled paint.
"Right." The corner of his mouth twitched. "Stupid question."
"The stupidest." She crossed her arms. "But it means something for how you catch him.
Sims you baited with a target. Roby you outmaneuvered on a road.
Fitch you catch by giving him something personal to hit—because he can't resist. He's not a soldier and he's not a planner.
He's an arsonist with a family connection, and he'll keep burning until someone puts him out. "
Crossroad was quiet. She could see the roads turning behind his eyes—routes and intersections, the geometry of a trap building in real time.
"You know this block better than anyone," he said.
"I walk it every morning. Before dawn, when nobody's watching.
" She unfolded her arms and pointed east through the window.
"The old hardware store on Cypress—it's been empty for two months.
Kings didn't take it because the foundation's bad, but the front's intact. It looks occupied from the street."
"Staging point."
"That's where I'd go if I were setting fires and needed somewhere to watch them burn.
" She pointed south. "The alley behind the barbershop connects to Oak Street through a gap in the fence that most people don't know about.
I know about it because I've walked it a hundred times taking trash to the dumpster on Oak. "
"Escape route."
"And the building on the corner of Main and Third—the check-cashing place the Kings took over four months ago. It's been dark for two weeks, but I've seen lights in the back window at night. Someone's using it."
Crossroad pulled out his phone and started typing. Sending the information to Outlaw, to Hollow, to whoever needed it. His eyes didn't leave hers.
"You just mapped his operational pattern from your bakery window."
"I mapped my block. I've been mapping it for fourteen months." She met his gaze. "The difference is now I know what I'm looking at."
The second call came at eleven PM.
Grace was in the compound kitchen—because of course she was, because her hands needed dough when her mind was on fire—when Crossroad came through the door with his cut already on and his weapon already holstered.
"Fitch hit the waterfront. The Sandbar—Destroyer bar on River Road. Firebombed the front window twenty minutes ago."
Twice in twelve hours. The reckless son of a bitch had struck twice in twelve hours, just like she'd predicted—too eager, too personal, too in love with the flames to wait for strategy.
"Anyone hurt?"
"Bar was closed. Damage only." His eyes were black in the kitchen light. "He's escalating. Hitting faster, hitting wider. Trying to make us spread thin enough that he can circle back to your block."
"So don't spread thin."
"We're not going to." He crossed the kitchen and kissed her forehead—brief, fierce, the gesture of a man leaving for war. "I need you to finish what you started this afternoon. The staging points, the escape routes, every building on your block that Fitch might use. I need it on paper by morning."
"I'll have it by midnight."
"Grace."
"Midnight. Go handle the waterfront. I'll handle the map."
He looked at her for a long moment. The possessive heat in his eyes warred with something else—pride, maybe. The specific pride of a man watching his woman prove she was exactly as formidable as he'd suspected.
"Midnight," he said. "And then you sleep."
"Don't push your luck, Road Captain."
He left. The bikes roared out of the compound ten minutes later, the sound swallowed by the Delta dark.
Grace pulled a clean sheet of paper from the shelf, found a pen, and sat down at the kitchen table.
She drew her block from memory. Every building, every alley, every gap in every fence. The streets she'd walked a thousand times before dawn, the corners she knew by feel, the sight lines and the blind spots and the hiding places a reckless man would use to stage a fire.
Fourteen months of walking the same streets. Fourteen months of knowing every door, every window, every shadow.
She'd built her life on that block. Now she was going to help Crossroad end a war on it.
The pen moved fast, certain, her hand steady.
By midnight she had a map more detailed than anything the club's surveillance had produced—not because she was tactical, but because she was present.
Because she'd been there every morning when no one else was, paying attention when no one else did, learning the shape of her world the way she'd learned the shape of dough.
By feel. By repetition. By the stubborn refusal to stop showing up.
She left the map on the kitchen table with a fresh pot of coffee beside it, and went to bed.
Crossroad's side was empty. She pressed her face into his pillow—leather, motor oil, the faint trace of her own flour—and closed her eyes.
Tomorrow, Nolan Fitch was going to ride into her block one more time.
He had no idea what was waiting for him.