Chapter 23 #4
"Now, that's disappointing." McBride made a sound that might have been a sigh.
"I had hoped we could be civilized about this.
Your establishment is perfectly positioned for my needs—highway access, local credibility, minimal law enforcement presence.
I'm offering you a partnership that would triple your annual revenue. "
"I don't want your money."
"What you want," McBride said, and now the polish was cracking, showing the steel underneath, "is increasingly irrelevant.
I've made three bar owners in the Dakotas understand that.
Two of them took my offer eventually. The third...
" A pause, weighted with implication. "Well.
The third isn't pouring drinks anymore."
Maren's grip tightened on the phone until the plastic creaked.
"You've got until Friday, Miss Halvorsen. After that, Cody finishes what he started last night—and I promise you, the mirror was the gentlest thing he'll break." The line went dead.
Maren set the phone down with exaggerated care, because if she didn't control her movements she was going to throw it through the plywood where her grandfather's mirror used to be.
Her face throbbed where Pruitt had hit her.
Her arm ached where his men had grabbed her.
And underneath the fear, underneath the exhaustion, something hot and furious was building in her chest.
Three bar owners in the Dakotas.
She thought about the stories she'd heard over the years—businesses that burned, owners who disappeared, families who packed up and left in the middle of the night without explanation.
She'd always assumed those were exaggerations, the kind of dark rumors that spread through small towns like winter flu.
Now she wasn't so sure.
The dinner rush, such as it was, started around six—but tonight the usual crowd was thin.
Word traveled fast in places like Hibbing.
People had seen McBride's men coming and going from the Pickaxe.
People had heard about the mirror. People knew what it meant when outsiders started making demands of local business owners.
Maren watched her regulars avoid her eyes and understood that she was already losing.
They weren't bad people. Most of them had known her father, had bounced her on their knees when she was a baby, had helped carry her mother's casket when cancer took her at thirty-four.
But they were Iron Range people, which meant they knew when a fight was too big and a cause was too lost. They'd learned that lesson when the mines closed, when the lumber mills died, when the world moved on and left them behind.
They'd help her if they could. But against Dale McBride and his armed crew? Against men who burned buildings and made people disappear?
They'd mourn her at the funeral and tell themselves there was nothing they could have done.
By eight o'clock, the bar was nearly empty.
Maren wiped down tables that didn't need wiping, restocked bottles that didn't need restocking, did anything to keep her hands busy and her mind from spiraling.
Her grandfather's shotgun was behind the bar—had been since the night Pruitt first showed up—but she knew how much good it would do against four or five armed men who knew she was alone.
Friday. Two days.
Two days to find a miracle or lose everything her family had built.
She thought about calling her cousin in Duluth, asking if she could crash on her couch for a few months while she figured out what came next.
She thought about the insurance policy that would pay out if the bar burned—enough to start over somewhere else, somewhere warm, somewhere that didn't freeze your heart along with your pipes every winter.
She thought about her father's face in those last weeks, gray and gaunt as the black lung stole his breath one cough at a time, still asking about the bar's receipts from his hospital bed because the Pickaxe mattered more to him than his own dying.
You're a Halvorsen, he'd said, gripping her hand with fingers that had lost most of their strength. We don't run. We don't bend. We survive.
Easy words for a dead man to say.
Maren locked the door at nine, two hours earlier than usual, and stood in the middle of her empty bar listening to the silence. The neon sign buzzed. The wind rattled the windows. Somewhere in the distance, a truck engine faded into the night.
Friday. Two days.
She was out of options and almost out of time—and the only people who could help her were the same people she'd spent five years proving she didn't need.
The thought tasted like failure.
But failure, Maren was starting to realize, tasted a hell of a lot better than death.
Chapter 3
Permafrost knew something was wrong the second he walked through the Pickaxe's door.
It wasn't the thin Thursday crowd or the plywood where a mirror used to hang. It wasn't even the way Maren Halvorsen went rigid behind the bar, her hands freezing mid-pour like she'd seen a ghost.
It was the bruise.
Purple and green and spreading across her cheekbone like a storm front, visible for half a second before she turned away, angling her face toward the back wall like she could hide it if she moved fast enough.
She couldn't.
Something hot and violent uncoiled in Permafrost's chest—a fury so sudden and so complete that he had to stop three steps inside the door and breathe through it.
His hands curled into fists at his sides.
His vision narrowed to that glimpse of damaged skin, to the rigid line of her shoulders, to the careful way she was not looking at him.
Someone had put their hands on her.
Someone had hurt her.
"Permafrost." Her voice was steady, professional, the same tone she used on every customer.
But he'd been drinking at this bar for fifteen years, watching her grow from the fierce teenager who helped her father behind the counter to the fiercer woman who'd kept this place alive through sheer stubborn will.
He knew what her voice sounded like when she was scared.
She was terrified.
"Maren." He crossed to the bar with measured steps, fighting the urge to vault over the counter and turn her face toward the light, to catalog every inch of damage and start planning retribution. "Look at me."
"What can I get you? The usual?"
"Look at me."
She didn't. Her hands moved with mechanical precision—grabbing a glass, reaching for the tap, pulling his usual lager with her eyes fixed on the pour. When she set it in front of him, she still wouldn't meet his gaze.
"On the house tonight," she said. "Slow crowd."
Permafrost didn't touch the beer. "Who did that to your face?"
"Nobody. I fell."
"Bullshit."
Her jaw tightened. For a moment, he saw the flash of Norwegian steel that had always drawn his attention—that stubborn backbone that made her the only woman in the Iron Range who'd never once flinched when a Savage walked through her door.
"It's none of your business," she said quietly. "Drink your beer, Permafrost."
The hell it isn't.
But he didn't say it. Not yet. Not here.
Because he'd noticed the two men in the corner booth—strangers with flat eyes and the particular stillness of predators waiting for prey.
They'd been watching Maren since he walked in, and now they were watching him, assessing the cut on his back and the way he stood at the bar like he had every right to be there.
They weren't from here. Wrong clothes, wrong posture, wrong everything. These were men who'd learned their violence somewhere warmer, somewhere that didn't require layers and preparation and the particular toughness that Minnesota winters bred into anyone who survived them.
And they were looking at Maren like she belonged to them.
Permafrost's fury crystallized into something colder. More dangerous. The kind of rage that didn't burn hot but froze solid, patient enough to wait for the right moment to shatter.
He picked up his beer. Took a long drink. Set it back down with perfect control.
"How long have those two been coming around?" He kept his voice casual, just a regular asking about unfamiliar faces. But his eyes never left Maren's profile, watching the way her shoulders hitched at the question.
"Few weeks." She wiped down a section of bar that was already clean. "They're just passing through."
"They're not."
"Permafrost—"
"They're not passing through, and you know it.
" He leaned closer, lowering his voice so it wouldn't carry.
This close, he could see the shadows under her eyes, the fine tremor in her hands, the way exhaustion had carved new lines around her mouth.
"Whatever's happening here, Maren, you don't have to handle it alone. "
For just a moment, her mask cracked. He saw the fear underneath—raw and desperate—and something else that looked almost like hope before she shuttered it away.
"Yes," she said quietly. "I do."
She moved down the bar to serve another customer, and Permafrost understood he'd been dismissed. Any other night, he might have pushed. Might have planted himself on this barstool until she talked to him, until he'd dragged every detail out of her stubborn Norwegian silence.
But those two men were still watching. Still waiting. And the smartest thing he could do right now was leave before they understood exactly how much he'd noticed.
He finished his beer in three long swallows. Left his usual tip—plus extra, because something told him she'd need the money soon. And when he walked out the front door without looking back, he felt those flat eyes follow him all the way to his bike.