Chapter Two
The plywood looked like shit.
Black Delta Ink. Four years of building something real. And now the front of her shop looked like every other abandoned storefront on this dying block.
"Fuck Karl Brandt," she said to nobody in particular, and went inside to open up.
The morning crawled by in the way mornings do when your brain won't stop chewing on something.
She inked a blues musician's forearm—a guitar wrapped in thorns—and her hands stayed steady while her mind kept circling back to the same image: a six-three armorer sitting in her waiting chair like a mountain that had decided to take a rest.
Levee.
She'd been tattooing Destroyers for two years.
Knew most of them by name, knew their ink, knew which ones tipped well and which ones whined about the needle.
Levee had come in exactly once, asked about covering the scar on his palm, and then sat there for ten minutes without saying anything before telling her he wasn't ready and walking out.
Yesterday he'd said more words to her in twenty minutes than she'd heard him speak in two years combined.
And every single one of them had been useful.
The club will handle it.
She finished the guitar, collected her cash, and was setting up for her next client when the rumble of motorcycles rolled down Main Street.
Two bikes. She recognized the sound before she saw them through the gap between the plywood and the window frame—that particular V-twin thunder that meant Destroyers.
They pulled up across the street and killed their engines, and Megan watched through the gap as Levee swung off his bike and stood on the sidewalk, looking at the block like it owed him money.
The brother with him was Crossroad—she'd done a Mississippi map across his shoulders last year. Road Captain, if she remembered right. Good tipper, didn't flinch.
They didn't come into the shop.
Instead, Levee started walking.
Megan's next client was a walk-in wanting a small piece on her wrist, simple enough that she could work and watch at the same time. She positioned her chair to keep an eye on the street and tried to pretend she wasn't tracking Levee's every movement.
He walked the block the way she imagined he'd walked levee sections back when he worked the river—slow, methodical, stopping every few feet to look at something.
The burned-out shell of Danny Moorehead's place.
The boarded windows of Terrence Mosley's old barber shop.
The scorch marks climbing the brick of the building two doors down from hers.
He touched the walls. Ran his hands over doorframes. Crouched down to examine something at the base of a fire-damaged building, then stood and made a note in a small book he'd pulled from his cut.
Crossroad followed, but it was clear who was running this assessment. The Road Captain kept watch while Levee worked, and the dynamic told her everything: this wasn't a casual ride-by. This was reconnaissance.
"You okay?"
Megan blinked. Her client—a college-age girl with nervous eyes—was looking at her with concern.
"Fine." She refocused on the wrist piece. "Just watching the neighborhood."
"Those bikers?"
"They're friends."
The girl didn't look convinced, but she didn't argue. Megan finished the piece in silence, wrapped it, gave the aftercare speech on autopilot, and collected payment while keeping one eye on the street.
Levee had made it to the end of the block. He stood at the corner for a long moment, that small notebook in his hand, then turned and walked back. This time he crossed to her side of the street, and she got a better look at what he was doing.
He was reading the damage like a language.
Every scorch mark, every broken window, every building that had gone dark in the last two years—he cataloged it all with the focus of a man solving an equation.
She recognized that look. It was the same look she got when she was designing a piece, seeing the whole composition before she put needle to skin.
Competence, she thought. That's what it is. He knows exactly what he's doing.
The irritation that flared in her chest surprised her.
Not irritation at him—irritation at herself. Because watching him work made something loosen in her shoulders that had been tight for months. Like the simple fact of his presence on her block changed the math somehow.
She didn't need anyone to make her feel safe. She'd been handling her own problems since she was seventeen, and she'd handle this one too.
But watching Levee assess her territory with that methodical intensity...
The block felt steadier with him standing on it. And she didn't know what to do with that.
The afternoon brought three more clients—a cover-up that took two hours, a memorial piece for a woman's dead sister, and a simple bicep band for a guy who couldn't sit still. By the time she finished the last one, the light outside was going gold and her hands were cramping from the detail work.
She cleaned her station, counted her cash, and started her closing routine.
Check the gas lines—she'd been doing it obsessively since Levee mentioned it yesterday.
Lock the back door. Turn off the lights.
Set the security system that probably wouldn't stop a determined middle schooler, let alone Karl Brandt's military contractors.
The plywood over the window cast the shop in shadow. She stood in the dimness for a moment, looking at what she'd built.
Four years.
Four years of eighteen-hour days and ramen dinners and clients who sometimes paid late and suppliers who never did. Four years of proving that a girl from a Tunica double-wide could make something real with nothing but talent and stubbornness.
The flash art on the walls was hers—designs she'd drawn at three in the morning when she couldn't sleep, waiting for the client who'd want exactly that piece. The chair was secondhand but broken in perfect. The equipment was the best she could afford, maintained religiously.
This shop was the first thing she'd ever owned that had her name on it. The first proof that Megan Trask existed as something other than her mother's daughter or her stepdad's punching bag.
And Karl Brandt wanted to turn it into rubble.
She grabbed her keys and headed for the front door, flipping off the last light as she went.
Levee was leaning against his bike.
He was parked directly across from her shop, chrome gleaming in the fading sun, his big frame utterly still in that way he had—like a structure that wasn't going anywhere until it decided to move. Crossroad was gone. Just Levee, alone, waiting.
Megan locked the door and crossed the street, stopping three feet away with her arms folded.
"You know stalking's illegal, right?"
"Wasn't stalking." His voice was low, unhurried. "Was working."
"Working." She gestured at the empty street. "On what?"
"The block. Brandt's acquisition pattern. Which buildings he's hit, which ones he's prepping to hit next." He pulled out that small notebook and showed her a page covered in neat handwriting and rough sketches. "He's working north to south. Your shop is the next structural target."
"I figured that out when he threw a brick through my window."
"You figured out you were a target. I figured out why."
She waited.
"You're the last load-bearing element on this stretch," Levee said. "Every other business has either sold or fled. Your shop is the only thing keeping this block from being declared commercially dead. Once you're gone, Brandt can buy the whole stretch for pennies and start his development project."
"So I'm not just a stubborn bitch who won't sell. I'm a strategically important stubborn bitch who won't sell."
Something flickered across his face—not quite a smile, but close. "Something like that."
Megan studied him in the dying light. The heavy shoulders. The scarred hands resting easy at his sides. The way he looked at her like she was a problem he was trying to solve, but not the kind of problem he resented.
"I don't need a bodyguard," she said.
"I'm not guarding your body."
"Then what are you doing?"
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was rougher than before.
"Assessing a structural threat."
The words landed between them, and Megan heard what he wasn't saying. Heard it loud and clear, the way you hear subtext from a man who doesn't waste words.
I'm not protecting you. I'm protecting what you built. Because someone tried to take something like that from me once, and I know what it feels like.
She should tell him to leave. Should remind him that she'd been fighting her own battles since before she could drive. Should make it clear that Megan Trask didn't need some quiet giant on a motorcycle to validate her existence.
Instead, she looked at him—really looked—and felt something shift in her chest that she wasn't ready to name.
"You always this intense about other people's buildings?"
"Only the ones worth saving."
The words hung in the air. He held her gaze without blinking, and she had the sudden, uncomfortable sense that he wasn't just talking about the shop.
"I'll be back tomorrow," he said. "Got some more reading to do."
"Reading."
"The damage. It tells a story if you know how to look." He swung onto his bike, the machine roaring to life beneath him. "Lock your doors. Check your gas lines. And call the compound if anything feels wrong."
"I told you, I've been handling my own—"
"I know what you told me." He looked at her over his shoulder, and something in his expression made her breath catch. "Call anyway."
Then he was gone, the rumble of his engine fading into the Delta dusk, and Megan stood on the sidewalk watching his taillights disappear.
Assessing a structural threat.
She'd heard what he actually said, even if he didn't mean to say it.
And the terrifying part was, she wasn't sure she wanted him to stop.