Chapter 13
"Bex?" She pressed the phone to her ear, stepping away from the garage where she'd been running scales on the amp. "What's—"
"They're burning it, Nina." Bex's voice was high and tight, words tumbling over each other.
"The Red Dust. Right now. Six guys with gas cans and a man who looks like he's enjoying it.
They hit the Wagon Wheel an hour ago and torched the stage there too.
Danny at the Dusty Spur says they're coming for him next. "
Nina's blood went cold.
"The Red Dust stage?"
"Gone. It's fully engulfed. Harlan's standing in the parking lot with his shotgun but he won't shoot—they told him they'd come back for the whole building if he did."
Three venues. Three stages. Every place she'd played on the Outlaw stretch, burning at once.
They were erasing her. Burning every stage she'd ever stood on until there was nowhere left to play.
"Bex, get out of there. Drive west and don't stop."
"Already gone. I'm calling from the highway. Nina, the guy running it—the one with the gas cans—he's not like the others. He watches the fire like it's—" Bex's voice broke. "Like it's beautiful."
Decker. The arsonist. The specialist Russell Pace had brought in from Tulsa.
Nina ended the call and ran.
She found Milepost in the clubhouse with Striker and Shadow, the three of them bent over the table studying something she didn't care about because everything she cared about was burning forty miles east.
"Decker's hitting the roadhouses," she said from the doorway. "The Red Dust, the Wagon Wheel, the Dusty Spur. He's torching every stage on the stretch."
The room went sharp. Milepost's head came up, those pale eyes locking onto hers.
"When?"
"Now. Right now. A friend just called from the highway—the Red Dust stage is already burning."
Striker was on his feet. "How many men?"
"Six, plus Decker."
"I'll get the brothers." Striker was already moving, phone in hand.
Milepost crossed the room to Nina. His hand caught her elbow, steering her toward the wall, his voice dropping low. "Stay here. We'll handle it."
"No."
"Nina—"
"My gear is at the Red Dust." She pulled her arm free.
"The amp I hauled out of a pawn shop in Midland.
The backup guitar Ridge helped me tune last week.
The mic I bought with the money from my first paying gig—sixty-two dollars at a music store in Odessa that doesn't exist anymore.
" Her jaw set. "That equipment is everything I have left.
I'm not sitting in this compound while it burns. "
"It might already be gone."
"Then I need to see that for myself."
His hand went to her jaw. Tilted her face up. The look in his eyes was caught between fury and fear—a man who wanted to lock her in a room and throw away the key because the world was full of fire and she kept running toward it.
"You stay behind me," he said. "You stay behind the brothers. You don't go in that building until I tell you it's clear."
"I'll stay behind you until I need to move. Then I'll move."
"Nina—"
"You fell for a woman who doesn't hide, Milepost. Don't start asking me to now."
Something cracked in his expression. Not anger—recognition. The understanding that the thing he loved about her was the same thing that terrified him.
"Behind me," he said again. "Promise me that much."
"Behind you. Until I can't be."
It wasn't the promise he wanted. He took it anyway.
Six bikes and a truck tore east on the highway, eating up the forty miles to the Red Dust in under thirty minutes. Nina rode behind Milepost with her good arm locked around his waist, and she smelled the smoke before she saw the flames.
The Red Dust Roadhouse glowed orange against the dark sky.
Not the whole building—not yet. The stage.
The outdoor stage she'd played every Saturday night for two years, the one where she'd learned to hold a crowd, the one where the promoter had first heard her sing.
It was a pillar of fire, flames climbing thirty feet into the air, throwing sparks across the parking lot like hellish confetti.
A man stood in the firelight watching it burn. Lean, calm, hands in his pockets. Watching the way other men watched sunsets—with satisfaction. With pleasure.
Decker.
Six men flanked him—three at the roadhouse entrance, three in the parking lot. Armed, alert, positioned like they expected company.
Harlan, the roadhouse owner, stood by his truck twenty yards back. Shotgun in his hands, barrel pointed at the ground, face lit orange by the burning stage. He looked broken. A man watching his life go up and unable to stop it.
The bikes came in fast and loud.
Milepost didn't slow down. He aimed the Harley at the parking lot and hit the gravel at speed, skidding to a stop that threw a wave of dirt toward the nearest gunman. Striker and Ridge flanked left. Shadow and Rascal flanked right. Hatchet brought the truck in behind, blocking the parking lot exit.
"Off," Milepost barked, and Nina was already swinging her leg over, already moving toward the building because the storage room was behind the bar and the bar was inside and inside was where her gear was.
The gunfire started before her boots hit the ground.
Decker's men opened up from the roadhouse entrance—wild, panicked shots from men who'd expected to burn things in peace and were now facing six armed bikers who'd arrived with murder in their eyes.
Striker returned fire from behind the first bike, controlled and devastating.
Ridge dropped to a knee and put two rounds into the truck the gunmen were using for cover.
Nina ran.
Not toward the fight. Around it. Along the side of the building, past the burning stage—the heat hitting her like a wall, singeing her eyebrows, the roar of the flames drowning out the gunfire for one terrifying second—and toward the back door she'd used a hundred times to load in her gear before a set.
The door was unlocked. She shoved it open and plunged into the back hallway.
Smoke. Not thick yet—the fire was outside, the stage, not the building—but the air was hazy and bitter and her eyes watered immediately. She pulled her shirt over her nose and pushed deeper.
The storage room was at the end of the hall. A closet, really—eight by six, no window, a padlock she'd bought herself because Harlan's lock was a joke. She spun the combination with shaking fingers, yanked it open, and there they were.
The amp. The backup guitar in its gig bag. The mic in its foam-lined case.
All of it. Still here. Still hers.
She grabbed the guitar first—slung it across her back the way she'd carried her main guitar out of the burning motel. Then the mic case, tucked under her arm. Then the amp.
The amp weighed fifty pounds. Her left hand couldn't grip the handle—the brace made it impossible. She hooked her right hand through the strap and dragged it off the shelf, and it hit the floor with a thud that shook her teeth.
Drag. That was the only option. Fifty pounds of Fender amplifier across a concrete floor, down a smoky hallway, out the back door.
She dragged.
The amp scraped and stuttered across the concrete, catching on every crack, the cord trailing behind like an umbilical. Smoke thickened as she reached the hallway—the fire was spreading now, licking at the exterior wall near the stage, heat pushing through the drywall.
Ten feet to the door. The guitar bounced against her back. The mic case slipped under her arm and she clamped it tighter.
Five feet.
The wall beside her groaned. Something structural shifting, wood cracking, the building starting to feel the fire's weight.
She hit the back door shoulder-first and burst into the night.
Clean air. Stars. The sound of gunfire from the front parking lot, sharper now, more controlled—the brothers winning, pushing Decker's men back.
Nina dragged the amp around the corner of the building, away from the fire, away from the fight, until she reached the edge of the parking lot where Harlan's truck sat idling.
The old man stared at her. At the guitar on her back, the mic case under her arm, the amp she was hauling through the dirt with one hand and pure stubbornness.
"Help me lift this into your truck bed," she said.
He moved. Set the shotgun down and helped her hoist the amp over the tailgate. The guitar and mic case went next, laid carefully on the truck bed liner.
Her gear. Salvaged. Safe.
The gunfire stopped.
Nina turned toward the front of the roadhouse. The smoke was thicker now, the stage fully consumed, embers spiraling into the sky. Through the haze she could see shapes—brothers, standing, moving. The fight was over.
But Decker wasn't among the bodies.
She heard it before she saw it—an engine, revving hard, tires screaming on asphalt.
A truck peeled out from behind the roadhouse and fishtailed onto the highway heading east, three men in the cab and Decker's lean silhouette behind the wheel.
Running. Retreating toward Oklahoma with the fire still burning behind him.
Milepost appeared through the smoke. Blood on his knuckles, fury on his face, eyes scanning the parking lot until they found her.
He crossed the distance in four strides. His hands went to her face, her shoulders, her arms—checking, cataloging, making sure she was whole.
"You went in the building."
"My gear was in there."
"The building was on fire."
"The hallway wasn't." She met his eyes. "And my gear is in Harlan's truck. The amp, the backup guitar, the mic. All of it."
His jaw worked. She could see him fighting it—the rage at her for running into danger, the pride at what she'd saved, the impossible tangle of loving a woman who would never, ever do the safe thing.
"Decker ran," he said.
"I saw."
"He went east. Highway."
Nina looked at the burning stage—at the skeleton of two-by-fours collapsing into the flames, the tin roof buckling, the strings of lights she'd hung herself melting into nothing. Two years of Saturday nights. The first place that had ever felt like her stage.
Gone.
But she was standing in the parking lot with smoke in her hair and her amp in a truck bed, and the man she loved was looking at her like she was insane and magnificent in equal measure.
"Go get him," she said.
Milepost's eyes went cold. The particular cold she'd seen before—at the motel, at the compound gate. The cold of a man who'd just been given permission to do what he was already going to do.
He kissed her. Hard, fast, tasting like smoke and gunpowder.
Then he turned toward his bike, and Nina stood in the burning light of the Red Dust Roadhouse, dragging her amp through the smoke toward the truck, watching him ride east into the dark.