Epilogue #4
"My partner's the reasonable one," he said. His grip tightened, fingers digging into the soft flesh above her wrist. "Me? I think you need a reminder of how serious we are."
He took the cigarette from his mouth.
Maggie saw it coming. Tried to twist free. His other hand clamped around her elbow, holding her still.
The cherry pressed into her forearm.
She didn't scream. Didn't give him that. But the sound that came out of her throat wasn't silence either—something between a gasp and a snarl, animal and furious. The pain was white-hot, searing, the smell of her own burning skin filling her nostrils.
He held it there for two seconds. Three.
Then he let go, and she stumbled backward into the screen door hard enough to rattle it on its hinges.
"Thirty days." He flicked the cigarette butt onto her gravel lot. "Clock's ticking."
They drove away.
Maggie stood in the doorway, arm cradled against her chest, watching the SUV's taillights disappear around the curve. The burn throbbed in time with her heartbeat—a perfect circle of ruined skin, already blistering.
She didn't cry.
Not when she locked the front door with shaking hands. Not when she checked the back door twice, then a third time. Not when she climbed the narrow stairs to the apartment above the restaurant, where her niece was asleep in the bedroom they shared.
Chloe was fourteen, all gangly limbs and headphones and the kind of stubborn streak that reminded Maggie too much of her sister.
She'd lost her mother to pills eighteen months ago, and she'd been angry about it ever since.
Angry at the world, angry at the aunt who'd taken her in, angry at everything except the music blasting through her earbuds.
Maggie stood in the doorway and watched her sleep. Chloe's face was soft in the darkness, younger than she looked when she was awake and armored against everything.
She closed the door without making a sound.
The bathroom mirror showed her what she already knew—the burn was ugly, the skin puckering around a wound the size of a dime.
She ran cold water over it until her arm went numb, then wrapped it in gauze she found under the sink.
The first aid kit was stocked for kitchen burns, grease splatter, the occasional knife slip. Not for this.
Not for men who showed up with forged papers and cigarettes they used as weapons.
Maggie made it to the kitchen table before her legs gave out.
The shaking started then. Deep tremors that rattled her teeth and made her hands useless. She pressed her palms flat against the table her mother had eaten breakfast at, the table where she'd done homework as a kid, and tried to breathe.
Thirty days.
They wanted her to believe her daddy had borrowed money against everything he'd built. Wanted her to sign away the land, the building, the legacy he'd left her. And if she didn't—
The burn pulsed under its bandage.
She thought about calling the sheriff. Dale Hendry had known her daddy for thirty years, had eaten brisket at this counter every Friday since before Maggie could remember. He'd help. He'd have to help.
But the wiry one had grabbed her on private property. No witnesses. Her word against his. And she'd seen what happened when poor folks tried to fight men with lawyers and paperwork. They lost everything and went broke doing it.
Take it to court. Hire a lawyer. Spend two, three years fighting it out.
They were counting on her being alone. Counting on her being scared. Counting on a single woman with a barbecue joint and a teenage niece to fold under pressure because that's what people like her did.
Maggie pressed her palms harder against the wood until her arms stopped shaking.
She wasn't going to fold.
She didn't know how to fight this yet. Didn't know who those men worked for or how deep this went. But she knew one thing with absolute certainty: her daddy had never signed those papers. Which meant someone had forged them. Which meant somewhere, somehow, there was a way to prove it.
Thirty days.
She had thirty days to figure out how to save everything that mattered.
The shaking came back, harder this time, and Maggie let it. Let her body do what it needed to do while her mind started working the problem. The burn throbbed under its gauze, a metronome counting down seconds she couldn't afford to waste.
Outside, the cicadas screamed into the darkness, and Maggie Reeves sat alone at her mother's table, planning a war she didn't know how to win.
Chapter Three
The screen door squeaked, and Maggie flinched.
Still caught it before she smoothed her expression—the flash of fear, the way her shoulders drew up toward her ears, the split-second calculation of distance to the kitchen. Then she saw it was him and something released in her posture, though not all the way.
Not nearly all the way.
"Tuesday again," she said. Her voice was steady, but the smile didn't land right.
Still took his usual seat without answering, scanning the restaurant on instinct. Four customers at the counter, two in a booth by the window. Nobody who set off alarms. But something was wrong here. Something had changed in three days.
Maggie reached for a glass, and he saw it.
White gauze wrapped around her forearm, taped neat but not professional. Kitchen burn would be on her hands, her wrists —grease splatter, oven rack, the places that made contact with heat. This was mid-forearm. Wrong spot. Wrong shape.
"What happened?"
She set the tea in front of him without meeting his eyes. "Nothing."
"Maggie."
The way he said her name made her still. Just for a second—a hitch in her movement, a breath she didn't quite take. Then she was reaching for the brisket plate like the conversation was over.
"It's handled."
"Show me."
Her jaw tightened. "You're not my daddy, Still."
"Didn't say I was." He kept his voice low, the words just for her.
"But you flinched when I walked in. You've got gauze on your arm in the wrong place for a cooking accident.
And you look like you haven't slept in three days.
" He held her gaze until she stopped pretending to arrange his silverware. "Something happened. Tell me what."
The lunch counter wasn't private. Four strangers within earshot, more coming through the door any minute. But Maggie looked at him like she was weighing something—his cut, his club, what it meant to tell a Ridgerunner that someone had put hands on her.
She unwrapped the gauze.
The burn was ugly. Circular, blistered at the edges, the kind of wound that came from something held in place. Deliberate. The size of a cigarette cherry.
Still's vision went red at the edges.
"Who." Not a question. A demand.
"Two men. Three nights ago." Maggie's voice was flat now, reciting facts like she'd been practicing. "They were waiting by my truck when I closed up. Had paperwork claiming my daddy took out a loan against the property. Sixty thousand dollars. Said I had thirty days to pay or sign over the deed."
"Your daddy never borrowed money."
"I know that. They don't care." She rewrapped the gauze with steady hands, though Still could see the fine tremor underneath. "The big one did the talking. The smaller one—" Her jaw worked. "He wanted to make sure I took them seriously."
The red at the edges of Still's vision was spreading.
Someone had walked onto his territory. Put hands on a woman. Burned her like she was property to be marked. Three days ago, while he was handling marina payments and riding back roads, some piece of shit had pressed a cigarette into Maggie Reeves's arm and walked away breathing.
"Names."
"They didn't introduce themselves."
"Describe them."
Maggie's eyes flicked to the customers at the counter, then back to him. "The big one was maybe six-two, soft gut, expensive boots. Talked like a salesman. The other one was wiry, mean-looking. Smoker. Yellow teeth."
"Vehicle?"
"Black SUV. Out-of-state plates, but I didn't catch the number." She picked up his tea glass, set it down again, her hands needing something to do. "I thought about calling Dale Hendry. But it's my word against theirs, no witnesses, and they've got paperwork that looks real even if it isn't."
Still was already fitting pieces together. Land scheme. Forged documents. Muscle that burned women to make a point. This wasn't some local tweaker trying to shake down a barbecue joint—this was organized. Calculated. The kind of operation that had money behind it and didn't care who got hurt.
"This isn't just about you," he said.
Maggie's eyes sharpened. "What do you mean?"
"Your property sits on the 54 corridor. So does the Hendricks marina.
So do a dozen other family businesses between here and the lake.
" Still's mind was working it now, seeing the pattern.
"Someone's buying up land. Probably got a developer waiting in the wings, ready to turn these back roads into strip malls and hotel lots. Your daddy's place is in the way."
"So they forge documents and threaten people until they sign."
"That's the play." Still pushed back from the counter, leaving his tea untouched. "How many other places on this corridor have sold in the last year?"
"I don't—" Maggie stopped. Thought about it. "The Tillman orchard. The old feed store on Route 7. That fishing camp that had been closed for years." Her face paled. "I thought those were just... people moving on."
"They weren't."
Maggie braced her hands on the counter, processing. Still watched her work through it—not crumbling, not panicking, just thinking. Weighing the information against what she knew.
"You're saying these men have done this before."
"I'm saying they're going to do it again. Every small property owner on this corridor is a target. Your daddy's place is just the one they hit first."
"Because I'm alone." Her voice was bitter. "Single woman, no family except a teenage niece. Easy mark."