Chapter 7
Pitt heard them before he saw them.
Boots on pavement. Multiple sets, trying to be quiet and failing, because men who relied on intimidation for a living never learned to move soft.
He was out of the chair and across the apartment in two seconds, pressing his back against the wall beside the window, angling his head just enough to see the alley below.
Eight men. Armed. Danny Strok at the front with a shotgun he held like a baseball bat—wrong hand on the pump, elbow flared out, amateur hour. But eight bodies with guns in a narrow alley at three in the morning was a math problem that didn't care about technique.
"Maggie." He kept his voice low, flat. "Get off the couch. Get on the floor behind the kitchen counter. Now."
She didn't ask why. She rolled off the couch and crawled behind the counter without a word, and something in his chest clenched at the sight of it—not fear in her movements, just compliance, trusting him enough to move first and question later.
He pulled his phone. One text to Gibbet: NOW.
Gibbet and Ash were in a car two blocks north, had been since midnight.
Pitt had called them in after Hollow's warning about the compromised neighborhood—not enough men for a real fortification, but enough for a surprise when Victor's crew came knocking.
And they'd come knocking, because Danny Strok was predictable in the way all men who ran on ego instead of brains were predictable.
"Stay down," Pitt said. "No matter what you hear."
"How many?" Maggie's voice was steady. Quiet, but steady.
"Eight."
"And there's one of you."
"For about three more minutes, there's one of me." He pulled the Glock from his waistband, checked the magazine—full, fifteen rounds—and chambered a round. "Then things get interesting."
The first hit came fast—a boot against the steel alley door downstairs, the bang echoing up the stairwell like a cannon shot.
Then another. The door was reinforced, Ash's work, but reinforced didn't mean invincible.
Pitt crossed to the apartment door and flipped the deadbolt, then shoved the couch lengthwise across the entryway.
Not a barricade—a speed bump. Something to buy seconds, and seconds were all he needed.
Another crash from below. The steel door groaned.
"Pitt." Maggie's head appeared above the counter. "There's a fire escape outside the bathroom window."
"I know."
"So we could—"
"We're not running." He positioned himself behind the couch, gun up, sighted on the apartment door. "Running's what they expect. Running means they chase us through streets they've already covered. We hold here, my brothers hit them from behind, and Danny Strok stops being a problem."
The steel door gave way with a shriek of torn metal. Boots pounded up the stairs—heavy, fast, no attempt at stealth anymore. Danny's voice floated up, barking orders that bounced off the narrow stairwell walls.
"Drag her out! Petrak wants the building standing, not the people in it!"
Pitt's finger found the trigger guard. Not the trigger—not yet. Wait for the door. Wait for the funnel.
The apartment door exploded inward, deadbolt tearing free of the frame, and the first man through caught Pitt's round in the shoulder.
He spun sideways, hit the wall, and the second man tripped over him.
Pitt put that one down with a shot to the thigh—not killing, controlling.
Narrowing the doorway with bodies, turning the entrance into a bottleneck that negated the numbers advantage.
Return fire punched through the doorframe, sheetrock dust filling the air. Pitt dropped behind the couch as bullets tore through the cushions above his head, stuffing exploding like dirty snow.
"Stay down!" he shouted toward the kitchen.
"I am down!" Maggie shouted back, and he could hear the fury in her voice even over the gunfire. Furious was good. Furious meant she wasn't freezing.
A third man came through the door, stepping over his fallen crew, and Pitt shot him in the knee from behind the couch. The man screamed and dropped, and the doorway was now effectively blocked—three bodies tangling the entrance, the men behind them shoving and cursing.
Pitt counted shots. Four spent, eleven remaining. Eight hostiles minus three down meant five standing, including Danny. The math was getting better, but not fast enough.
Glass shattered in the bathroom.
They were coming through the fire escape. The window he'd thought about as an exit was now a second entry point, and his position behind the couch was wrong for covering both doors.
He moved. Pushed off the floor, crossed the apartment in a crouch, and pressed his back against the wall between the bathroom and the kitchen. From here he could see both the front door and the bathroom hallway, but he was exposed—no cover, just angles and speed.
A body came through the bathroom door. Pitt fired twice—chest, chest—and the man dropped in the hallway without a sound.
Another shape behind him, climbing through the window, and Pitt put a round through the bathroom wall at center mass.
A grunt, a crash, the sound of someone falling back down the fire escape.
Six rounds left. Three hostiles down at the front door, two down at the bathroom. That left three standing, and one of them was Danny.
The front door cleared. The bodies were dragged aside, and two men came through fast and low—better tactics than the first wave, someone learning from the mistakes.
Pitt dropped the first with a headshot that painted the wall behind him.
The second got two rounds off before Pitt's bullet took him in the throat.
Silence. Heavy, ringing, dust-choked silence.
Two rounds left in the magazine.
Then Danny Strok stepped through the doorway.
He'd ditched the shotgun somewhere—probably jammed it, the idiot—and had a pistol in his good hand, the bandaged one hanging at his side.
His face was a mask of blood and fury, cut by shrapnel or debris, eyes wild in the way eyes got when a man realized he was in over his head but couldn't find reverse.
"Just you," Danny snarled. "Victor's gonna—"
The alley door downstairs blew open again, and this time the boots coming up the stairs were moving with a precision that made Danny's crew sound like a marching band.
Gibbet came through the apartment door like a freight train—six-three, two-forty, face showing absolutely nothing—and hit Danny from behind with an impact that drove both men into the far wall.
The plaster cracked. Danny's gun skittered across the floor.
Ash came through three seconds later, compact and crackling with energy, sweeping the room with his weapon before flashing Pitt a grin that was entirely too cheerful for three in the morning in a shot-up apartment.
"Started without us," Ash said. "Rude."
Danny was on the floor with Gibbet's knee in his spine, making sounds that weren't quite words. Gibbet looked up at Pitt, waiting. Always waiting for the call, because that's what the Sergeant at Arms did—he handled the worst jobs, but only on the President's word.
Pitt walked over. Stood above Danny Strok, looking down at the man who'd grabbed Maggie's wrist hard enough to leave bruises. The man who'd put his fist through her father's mirror. The man who'd kicked down the door of a building where she was sleeping and told his crew to drag her out.
"Roll him over."
Gibbet flipped Danny onto his back. Danny's eyes were glazed, blood bubbling from a split lip, but he was conscious. Conscious enough to see Pitt crouching over him. Conscious enough to understand.
"Victor will—" Danny started.
"Victor's going to hear about this." Pitt's voice was conversational. Almost gentle. "He's going to hear that he sent eight men after one woman, and one woman's man sent them back in bags. And he's going to know that every time he sends someone, they don't come home."
Danny's eyes widened. "Wait—"
Pitt's hands found Danny's throat.
It wasn't quick. Pitt didn't want it quick. He wanted Danny Strok to feel every second, wanted those flat, cruel eyes to understand exactly why this was happening. Danny bucked, clawed at Pitt's wrists, kicked at nothing. Gibbet held his legs. Ash watched the door.
When it was over—when Danny's hands dropped and his eyes went glassy and the last sound he'd ever make rattled out between Pitt's fingers—the apartment went quiet again.
Pitt stood. His hands ached.
"Maggie." He didn't raise his voice. Didn't need to.
She appeared from behind the kitchen counter, standing slowly, eyes sweeping the destruction—bullet holes, blood, bodies, plaster dust hanging in the air like fog.
Her face was white but her jaw was set, and she stood straight with her shoulders back and her chin up, looking at the carnage without flinching.
Gibbet watched her. Ash watched her. Pitt watched them watching her.
"She good?" Gibbet asked. Two words, which for Gibbet was practically a speech.
"She's good," Pitt said, and crossed the room to her.
He stopped close. Too close for strangers, exactly right for whatever they were becoming. His hand came up to her face—blood on his knuckles, he saw it and didn't care—and his thumb brushed her cheekbone.
"You okay?"
"You just killed a man with your bare hands."
"Yeah."
"In front of me."
"Yeah."
She looked at his hands, then at the body, then back at his face. He waited for the horror. The revulsion. The moment she'd look at him and see a monster instead of a man.
"He was going to drag me out of here," she said.
"He was never going to touch you again."
Her hand came up and covered his where it rested against her face, pressing his palm harder against her cheek. Her fingers curled around his—the same fingers that had just squeezed the life out of Danny Strok—and held on.
Ash cleared his throat. "Hate to break up the moment, but we need to move. Neighbors heard the shots. Probably not calling cops in this neighborhood, but probably is a word I don't love."
Pitt stepped back from Maggie, but his hand dropped to hers and stayed there. "Strip the bodies for intel. Phones, wallets, anything useful. Gibbet, torch the apartment when we're clear—nothing left for Petrak to read."
"And her?" Ash nodded toward Maggie.
"She's with me." Pitt looked down at her, and something in his chest shifted into a gear he hadn't known he had. "She's coming to the compound."
"Full protection?" Gibbet asked.
"Full protection."
The words hung in the air with a weight that went beyond tactical designation.
Full protection meant club resources, brothers on rotation, the weight of the entire Steel City Outlaws behind one person.
It was a commitment that required a Church vote, technically, but not a single brother in this room was going to question it. Not after what they'd just seen.
Gibbet nodded. Ash grinned.
Maggie's hand tightened in his.
They cleared the apartment in six minutes—bodies searched, intel pocketed, Gibbet dousing the rooms with accelerant from a can Ash produced from the trunk of their car.
Pitt led Maggie down the narrow stairwell, stepping over the ruined steel door, and into the alley where his bike waited behind the dumpster.
The pre-dawn air hit them like cold water, sharp and clean after the cordite and blood of the apartment.
He handed her the helmet. She took it without hesitation this time—no debate, no smart remark, just the quick efficiency of a woman who'd made her decision and wasn't looking back.
Behind them, the second-floor windows bloomed orange.
"Get on," Pitt said.
Maggie swung onto the bike, her arms going around his waist before he'd even kicked the engine. Her grip was different now—not the desperate clinging of last night's chase, but something deliberate. Anchored. Like she'd chosen to hold on and meant it.
Pitt pulled out of the alley with Gibbet and Ash falling in behind, three bikes cutting through Lawrenceville toward the South Side, the burning safehouse shrinking in his mirrors. Danny Strok was dead. Victor Petrak had just lost his primary enforcer and eight soldiers in a single night.
The war was just starting.
Maggie's arms tightened around him as he leaned into the turn toward the compound, and Pitt covered her hands with one of his the way he had the first time—pressing them against his stomach, holding her against him, claiming the contact like it belonged to him.
It did.