Chapter 15
The phone rang at three-fourteen in the morning, and Maggie knew before she opened her eyes.
Not what—not specifically. But the weight of it, the shape of it, the way Pitt's body went rigid beside her before he even reached for the phone.
She'd learned to read him in the dark the way she'd learned to read a bar full of strangers—by feel, by instinct, by the electricity that changed in the air when something shifted from normal to wrong.
"Talk to me," Pitt said into the phone. Then nothing. Just listening, his free hand finding Maggie's hip under the sheet and gripping hard enough that she knew whatever he was hearing was bad.
He hung up. Sat on the edge of the bed. Didn't move for five seconds—an eternity for a man who never stopped moving.
"Get dressed," he said. "We need to go."
"What happened?"
He turned his head. In the dark, she could only see the outline of him—massive shoulders, the line of his jaw, the glint of his dog tags.
"Maggie. Get dressed."
She drove with him. Not the bike—he took a truck from the compound garage, pushing it through the empty South Side streets with a controlled speed that scared her more than recklessness would have.
Reckless she could handle. Control in the face of something this bad meant he was holding himself together with both hands.
She smelled it before she saw it. Smoke—thick, chemical, the kind that coated the back of your throat and sat in your lungs like wet concrete. Then the glow, orange and sick against the low clouds. Then the flashing lights of two fire trucks that had arrived too late to matter.
Kowalski's Corner was burning.
Not burning—burned. The structure was already collapsing inward, the roof gone, flames chewing through what was left of the walls with the lazy confidence of a fire that had won and knew it.
The front window—the one Pitt's brothers had boarded after Danny went through it—was a rectangle of pure orange light.
The sign her father had hung thirty years ago was melting, green and white neon dripping down the brick like tears.
Pitt parked the truck across the street. Maggie was out the door before he killed the engine, crossing the sidewalk toward the heat, and his arm caught her around the waist before she got within thirty feet.
"Don't." His voice in her ear, rough and low. "There's nothing to save."
She stopped fighting. Not because he was right—because her legs had stopped working.
She stood on the sidewalk across from the place where she'd grown up, where she'd poured her first drink and learned her father's laugh and spent eighteen-hour days clawing back from bankruptcy because giving up wasn't something Kowalskis did, and she watched it die.
The fire ate methodically. Room by room, memory by memory.
The bar where her dad held court for three decades.
The back office where she'd done the books every Sunday night.
The kitchen where she'd learned to make pierogies from her grandmother's recipe at eight years old.
The spot by the register where she'd stood the night Danny Strok walked in and started all of this.
Gone. All of it. Reduced to smoke and ember and the hiss of water hitting surfaces too hot to save.
Neighbors appeared on stoops and porches—robes and slippers, faces lit orange, watching with the helpless anger of people who'd seen too much destruction to be surprised but not enough to stop caring.
An old woman three doors down crossed herself.
A man Maggie recognized as a Tuesday regular stood on his porch with his hands in his pockets and tears on his face.
Pitt's arm stayed around her waist. Solid, warm, the only thing holding her vertical.
"Craig Burch," Parkway said, materializing from the shadows beside the truck. He must have beaten them here—his bike was parked at the end of the block, engine still ticking. "Ash confirmed it. Accelerant on all four walls, timed ignition. Professional job. And he left a calling card."
"Show me," Pitt said.
Parkway led them around the fire trucks to the far side of the building—what was left of it—where the sidewalk met the alley. Spray-painted on the concrete in letters two feet high, still wet:
YOUR TURN NEXT
Maggie stared at the words. The heat from the building pressed against her face, drying her eyes, and she was grateful for it because it meant she couldn't tell if the burning was from fire or from something else.
"Craig Burch," she said. The name sat in her mouth like something rotten. "The one with the burn scars. The one who takes pictures."
Parkway glanced at Pitt, then back at her. "You know him?"
"I know about him. Danny mentioned him once—said Victor had a specialist for when he wanted someone to really suffer." She looked at the spray paint. "This is suffering."
Pitt's hand moved from her waist to the back of her neck, fingers curling into her hair, pulling her gently against his side.
A possessive gesture, a protective one, a claiming that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a man drawing a line around what was his and daring the world to cross it.
"We'll find him," Pitt said. Not to her—to Parkway. But for her.
"Already working on it. Shiv picked up his trail heading north toward Bloomfield. He's got a place up there—row house on Friendship Avenue that he uses as a workshop."
"Workshop." Maggie heard the word and felt her stomach turn. A workshop for a man who burned things and took photographs.
More bikes arrived. Hollow, Gibbet, Ash—brothers pulling up in ones and twos, parking at the end of the block, walking toward the fire with faces that ranged from furious to murderous. They gathered around Pitt like satellites, a wall of leather and intent between Maggie and the burning building.
"Insurance?" Hollow asked, and Maggie almost laughed at the normalcy of it.
"My father let it lapse two years before he died," she said. "I got it reinstated, but the coverage is—" She stopped. Swallowed. "It doesn't matter. The coverage doesn't rebuild what that place was."
"No," Hollow agreed quietly. "It doesn't."
Ash crouched by the spray paint, studying it with the focused intensity of a man reading a signature. "Craig uses a specific accelerant mix. Heavy on the diesel, light on the gasoline, with an additive I can smell from here. He's proud of his formula. Uses it like a calling card."
"Can you track the supplier?" Pitt asked.
"Don't need to. I know where he gets it." Ash stood, wiping his hands on his jeans. "Same industrial supply on the Strip that half the contractors in Pittsburgh use. He buys in bulk under a fake company name. I can have the purchase records by morning."
"Don't need records," Pitt said. "We know where he is. Parkway just told us."
"Prez." Gibbet's voice, low and final. "Say the word."
Pitt looked down at Maggie. His hand was still on her neck, his thumb moving against the skin behind her ear in slow, steady strokes that were either meant to comfort her or to keep himself from losing control. Maybe both.
"Maggie," he said. "What do you want?"
She looked at the fire. At the spray paint. At the men standing around her in a semicircle, waiting, ready, every one of them prepared to ride the second their president gave the order.
"I want to be there," she said. "When you find him."
Silence. Hollow shifted his weight. Gibbet's expression didn't change, which meant he was processing. Ash raised an eyebrow.
Pitt's jaw worked. She watched the conflict play out in the tension of his neck, the tightening of his fingers on her skin—the president who wanted to protect her warring with the man who'd just promised to stop deciding what she deserved.
"You stay in the vehicle," he said finally. "You don't go inside. You don't see what happens."
"But I'm there."
"You're there."
She turned back to the fire. The roof collapsed inward with a groan that sounded almost human, sending a column of sparks spiraling into the black sky.
The firefighters adjusted their hoses, but it was mop-up now.
The building was gone. Kowalski's Corner—forty years of history, three generations of stubbornness, her father's legacy and her mother's memory and every early morning she'd spent behind that bar telling herself it would be okay—was gone.
She didn't cry. Not here, not in front of the brothers, not on the street where her neighbors could see. She filed the grief in the same place she'd filed every loss since her father died—deep, locked, dealt with later in private or not at all.
What she felt instead was clarity. Cold, hard, absolute.
Pitt's arm tightened around her. He pressed his mouth against her temple—not a kiss, a seal. A promise written in contact.
"Tomorrow night," he said against her skin. "Craig Burch."
Maggie leaned into him. Let his body take her weight. Watched the fire consume the last standing wall of her father's bar, and felt something inside her shift from grief to purpose with a click she could almost hear.
"Tomorrow night," she agreed.
The wall fell. Sparks flew. The brothers stood in the heat and the smoke, silent, waiting for their president to tell them where to point the fury.
Pitt looked at them over Maggie's head. Two words, quiet enough that only the men closest heard it, but it carried the weight of everything the Outlaws were built for.
"Church. Dawn."