Chapter 16
The row house on Friendship Avenue sat dark between two occupied homes, curtains drawn, a light in the basement window that flickered like something burning. Fitting, for a man who made fire his signature.
Pitt crouched behind a parked car across the street, studying the building with the patience of a man who'd learned that rushing got people killed.
Eleven-forty at night, residential block, Bloomfield.
Quiet enough to hear the river fog settling on the rooftops.
Three of Victor's remaining muscle inside with Craig Burch—Parkway had confirmed the count an hour ago from a vantage point on the next block.
Four men. Three Outlaws going through the front, two through the back. Math that worked.
"Gibbet, you and Ash take the rear," Pitt said, his voice barely above a breath. "Back door's wood frame—one kick. Clear the kitchen and the basement stairs. Craig likes to work below ground."
Gibbet nodded once. Ash was already moving, that manic energy compressed into something quiet and lethal.
"Parkway, hold the street. Anyone comes out a window or tries to run, they don't make the sidewalk."
"Copy." Parkway melted into the shadow of a delivery van twenty yards east, positioning himself with sight lines on both sides of the building.
Pitt checked his weapon. Full magazine, round chambered, spare in his back pocket.
The Glock felt like an extension of his hand—familiar, weighted, purposeful.
He didn't enjoy killing. He'd never enjoyed it, not in Fallujah and not on Pittsburgh streets.
But he was good at it, and tonight good was what Craig Burch had earned.
He thought about Maggie. She was in the truck two blocks south, parked on a dark side street with the engine off and the doors locked, exactly where he'd put her.
She'd argued—of course she'd argued, because Maggie Kowalski had never met a boundary she didn't test—but she'd stayed.
Not because he'd ordered it. Because she'd looked at his face and seen something that made her nod once and say come back.
Come back. Like it was simple. Like a man could walk into a house full of armed men and promise to walk out again because a woman with green eyes and a stubborn jaw told him to.
He was going to come back. That wasn't negotiable anymore.
"In position," Gibbet's voice, barely audible through the earpiece.
"On my go," Pitt said. He stood from behind the car, crossed the street in six long strides, and took the porch steps two at a time. Hollow was at his shoulder—always at his shoulder, the VP who'd been first through every door since the day they'd patched in together.
Shiv flanked left, silent as smoke, blade already in his hand because Shiv always preferred the knife and tonight Pitt wasn't going to argue with preference.
"Go," Pitt said.
He hit the front door with his boot—dead center, just below the knob—and the frame splintered inward with a crack that split the quiet street like a gunshot. He was through before the door finished swinging, weapon up, sweeping the front room.
Living room. Empty. Furniture shoved against the walls, the floor covered in drop cloths stained with things Pitt didn't examine.
A table against the far wall held a laptop and a printer and stacks of photographs that he caught in peripheral vision—images he'd look at later or never, depending on how strong his stomach was.
Movement in the hallway. A shape coming fast from the back of the house, gun up, and Pitt put two rounds into center mass before the man cleared the doorframe. The body dropped, weapon skittering across hardwood.
Behind him, Hollow surged past into the hall, and a second man appeared on the stairs—descending fast, firing blind, rounds punching holes in the plaster above Hollow's head.
Hollow returned fire without flinching, three shots climbing the staircase, and the shooter tumbled down the last four steps and didn't move.
The back door crashed open—Gibbet's boot—and the sound of a brief, ugly struggle came from the kitchen. A body hitting a wall. Something breaking. Then Gibbet's voice: "Kitchen clear. One down."
Three of Victor's muscle, handled in under fifteen seconds.
Which left Craig Burch.
"Basement," Pitt said.
The door was in the hallway—heavy, newer than the rest of the house, reinforced with a deadbolt that someone had installed with professional care. The kind of door a man put on a room he didn't want anyone walking into uninvited.
Pitt kicked it open anyway.
The stairs dropped into a basement lit by work lamps—harsh white light bouncing off concrete walls and a floor that had been covered in plastic sheeting.
A workbench ran along one wall, covered in tools that had nothing to do with construction.
Containers of accelerant lined the opposite wall, labeled and organized with the care of a man who took pride in his materials.
Craig Burch stood in the center of the room.
Six feet, wiry, burn scars running up both forearms like sleeves made of ruined skin.
He had a gun in his right hand and a phone in his left—photographing, even now, documenting the moment because that's what Craig did.
He documented suffering. He archived it.
He kept it organized and labeled and filed away like trophies.
"Put it down, Craig." Pitt descended the stairs with his weapon aimed at Craig's chest, Hollow and Shiv spreading to either side behind him.
Craig's eyes were flat. Not scared—calculating. The eyes of a man who'd been in bad situations before and survived through cruelty and timing.
"Pitt." Craig said the name like he'd been expecting it. "Victor said you'd come."
"Victor was right."
"He also said to tell you that the bar was personal. The woman disrespected him. In his territory, that has consequences."
Pitt's finger found the trigger. Not the guard—the trigger. "His territory."
"Twenty years," Craig said. "Twenty years running the South Side while you played soldier overseas. That neighborhood belongs to Victor. The bar belonged to Victor. The woman—"
"Finish that sentence."
Craig smiled. The smile of a man who enjoyed provoking pain because he'd built his entire identity around it. "The woman belongs to—"
Pitt shot him in the knee.
Craig screamed—high, sharp, the sound of a man who'd spent years delivering agony suddenly receiving it. He crumpled sideways, hitting the workbench, his gun dropping, his phone shattering on the concrete floor. His hands went to his ruined knee, blood pumping between his fingers.
Pitt crossed the basement floor. Stood over him. Looked down at the man who'd burned Maggie's bar, her father's legacy, forty years of memories—and spray-painted a threat on the sidewalk like signing his work.
"You took pictures," Pitt said. Conversational. "Of the bar. While it burned."
Craig was gasping, rocking, tears cutting through the grime on his face. "It's what I—it's what I do—"
"I know what you do." Pitt crouched beside him.
Eye level. Close enough to see the individual scars on Craig's forearms, the puckered burn tissue he wore like medals.
"You burn things that belong to other people.
You destroy what they love and you take pictures of it because watching them lose everything makes you feel powerful. "
"Victor ordered—"
"Victor's next. But right now, I'm talking to you." Pitt pressed the barrel of his Glock against Craig's chest. Directly over the heart. "You burned her bar. You burned her father's memory. You spray-painted a threat on the sidewalk outside the place she grew up."
Craig's eyes went wide. The calculation was gone—nothing left but the animal understanding of a man who'd just realized he was finished.
"She wanted to be here," Pitt said. "She wanted to watch.
I told her no, because some things shouldn't follow a person into their sleep.
But I want you to know—the woman whose life you tried to destroy is two blocks from here, waiting for me to come back to her. And I'm going to. Because you're not."
He fired three times. Close range, tight grouping, the way he'd done it with Raymond Hask at the warehouse. Craig Burch jerked with each impact, then went still. His eyes stayed open—flat, empty, staring at the work lamps with an expression of permanent surprise.
Pitt stood. His ears rang. The basement smelled like cordite and accelerant and the particular chemical odor of a room where terrible things had been planned.
"His files," Pitt said to Hollow. "The laptop. The photographs. Everything. Take it."
"And the body?"
Pitt looked at the containers of accelerant lining the wall. Craig's own supply, organized and labeled with the precision of a craftsman.
"Ash," he said.
Ash appeared at the top of the stairs, already grinning because he could smell the accelerant from the hallway and knew exactly what was coming. "Prez?"
"Use his own stuff. Make it thorough."
"My pleasure."
They cleared the house in four minutes. Pitt carried the laptop personally, tucked under his arm, evidence of Victor's operation that would help them plan the final move.
Hollow hauled two boxes of files. Gibbet dragged the bodies of Victor's muscle to the basement because there was no point in leaving a mess on the first floor when the whole building was coming down.
Outside, the Bloomfield street was still quiet.
No sirens yet—the neighbors in these row houses had learned long ago that curiosity after midnight led to conversations nobody wanted to have.
Pitt gathered his brothers on the sidewalk while Ash worked inside, the sharp smell of diesel and accelerant drifting through the open front door.
"Casualties?" Pitt asked.
"Zero on our side," Parkway reported. "Shiv took a graze on his shoulder. He says it's nothing."
"It is nothing," Shiv said from the shadows, pressing a wadded bandana against his left shoulder with the irritated expression of a man who considered a bullet graze a personal insult.
"Craig's three muscle are done," Gibbet added. "Plus Craig. That puts Victor at—what? Three, maybe four soldiers left? Plus whatever hired guns he can scrape together."
"He's exposed," Hollow said. "Danny's dead. Hask is dead. Craig's dead. His entire command structure is gone. He's alone."
Pitt nodded. The math was becoming simple.
Victor Petrak had started this war with fifteen soldiers, three lieutenants, and twenty years of unchallenged power.
Now he had a handful of muscle and the dawning realization that everything he'd built was being dismantled by men who were better at violence than he'd ever been.
Ash came out the front door, jogging, the cheerful urgency of a man who'd just set a timer on something volatile. "Sixty seconds. We should move."
They mounted up. Pitt straddled his Road King and felt the engine catch, the rumble vibrating through his bones, grounding him in the present. Alive. Unhurt. Mission accomplished. One more name off the list, one step closer to the end of this.
They were three blocks away when the row house went up—a deep whump followed by the crack of windows blowing out, orange light blooming in Pitt's mirrors like a second sunrise.
Craig Burch's workshop, destroyed with his own tools.
Poetic, if you were the kind of man who appreciated poetry.
Pitt wasn't, but he appreciated symmetry.
The ride back to the compound took twelve minutes.
Pitt parked the truck first—Maggie's truck, the one she'd been sitting in—and she was out the door before his boots hit the ground.
Her face was pale in the security lights, her eyes searching his body for damage the way she always did now, cataloging and confirming.
"Done?" she asked.
"Done."
She stepped into him. Her arms went around his waist, her face pressed against his chest, and he wrapped himself around her with both arms and held on. She smelled like the truck's interior—stale air and anxiety—and underneath that, like herself. Like home.
"He's gone," Pitt said into her hair. "The man who burned your bar is gone."
She nodded against his chest. Didn't speak. Her hands gripped the back of his cut with a force that said everything her voice didn't.
Around them, brothers parked and dismounted, the controlled energy of a successful operation settling into the quieter hum of men coming down from combat.
Hollow slapped Pitt's shoulder as he passed—no words needed.
Gibbet carried the boxes of files toward the clubhouse.
Ash was already telling someone about the explosion with the enthusiasm of a man describing his favorite painting.
Pitt pulled back enough to see Maggie's face.
Her eyes were dry. Set. The grief was there—he could see it underneath, the loss of her bar still burning through her like a slow fire—but over it was something harder.
Determination. Purpose. The look of a woman who was done being a target and ready to be part of the strike.
"Victor," she said.
"Soon."
"How soon?"
"Days. We've got his files, his laptop, his operation laid bare. When we move, it's the last move."
She pulled him down by his cut and kissed him—hard, fierce, a claiming of her own that had nothing tender in it and everything possessive. When she broke away, her eyes were blazing.
"Good," she said. "End it."