6. Priest
SIX
PRIEST
I brought her back to the compound and Angel called church within the hour.
Full table. Every brother. The room was heavy timber and low light and the faces around it carried the focus of men who’d been briefed before bad things happened.
Angel at the head. Ghost to his left. Hawk at his right.
Duke, Doc, Rook, Razor. Me. Eight men who’d served in places where the briefing was the last calm thing before the storm.
Rook laid out what he had. The crew that hit the flower shop was hired muscle out of Boise. Three, maybe four men. They’d come once and missed. They’d come again because the job wasn’t finished and the money was already spent.
Angel was mid-sentence when Mia appeared in the doorway.
Church was members only. Always had been. No exceptions, no guests, no old ladies. Angel looked at her, and for a second I expected him to tell her to wait in the common room.
He didn’t. He pulled a chair from the wall and set it at the end of the table.
“Sit down,” he said.
She sat. She looked at the faces around the table, the cuts, the ink, the particular weight of eight men who’d been planning operations since before she was old enough to vote.
“I want to be there,” she said. “When they come. I want to be in the shop.”
Silence.
“If they see me, they’ll come,” she said.
“That’s the whole point. They’ve been sent to find me and finish the job.
If I’m visible, if I’m behind the counter doing what I always do, they won’t be able to resist. I’m the draw.
Without me, you’re just sitting in an empty building hoping they show up. ”
“She’s got a point,” Hawk said.
“No.” I said it before I’d decided to say it. “Absolutely not.”
Mia looked at me. “This isn’t your decision.”
“You’re talking about standing in a room and waiting for armed men to walk through the door.”
“I’m talking about being done hiding. I’ve been hiding since the Marshals dropped me here. I hid behind a fake name and a fake life and a handler who sold me out, and I’m finished. If they’re coming for me, I want to be standing in my own shop when they get there.”
Angel let the silence hold. He looked at me. He saw what I was feeling and he didn’t dismiss it, but he didn’t let it override the operational logic either.
“She’s right,” Angel said. “Without her, there’s no draw. We control the environment. We control the timing. Every exit, every sightline, every position. She’s behind the counter. We’re everywhere else. The risk is managed.”
“I don’t have to be happy about this,” I said.
“No,” Angel said. “You don’t. But we build the plan around her.”
The club had arranged to have the windows fixed while she was at the compound. New glass, clean frames, the shopfront restored as if nothing had happened. That was what the Angels did. They protected the town, and a flower shop on Main Street with broken windows was their problem.
We set up at dawn. Brothers came in through the back door one at a time, bikes stashed behind the building where they couldn’t be seen from the street.
Each man found a position and disappeared into it.
Ghost took the storeroom, which had a sightline to the front through a gap in the shelving.
Hawk and Duke covered the approaches from the back hallway.
Razor was behind the display cooler, coiled, radiating the energy he carried before an operation.
Doc was upstairs at the apartment window with eyes on Main Street.
Rook was in a truck half a block down, outside backup in case things went sideways.
Angel was in the back workroom, running the whole thing as he’d run a hundred operations.
I was in the back room. Three steps from the shop floor. Close enough to hear every word. Close enough to be through the door before anyone finished a sentence.
We all wore earpieces. Angel’s voice, calm and low, confirming positions.
Mia walked out the front door at ten in the morning and started arranging the flower buckets on the sidewalk.
Through the window in the back room door, she was visible.
She moved the buckets into position with the practiced ease of a woman who’d done this a thousand mornings, adjusting stems, tilting the displays toward foot traffic. She looked exactly like what she was. A florist opening for business in a small Montana town.
But her hands were shaking. The tremor was visible from fifteen feet away, her grip on the bucket rims a fraction too tight. She was terrified and she was doing it anyway, and the combination put an ache in my chest that I couldn’t breathe around.
She came back inside. Took her position behind the counter. The bell rang as the door closed behind her.
“I think someone was watching me,” she said. She was addressing the room, the earpieces, the men concealed around her. Her voice was steady but her eyes were moving. “Across the street. A car I didn’t recognize.”
Rook’s voice came through the earpiece. Calm, clipped. “Confirmed. Dark sedan, Idaho plates, three occupants. They’re moving. ETA two minutes.”
Angel’s voice. “Positions. We’ve got company.”
The shop held its breath. Flowers in their buckets. The cooler humming. The whole place catching the morning light. A perfect reproduction of normalcy with armed bikers behind it.
I put my hand on the Sig at my hip and waited.
I heard the car doors before the bell. Several sets of boots on the sidewalk, unhurried, the pace of men who’d done this work before and expected it to be simple. One woman alone in a flower shop. Walk in, finish the job, walk out.
The bell rang.
Three men. The one in front was tall with a shaved head and a jaw that had been broken and reset crooked. The two behind him were broader, younger, hired weight. All three wore jackets despite the warm morning, the shape at their waistbands obvious to anyone who knew what to look for.
Mia was behind the counter. Standing. Hands flat on the surface, back straight. She looked at them the way she’d looked at every customer who’d ever walked through her door.
The tall one looked around the shop. His eyes moved over the flowers, the cooler, the ceiling. They stopped on the front windows.
“New glass,” he said. Smiled. “Looks good. Be a shame to have to replace it twice.”
“Can I help you with something?” Mia said.
He turned his full attention to her. The smile stayed but the eyes behind it were flat, professional, the eyes of a man sizing up a job.
“You’re a hard woman to put in the ground, Mia. Marco’s tired of waiting.”
The sound of her real name in this man’s mouth made my jaw lock.
“I know exactly what I cost Marco,” she said. “Twenty years to life in a cell. And he couldn’t get what he needed done with a compromised Marshal and a hundred thousand dollars. So he sent you. He must be desperate.”
The smile vanished. His jaw tightened and his right hand drifted to his waistband, fingers brushing the grip of whatever he was carrying. The two behind him read his body language and shifted their weight, hands moving, the room tipping toward the edge.
I came through the door.
No rush. Deliberate. I positioned myself behind Mia and to her right, close enough that she could feel me, close enough that every man in the room could see my hand on the Sig.
The tall one’s eyes locked onto me. The cut. The gun. My stance, weight forward, balanced, a man who’d spent six years doing bad things to bad people and didn’t have to think about what came next.
His hand hovered at his waistband. Calculating.
“Don’t,” I said. Calm. “You won’t clear the holster before I put you on the floor. And even if you got past me, you won’t get past my brothers.”
His eyes narrowed. “What brothers?”
Ghost materialized from the storeroom doorway. One second empty, the next occupied. Pale eyes, flat expression, a shotgun held low against his thigh.
Hawk stepped out of the back hallway to my left. Razor came around the display cooler to my right, and the energy rolling off him made the air feel dense.
Duke appeared at the front door, blocking the exit. He’d come around from outside. His arms were folded and his expression was a pleasant mask that promised nothing good.
Angel stepped out of the back workroom. Last. The president. The man who ran everything, and the authority in his face made it clear this wasn’t a confrontation. It was a conclusion.
Eight men. All ex-military. All armed. All standing in a room they’d designed for this moment, on ground they owned, in a town they’d bleed for. Against three hired guns from Boise who’d walked into the wrong place and the wrong time.
The tall one’s hand moved away from his waistband. His jaw worked. The two behind him had gone white, eyes moving from face to face around the room, counting the guns, counting the exits, finding nothing.
“Hands up,” Angel said. “Slowly. Fingers spread. Anybody touches a weapon and this goes a different way.”
Two of them complied. Hands up, palms out, the posture of men who understood they’d lost.
The tall one hesitated. He was looking at Mia. The expression on his face was ugly, resentful, the look of a man who’d been paid to kill a woman and was furious that the opportunity had been taken from him.
“Marco said to make sure you felt it,” he said to her. “Said you deserved to know it was coming.”
The red mist came up through my body like a wave breaking.
I didn’t decide. The decision happened somewhere below thought, below training, in the place where everything fused into a single white-hot point. I was behind the counter and then I was across the room and my fist connected with his jaw with every pound of force my frame could generate.
He came off his feet. His boots left the floor and he hit the hardwood on his back and the impact rattled the flower buckets against the wall.
I grabbed him by the front of his jacket before he could process what had happened and hauled him up and hit him again, a short, vicious hook that snapped his head sideways and sprayed blood across the floor.