9. Wendy
Wendy
The harsh glare of the single bulb over the milk crate illuminates the surveillance photos scattered across my mattress. Black-and-white glossies. Grainy prints. The terrifying, undeniable proof of a hunt I never even knew was happening.
A photo of me taking out the trash in the alley behind the shop. The date stamp is from last November.
A photo of me unlocking the front door of the Vinyl Vault. The angle is high. Taken from the roof of the pharmacy across the street. Date stamp: March.
A close-up of my face through the windshield of my car, stopped at the single traffic light on Main Street.
Bile rises hot and sour in my throat. I push the glossy prints away.
They slide off the edge of the mattress and hit the scuffed oak floor of the back room.
Seven months. The Tuesday Enforcer—Martino—has been watching me breathe for months.
He built a dossier on my existence. He tracked my habits, my hours, the way I tie my boots in the morning. He cataloged my life for the Syndicate.
A calloused hand lands on my shoulder.
Heat radiates from the touch, burning through my skin and settling in my chest. The scent of dark roast coffee and clean sweat wraps around me. Tyler.
"Stop looking at them." His voice is low in the quiet room.
"He took a picture of me buying oat milk at the bodega, Tyler." My voice shakes. I hate that it shakes. I clamp my jaw shut.
"Martino is gone." Tyler’s thumb strokes the curve of my neck. The gesture is grounding. An anchor dropped in the middle of a storm. "He’s currently answering to a very angry Syndicate lieutenant about twenty thousand dollars in missing extortion funds and an offshore account traced to his IP address. He’ll never walk down this street again. He’ll never look at you again."
I tilt my head back. Tyler stands over me, terrifying and mine.
The plain black t-shirt stretches across his broad chest. His dark eyes are focused.
He doesn't look like "Tom from Portland" right now.
He looks like the operative. The Broken Halos ghost. The man who dismantled a Syndicate threat at two in the morning with nothing but a burner laptop and a lethal devotion.
"You framed him for stealing from his own bosses."
"I signed his death warrant." Tyler corrects me. The lack of remorse in his tone sends a rush of heat straight to my core. "I just let the Syndicate pull the trigger. It keeps the heat off the shop."
"You did that in three hours."
"I would have done it in two, but the encryption on their central server was slightly less pathetic than I anticipated."
A fractured laugh escapes my lips. The sheer, terrifying competency of this man. I spent four years surviving in this rotting town by keeping my head down, shrinking my footprint, becoming part of the wallpaper. I paid the extortion money. I swallowed the bile. I survived by being invisible.
Tyler didn't make me invisible. He just quietly erased the man looking at me.
"Drink this." He hands me a mug. The ceramic is chipped. The coffee inside is black, hot, and smells like salvation.
I wrap both hands around the mug, letting the heat sink into my palms. The Ignition.
That fated, undeniable pull they talk about up north.
It isn't a fairy tale. It’s this. This violent gravity that clicked us together the second I grabbed his arm on the shop floor.
I claimed him as a cousin to save his cover. He claimed me as his world.
"We need to clean up the front," I murmur, staring into the dark liquid.
Tyler’s jaw tightens. The raid from Wally and the other goons yesterday left the main floor in chaos. Crates overturned. Decades of vintage vinyl spilled across the floor. A bureaucratic intimidation tactic to remind me who owns Crimson Hollow.
"I'll handle it. You stay back here."
"Not a chance." I stand up, shoving the coffee mug onto the milk crate beside the turntable. "If you touch that 1984 limited pressing of Prince with those meat-hook hands, I will end you."
A slow, devastating smirk tips the corner of his mouth. The danger in his eyes recedes, replaced by that dark, consuming heat reserved for me. "Yes, ma'am."
We push through the beaded curtain. The main floor of the Vinyl Vault is bathed in the weak, dusty morning light filtering through the front windows. The OPEN sign remains stubbornly flipped to CLOSED.
The damage is extensive, but not fatal. Cardboard boxes are ripped. Wooden crates are knocked off their stands. My mother’s life’s work, scattered like trash.
A sharp ache blooms behind my ribs. The jagged edge of grief.
Four years ago, the hospital room smelled of bleach and dying flowers.
The rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor drowned out everything else.
My mother’s hand was so thin, so frail, her skin like translucent parchment over brittle bones.
She gripped my fingers with the last ounce of her strength.
Don't let the music stop, Wendy.
That was her final breath. Her final command.
I took it literally. I took the keys to the shop and I bolted the doors to my own life.
I became the curator of her ghost. I anchored myself to the oak counter, to the smell of old paper sleeves and warm vinyl dust, to the oak floorboards.
I thought keeping the building open meant keeping her alive.
I thought if I abandoned Crimson Hollow, I was abandoning her.
I drop to my knees beside an overturned crate. The Beatles. The White Album. The sleeve is bent at the corner. I smooth my thumb over the crease.
Tyler kneels beside me. He doesn't offer hollow apologies.
He doesn't try to fix the unfixable. He just starts working.
His scarred hands—hands that have broken bones and forged federal documents—move with surprising care.
He slides a warped Fleetwood Mac album back into its protective plastic.
He stacks the records by decade, watching my face for cues.
"They want the property," Tyler says quietly, setting a stack of jazz records into a wooden crate. "The Syndicate is corporatizing. They aren't just extorting cash anymore. They're acquiring assets. Pushing out the civilian owners. Consolidating the block."
"Wally basically handed me a buyout contract wrapped in a threat." I slide a handful of soft rock albums into an empty cardboard box. "They want the Vault."
"They aren't getting the Vault." Tyler’s voice drops an octave, vibrating through the floorboards. "They aren't getting a single square inch of anything that belongs to you."
"Tyler." I stop sorting. I look at him. The broad shoulders.
The dark hair falling over his forehead.
The man who traded his identity, his real name, his freedom, to run covers for his MC brothers.
He was a ghost in Albuquerque. A ghost in Reno.
A ghost here, until I dragged him into the light. "You can't shoot a corporation."
"Watch me."
"I'm serious." I shift on the floorboards, crossing my legs. The dust motes dance in the shaft of sunlight between us. "You took out Martino. You framed him. That buys us time. But the lieutenant will send another collector. They’ll send another enforcer. They’ll keep coming because the system is designed to crush things like this shop. "
"Then I dismantle the system." Tyler leans forward.
He crowds my space, blocking the morning light, casting me in his shadow.
"I have access to their server. I have their routing numbers. I’ll bleed them dry digit by digit, and anyone who steps through that front door gets their spine snapped. End of list."
His devotion is a physical weight. It presses against my chest, demanding surrender. He’s ready to wage a one-man war in the middle of Crimson Hollow to keep my mother’s ghost alive.
But looking at him, surrounded by the scattered cardboard boxes and the ruined displays, a terrifying, liberating truth clicks into place.
I don't want to be a ghost anymore.
And I don't want him to be one either.
The bell above the front door chimes. A sharp, clear ring that shatters the quiet of the shop.
Tyler moves faster than humanly possible.
One second he’s kneeling next to me, the next he’s on his feet, his body positioned between me and the door, his right hand resting casually at the small of his back where the steel of his Glock sits against his spine.
His cover drops over his face. The blank, unreadable mask of "Tom. "
I peer around his solid waist.
A woman stands just inside the doorway. She isn't Syndicate. She doesn't have the slick, arrogant posture of a Crimson Hollow local. She wears a canvas jacket, worn denim, and boots laced tight. Her gaze is sharp, calculating, sweeping the room in a single glance before locking onto Tyler.
Tyler’s posture shifts. The tension bleeds out of his shoulders just a fraction. His hand drops away from his spine.
"Shop's closed," Tyler says. His voice is neutral.
The woman smiles. It doesn't reach her eyes, but it isn't hostile. She walks toward the counter, her boots steady on the oak floor. She carries a glass jar in her hands. The amber liquid inside catches the weak morning light, glowing like liquid gold.
"I can read a sign," she replies. Her voice is calm, grounded. The voice of a woman who knows what it means to stand on a contested perimeter. She steps up to the oak counter and sets the jar down with a soft thud.
I stand up, brushing the dust off my jeans, and step out from behind Tyler.
The woman’s gaze shifts to me. The sharpness softens. A silent understanding passes between us. She looks at the wrecked crates, the cardboard boxes, the mess of a life under siege. Then she looks at the lethal man standing guard over me.
"I'm Susan," she says quietly.
I know that name. I don't know how I know it, but the lore of the northern ridge seeps down into Crimson Hollow through whispers and rumors. The bee farm. The contested south trail. The woman who stood her ground until the MC sent a monster to hold the line for her.