Chapter 10 Vultures
The trouble started with a broken window.
Wren found it Monday morning, glass scattered across the front display of Hollow Creek Books, and spray-painted across the brick beside the door in ugly red letters: TELL YOUR OLD MAN TO BACK OFF OUR TERRITORY.
She called Cain before she called the police, which told her something about herself she didn't have the bandwidth to examine yet.
He arrived faster than should have been physically possible, an expression on his face she'd never seen before, something past anger into a kind of controlled, lethal focus.
"Are you hurt," was the first thing he said, hands on her shoulders, scanning her for injury before he even looked at the window.
"I wasn't here when it happened. I just found it this morning."
He read the message on the wall, and something in his jaw went tight and dangerous. "This is about the territory dispute. The Vultures' new president, Kellan Voss, he's been pushing into our supply routes for months. This isn't about you at all, and I am so sorry it landed on your doorstep anyway."
"How did they even know this was my shop? I haven't used your name in eight months."
"Somebody talked. Or somebody's been watching me closer than I realized, which is worse.
" His hands were still on her shoulders, and she found she wasn't pulling away.
"I'm putting a man on this shop. I know you don't want the club anywhere near your life.
I am not leaving you exposed because of a fight that's mine, not yours. "
Wren wanted to argue. She'd spent eight months building a life specifically outside the reach of the club.
But she looked at the broken glass, at the ugly red letters, at the shaken faces of Reyna and the morning's first customers, and some practical part of her recognized that principle was a luxury she couldn't currently afford.
"Fine," she said. "But I want to know what's actually happening. Not the sanitized version you used to give me. If this is going to touch my life again, I'm not doing it blind."
Something shifted in his expression, surprise and something that looked almost like relief. "Okay. All of it. I owe you that much and more."
He told her, standing on the sidewalk while Reyna called a glass repair company, about Voss's aggressive push into Reapers routes, about two other incidents of property damage at businesses that supported the club.
"I want it to be you," Wren said finally, surprising herself as much as him. "Watching the shop. I want to see if you can actually do this without me wondering what you're not telling me."
"Done," Cain said. "You won't be wondering. I promise you that."
Ellis, the prospect Diesel assigned to the first overnight watch, proved unexpectedly easy to have around, careful never to hover inside the shop itself, content to observe the street from a discreet distance.
Wren found herself, one slow evening, bringing him a cup of coffee where he sat in his truck across the street, an old habit reasserting itself before she'd fully decided to indulge it.
"You don't have to do that, ma'am," he said, surprised, accepting it anyway.
"You're sitting out here in the cold protecting my shop. Least I can do." She leaned against the truck door. "How long have you been prospecting?"
"Little over a year. Diesel says you used to be Cain's old lady. Says you two were the real thing, before everything fell apart."
"We were," Wren said, surprising herself with how easily the admission came now. "Working on becoming something again, maybe."
"For what it's worth," Ellis said carefully, "the club's different since you left.
Cain's different. I don't know you well enough to have an opinion on whether you should give him another shot.
Just wanted you to know, from somebody who's watched him up close, whatever he's building now looks real. "
She thanked him for the coffee and the honesty in equal measure, and carried the exchange with her through the rest of a quiet, watchful evening, one more small piece of outside evidence settling alongside everything else she'd witnessed firsthand.
Ellis arrived within the hour to take up the first watch, and Wren found herself, sweeping the last of the glass into a dustpan, unexpectedly steadied by the sight of a Reapers cut standing quiet guard across the street, an image that would have sent her running eight months earlier and now, strangely, felt like the first solid ground she'd stood on all day.
"You sure about this," Reyna asked quietly, watching Ellis settle into his truck.
"Letting them back into your life this deep, this fast, after everything. "
"I'm not sure about anything," Wren admitted. "But I'm done pretending certainty is a requirement for doing the smart thing. Right now the smart thing is not being alone with a threat I don't fully understand yet. Everything else, I'll figure out as I go."
Reyna didn't argue further, just squeezed her shoulder and went back to boarding up the broken window, and the two of them worked in companionable silence until the last board was nailed into place and the shop, battered but standing, was ready to face whatever came next.
That night, lying awake above the shop with Cain settled on the couch downstairs, Wren found herself running through the whole sequence of the day, the broken glass, his hands on her shoulders, the specific controlled fury in his voice when he'd read the message on the wall.
She'd spent eight months building a life specifically insulated from exactly this kind of danger, and now here it was again, uninvited, and the strange thing, the thing she turned over long into the night, was that she didn't feel the old paralyzing fear she'd expected to feel.
She felt something closer to clarity. Whatever came next, she wasn't facing it blind this time, and that distinction, she was beginning to understand, mattered more than the absence of danger ever could.
That same week, a second, smaller incident occurred, easy to miss against the backdrop of the broken window, someone slashing a single tire on Reyna's car parked behind the shop.
Cain took it seriously despite its smaller scale, understanding that escalation rarely announced itself all at once, that small warnings mattered precisely because they were easy to dismiss.
"I don't like this," Reyna admitted, standing over her flattened tire. "Not for myself. For you. This is your life getting pulled back into something you spent eight months running from."
"I know," Wren said. "But running from it clearly isn't working either. Maybe facing it, with actual information this time instead of blind fear, is the better option left available to me."
Reyna didn't argue further, just helped her call a tow truck, and the two of them spent the rest of the afternoon watching Ellis's careful, unobtrusive presence across the street with something closer to gratitude than the wariness either of them might have expected to feel a year earlier.
Wren spent that same evening researching, on her own, everything she could find about Kellan Voss and the Vultures MC, an old instinct from her years as an old lady reasserting itself despite the eight months she'd spent trying to leave that whole world behind.
She found little beyond rumor and speculation, the club keeping a low enough profile that hard information proved difficult to come by, and she understood, closing her laptop late that night, that whatever was actually happening, she'd have to rely on Cain's account of it rather than any independent verification of her own.
The realization unsettled her less than she expected.
She was, she recognized, already choosing to trust his word on something that mattered, a small, private test she hadn't consciously designed but that she passed anyway, almost without noticing.