Chapter 7
MIA
We’re still in the conference room when my phone rings. It’s Donahue, which is an immediate red flag. Donahue doesn’t call unless something has already gone wrong, and he’s already done everything he can think of to take care of it himself.
I answer on the second ring. “What happened?”
“Fire,” he says, breathless and struggling to shove the word out.
“Fire? Where?”
“At Solano’s. I just got the call from emergency dispatch. It’s— Mia, it’s bad.”
The words hit me somewhere below the sternum. I’m already moving before he finishes the sentence, leaving all my stuff behind. “Crow?”
“I don’t know. First responders are on their way.”
I stop walking for exactly one second. One second where the map room, the overlays, Nash standing on the other side of the table watching me with those steady dark eyes—all of it goes somewhere far away.
Then I start moving again.
“I’m on my way.”
“Me too,” he says before I hang up.
Nash is already moving with me. He doesn’t ask if I want company.
He doesn’t ask if I’m okay. He just falls into step beside me and matches my pace down the corridor and out through the east wing doors to where my car is parked, and I hand him the keys without thinking because my hands are doing something that isn't quite shaking but isn’t quite steady either.
He drives.
I stare at the city moving past the window and think about Bobby polishing glasses at the end of the bar with the same energy he’d applied to that task for twenty years.
I think about the morning crowd and the new windows letting in rectangles of light and the way Solano’s had started to smell like garlic and fresh bread instead of cigars and corruption.
I think about Claire waiting tables.
Crow finding peace.
The drive takes six minutes. It feels like sixty. I barely hear the voice of the navigation system reading out directions.
Nash calls Grey on the way, which I realize belatedly is something I should have done. But from the few words Nash offers, it sounds like Grey already knows. Nash suggests they stay at the house with Lexi until we know more. Then he hangs up. I can’t even ask for details.
I’m too shaken by the view.
The smoke is visible from two blocks out.
A dark column rising against the afternoon sky, wrong and ugly against the skyscraper backdrop.
By the time Nash pulls to the curb, Fletcher’s people have already taped off the block, and two pack enforcers I recognize are keeping civilians back from the perimeter.
Firefighters are still blasting water through the windows, and there are no active flames I can see, but what’s left of Solano’s is still smoldering.
The new sign is gone. The windows are blown out, frames black and scorched.
The front wall has partially collapsed inward, exposing the skeleton of the dining room where this morning there had been locals holding newspapers and Bobby at the bar and Claire making fancy lattes with the focused pride of someone who had worked hard to build a life worth being proud of.
I take it in for exactly three seconds.
Then I move toward it.
Nash follows, silent as a ghost.
Donahue meets me at the tape line. “Accelerant,” he says without preamble. “Multiple points of origin; kitchen, back storeroom, the bar. Whoever did this knew the layout.”
Of course they did.
“Crow?” I ask, my voice too high, but I don’t care.
“Over here.” Donahue leads me around the side of the building to where a pair of EMTs are working out of their ambulance in the narrow alley.
Crow is sitting against the wall with his forearms resting on his knees, a burn dressing wrapped around his right hand and forearm, soot darkening his face and neck.
My heart swells at the sight of him, and I find myself able to draw a breath that felt stuck before.
He looks up when he hears me coming, and his expression does the thing it does when he’s holding himself carefully together.
I crouch in front of him. He looks alive. He also looks like Ramsey burned something out of him that had only just started growing back.
“Hey,” I say, my heart breaking for the hollow look he wears.
“Hey,” he says.
“How bad?”
“Burns on my arm. Smoke inhalation.” His jaw tightens. “I'm fine.”
“Where’s Claire?”
He tips his head toward the end of the alley. I stand and find her sitting on the back bumper of the ambulance, a thermal blanket around her shoulders, a cut along her hairline already cleaned and butterflied shut. She’s staring at the ground with the emptiness of shock.
Even when I walk over to her, she doesn’t look up. “I tried to get to him,” she says. Her voice is flat. Scraped out.
“Who?” I ask.
“Bobby. He was at the bar when it started, and I went back, and Crow—" She stops. Swallows. “Crow pulled me out, but I couldn’t…”
“It’s okay.”
I take her hand, squeezing tight against the cold clamminess.
“I almost had him.”
“I’m so sorry.”
She finally looks at me. Her eyes are red-rimmed, not from crying but from smoke. “He didn’t do anything wrong. He just worked here.”
The words sit in my chest like stones.
“No,” I agree. “He didn’t.”
She looks back at the ground. I wrap both my hands around hers, which are cold despite the blanket.
After a moment, her fingers turn and grip mine with a strength that tells me the shock is already starting to wear off.
The grief is coming next, and I will sit here for as long as it takes for her to process it and come out the other side.
Without moving away from her, I do a quick scan of the area, assessing.
The restaurant is fucked. But Crow and Claire are okay. And Bobby…
Nash waits at the mouth of the alley, clocks the scene, and stays where he is. Giving us space. Watching the perimeter.
After a while, an EMT comes and gently asks Claire if he can do a proper examination. She offers a timid agreement. I stand, roll my shoulders back, and go find out everything I can about who did this and how and what it’s going to cost them.
I already know the answer to that last part.
Everything.
Ten minutes later, I’m sitting on the ground against the wall with Crow, his arm around my shoulders, when my phone rings.
Unknown number.
But I can guess.
“Ramsey.”
“Mia.” His voice is exactly as I remember it: easy, almost warm, like we’re old friends catching up. Like there isn’t a lifetime of betrayal and death sitting between us now.
Crow jerks toward me, eyes wide.
“I hear the new sign was nice,” Ramsey says.
The fury comes up so fast it takes a physical effort to manage it. “Fottuto stronzo. You killed Bobby.”
“Collateral damage is regrettable,” he says. Clinical. Bloodless. Like he’s reading from an incident report. “Though I’d argue you could have prevented it.”
“Don't.” The word comes out vicious, and Crow snarls in agreement. “Don't you dare put that on me.”
“Is that Crow listening in like the little mouse in the corner?” Ramsey asks.
“Fuck you, Ramsey,” Crow snarls. “I’ll—”
Ramsey just laughs.
I get to my feet and stalk a few paces away. My heart is racing. My blood is boiling. I want to hurt him like he’s hurt me.
“Why would you do this?” I demand quietly but no less viciously.
“I made you a very reasonable offer, Mia. You declined.”
“Your offer,” I say, my voice dropping to something that doesn’t sound like me at all, “was an insult. And burning down a restaurant full of civilians because I said no makes you exactly what I always knew you were.”
A pause. “And what’s that?”
“Your father’s son.”
Silence.
It's the cruelest thing I could have said, and I know it, and I said it anyway because I want him to feel something. I want him to not be able to use that bloodless clinical voice for thirty seconds.
When he speaks again, the warmth is gone, but so is the control. “Be careful, Mia.”
“Or what? You’ll burn something else down?” I can feel my hands shaking. I curl the one not holding the phone into a fist at my side. “Come find me yourself next time, Ramsey. Stop hiding behind accelerant and matches.”
“I'm not hiding.” He sounds almost amused again, which is worse. “I’m being strategic. There’s a difference. I thought you, of all people, would appreciate that.”
“What I appreciate,” I say through clenched teeth, “is that you just showed me exactly who you are and exactly how far you’re willing to go. So thank you for that. It makes what comes next very simple.”
“What comes next,” he says, “is your choice. Join me, or keep watching people you protect die. Those are the options.”
“There’s a third option.”
“Is there?”
“I find you,” I say, the threat lacing my voice. “And I end this.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“I look forward to seeing you try,” he says. And hangs up.
I stand there for a moment with the phone in my hand and the smell of smoke in my hair and the shaking in my hands that I cannot make stop.
Then Nash is there.
Not touching me. Just close. His voice low enough that only I can hear it. “Talk to me.”
“I’m fine.”
“Mia.”
“I'm—” The word fractures somewhere in the middle. I press my lips together. Look at the burned-out shell that is Solano’s.
The sign that isn’t there anymore. “He’s not going to stop,” I say.
“Crow. Claire. He'll go after Dutch next, or Razor, or—” My voice cracks, so I drop to a whisper, determined to keep my shit together out here. “He knows exactly where to cut me.”
Nash doesn’t tell me it’s going to be okay. He doesn’t offer reassurances or tactical optimism or any of the things people say when they don’t know what else to do.
He just says, “Then we find him first.”
And something about the way he says we, like it’s already decided, like I am not in this alone, like the weight I’ve been carrying has a second set of hands on it whether I asked for that or not, does something to the shaking.
It doesn’t stop it.
But it helps.
I look at him. He looks back, steady and unhurried, soot from the scene faint on his jaw and dark on his hands.
“Okay,” I say. “But when we get him, he answers to me.”