Chapter Four
The smoke woke her before the heat did.
Ramona's eyes snapped open in the darkness of her bedroom, lungs already burning with the acrid taste of something wrong. For a half-second she thought she was dreaming—the orange glow bleeding through her curtains, the distant crackle that didn't belong to the Panhandle wind.
Then she was moving.
She hit the floor barefoot, grabbed the jeans she'd left on the chair, and was out the door before her brain caught up with her body. The night air should have been cool, should have carried the familiar scent of dust and mesquite.
Instead, it tasted like ash.
The aging barn was a wall of flame.
Three months of barreled whiskey. Twelve barrels she'd filled herself, rolled into racks she'd welded, left to age in darkness until they were ready. Gone. All of it gone, consumed by fire that roared toward the sky like something alive and hungry.
"No—"
The word tore out of her as she ran toward the barn, toward the heat, toward everything she was losing. The flames were already licking at the roof beams, the old wood catching like kindling. She could hear the barrels cracking inside, whiskey feeding the fire, making it worse.
Arms caught her from behind.
"Stop." Shadow's voice, hard and close. "You can't—"
"My whiskey—" She fought against his grip, but he was stronger, dragging her back from the fire line as the roof groaned overhead. "Three months, that's three months of—"
The roof collapsed.
The sound was like thunder, like the end of the world. Sparks exploded into the night sky, a cascade of orange and red against the black. Shadow threw her to the ground and covered her body with his as burning debris rained down around them.
Heat. Everywhere, heat. And the smell of everything she'd built turning to smoke.
When Shadow pulled her up, his face was lit by firelight, all sharp angles and shadows. His eyes scanned the property, the access road, the darkness beyond the flames.
"We need to move."
"I can't just—"
The crack of a rifle split the air.
Dirt exploded two feet from her boots. Ramona froze, brain stuttering, and then Shadow was shoving her behind the water tank, his body between her and the access road where a truck idled in the darkness.
Another shot. Closer this time, kicking up dust near Shadow's position.
He had his gun out—she hadn't even seen him draw it—and he fired back, three controlled rounds that made the truck's headlights shatter. Someone cursed in the distance. An engine revved.
"Stay down." Shadow's voice was ice, all the warmth she'd glimpsed over the past two days stripped away. This was the man who'd broken Boyd's wrist without blinking. This was the man Tornado had sent.
A third shot pinged off the water tank above her head.
Shadow fired again, and this time she heard a scream—short, sharp, cut off by the sound of tires tearing through gravel. The truck was moving, retreating, red taillights disappearing down the access road like coward's eyes.
The silence that followed was worse than the gunfire.
Ramona stayed crouched behind the tank, her breath coming in ragged gasps, her whole body shaking with adrenaline she couldn't burn off. The barn was still burning, flames dancing against the sky, and somewhere in the distance she could hear sirens—too late, always too late.
Shadow appeared in front of her, holstering his weapon. His face was unreadable.
"You hurt?"
She shook her head. Couldn't find words.
"Ramona." He crouched, caught her chin, forced her to meet his eyes. "Are you hurt?"
"No." The word came out cracked. "No, I'm—I'm fine."
She wasn't fine. Nothing about this was fine. But she was alive, and the man in front of her was the reason.
"We're leaving." Shadow pulled her to her feet, his hand wrapped around her wrist like he was afraid she'd run back toward the fire. "Now."
"My records—the fermentation logs—"
"Where?"
"Main house. Filing cabinet in the office."
He didn't argue, didn't tell her the documents didn't matter. He just steered her toward the house with one hand on her back, gun still in the other, eyes scanning the darkness for threats she couldn't see.
The office was untouched—the fire had been set at the barn, not the house. A message, not an execution. We can reach you whenever we want.
Ramona grabbed the fermentation logs, the yield records, the recipe book her grandmother had started and she'd filled with her own adjustments. Her hands were shaking so badly she dropped the first folder twice.
Shadow took the stack from her without a word.
"Land deed," she said. "The lockbox—"
"I have it." He was already moving toward the door. "Grabbed it when I heard the first shot. Let's go."
His truck was parked behind the main house, hidden from the access road. Smart. He'd positioned it for exactly this scenario—a fast exit when everything went to hell.
She climbed into the passenger seat and watched her property shrink in the side mirror. The barn was a skeleton of flames now, the roof completely gone, walls starting to buckle. Fire trucks were pulling up the access road, too late to save anything but the ashes.
Three months of whiskey. Gone in twenty minutes.
Ramona pressed her forehead against the window and didn't cry. Crying was for later, for when she had the luxury of falling apart. Right now she needed to think, to plan, to figure out what came next.
Shadow drove in silence, taking back roads she didn't recognize, putting distance between them and the Crenshaws' message. His jaw was tight, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.
"They knew I was back," she said finally. "They were waiting."
"Someone's watching the property. Has been since you came home." His voice was flat. "They saw my truck leave yesterday, figured you'd be alone."
"I thought you were staying—"
"Church ran late. I was on my way back when I saw the glow." He glanced at her, and something flickered behind his eyes. "Thirty seconds later and you'd have been inside that barn when the roof came down."
The thought landed like a punch. She'd been running toward the fire, toward certain death, and he'd caught her. Held her down while the world collapsed around them.
"Thank you," she said.
"Don't."
"Don't thank you?"
"Don't act like I did something special." His grip tightened on the wheel. "I did my job. You're under club protection. That means I keep you alive."
Something about the way he said it—my job—made her chest ache. Like she was a task on a list, a problem to be solved and filed away.
But his hands had been gentle when he'd checked her for injuries. And he'd grabbed her grandmother's lockbox before the shooting started, like he knew what mattered to her. Like he'd been paying attention.
The Mother Road Motel appeared out of the darkness, twelve rooms with a buzzing vacancy sign and a parking lot empty except for two bikes she recognized from the compound. Striker and Ridge, probably. The support Tornado had promised.
Shadow pulled around back, killed the engine.
"Inside," he said. "Don't argue."
She didn't.
The motel room was sparse—double bed, scarred dresser, a bathroom that had seen better decades. But it was clean, and it was safe, and right now that was enough.
Ramona dumped the fermentation logs on the bed and started spreading papers across the faded comforter. Yield records. Temperature charts. The recipe adjustments that had taken her three years to perfect.
Shadow stood by the door, watching her.
"You should sleep."
"I will." She didn't look up, sorting documents into piles that made sense only to her. "After I know what's left."
"Ramona—"
"Three months." Her voice cracked, and she hated it. "Three months of aging, gone. Do you know how long it takes to make whiskey? The fermentation, the distillation, the barrel aging—you can't rush it. You can't cheat it. And they just—"
She stopped. Swallowed hard. Kept sorting.
Shadow was quiet for a long moment. Then she heard him move—crossing to the window, checking the parking lot, the kind of restless pacing that said he wanted to do something but didn't know what.
"The main still survived," he said finally. "The fermentation tanks. The cellar, the aging racks. You can rebuild."
"With what? Three months of product was supposed to be my first real shipment.
The distributor order that was going to keep the lights on.
" She laughed, and it sounded like breaking glass.
"The Crenshaws know exactly what they're doing.
They're not trying to scare me off—they're trying to bleed me out.
Take everything piece by piece until there's nothing left to fight for. "
"Then we make sure there's always something left."
She looked up.
Shadow was standing by the window, silhouetted against the parking lot lights. His face was in shadow, but she could feel his eyes on her—steady, certain, carrying a weight she didn't fully understand.
"Get some sleep," he said again. "Tomorrow we figure out how to make them pay."
He walked out before she could respond, closing the door behind him with a soft click.
Ramona sat on the bed, surrounded by the paperwork of everything she'd built, and tried to make the numbers add up to survival. The land deed in her grandmother's handwriting. The fermentation logs tracking three years of experiments. The recipe book with its cramped notes and coffee stains.
Everything that mattered, spread across a motel bedspread at three in the morning.
She wouldn't sleep. Couldn't, with the smell of smoke still in her hair and the sound of gunfire echoing in her ears.
But she could count. She could calculate. She could figure out exactly what the Crenshaws had taken and what she had left to fight with.
And when the sun came up, she'd be ready to fight.