Chapter Thirteen
The call came at midnight.
Ramona was in Shadow's bed, half-asleep, when her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She reached for it without opening her eyes, expecting spam or a wrong number.
"Ramona?" Old Carl's voice, her neighbor from three miles east. Shaking. "Ramona, you need to get out here. They're burning your place down."
She was out of bed before the sentence finished.
"Carl—slow down. What's happening?"
"Men. Five, maybe six. They've got the distillery building on fire and they're—" His voice cracked. "They're pouring something on the ground. Chemicals. The smell is coming all the way to my property."
Ramona's blood went cold.
Shadow was awake now, reading her expression, already reaching for his clothes.
"Stay inside, Carl. Lock your doors." She was pulling on jeans, searching for her boots. "Don't let them see you watching."
"What about—"
"Just stay safe. I'm coming."
She ended the call and turned to Shadow.
"Teague," she said. "He's torching my distillery. Salting the ground."
Something dark and terrible crossed Shadow's face.
"Get dressed. I'll wake the brothers."
They rode hard through the Panhandle night, a convoy of bikes eating up the miles between the compound and Ramona's land. Shadow led with Ramona on his back, her arms tight around his waist, her heart pounding against his spine.
She could see the glow before they reached the property line.
Orange light bleeding into the sky, turning the horizon into something from a nightmare. Smoke rising in thick columns, black against the stars. The smell hit next—burning wood, melting copper, and underneath it something chemical and wrong.
Herbicide. They were poisoning her land.
"Stop," she shouted over the engine noise. "Stop here."
Shadow pulled off the road a quarter mile from the property entrance. The other brothers followed, killing their engines, gathering in the dark.
"What's the play?" Striker asked.
"Ramona stays—" Shadow started.
"No." She swung off the bike, facing him. "The aging cellar is underground. It might have survived. I'm not waiting here while you check."
"There are armed men on your property—"
"And I've already killed two of them." She held his gaze, refusing to back down. "I know what I'm walking into. I'm going anyway."
Shadow's jaw worked. She could see the war playing out behind his eyes—protect her versus respect her. Keep her safe versus acknowledge she'd earned her place.
"Stay close," he finally said. "And if I tell you to run—"
"I run. I remember."
They moved in on foot, spreading into a loose formation. Shadow kept Ramona at his side, one hand on her arm, the other on his weapon. The smoke thickened as they approached, making her eyes water, coating her throat with ash.
The distillery came into view through the trees.
Or what was left of it.
The main building was fully engulfed—flames leaping from the roof, walls starting to buckle.
Her salvaged copper still, her fermentation tanks, her grandmother's recipes—all of it burning.
Men moved through the wreckage like shadows, pouring liquid from industrial containers, spreading destruction with methodical efficiency.
One of them was huge. Former rodeo build, broken too many times, moving with the particular swagger of someone who enjoyed this.
Virgil Teague.
"The cellar," Ramona whispered. "South side of the building. The entrance is behind the—"
Gunfire erupted.
Someone had spotted them—shouts, muzzle flashes, bullets snapping through the air. Shadow shoved her behind a tree as the brothers returned fire, the night exploding into chaos.
"Go!" Shadow yelled. "Get to the cellar! We'll cover you!"
Ramona ran.
She sprinted through the smoke and darkness, ducking behind burning debris, her lungs screaming for clean air. Bullets kicked up dirt near her feet. Someone was tracking her, trying to cut her off before she reached the cellar entrance.
She dove behind the remains of her aging barn—the one they'd burned weeks ago, now just a skeleton of charred beams—and pressed herself against the blackened wood.
The cellar door was twenty feet away. Still intact. Still closed.
Please. Please let something have survived.
She counted to three and ran.
The cellar entrance was a concrete bunker set into the hillside, hidden from casual view by brush she'd planted years ago.
The door was heavy steel, meant to withstand exactly this kind of disaster.
She grabbed the handle, hauled it open, and threw herself inside as another burst of gunfire exploded overhead.
Darkness swallowed her.
She fumbled for the flashlight she'd kept down here—emergency supplies, stored against exactly this kind of nightmare—and clicked it on.
Barrels.
Rows of them, standing upright on the racks she'd built, untouched by the fire above. The concrete walls had held. The steel door had kept out the smoke. Her whiskey—three years of aging, the only batches that had survived the first fire—was still here.
Ramona pressed her hand against the nearest barrel, felt the cool wood against her palm.
"Thank God," she whispered. "Thank God."
The sound of combat filtered through the concrete—gunfire, shouts, the chaos of men fighting and dying above her head. She needed to help. Needed to get back out there, find Shadow, make sure—
Her radio crackled.
"Ramona." Shadow's voice, tight with fury. "The cellar?"
"Intact. Twelve barrels, all safe."
"Good. Stay there."
"Like hell—"
"Teague's running." The gunfire above was fading, moving away from the property. "He's heading for the canyon breaks south of here. I'm tracking him."
"Shadow—"
"Stay. There." The radio clicked off.
Ramona stood in her cellar, surrounded by everything she'd saved, and made a decision.
She couldn't let him go alone.
The canyon country south of her property was a maze of dry creek beds and sandstone walls, carved by water that only ran during flash floods. Teague knew these breaks—had been burying bodies here for twenty years, according to Shadow. If anyone could disappear into this landscape, it was him.
Ramona followed the sounds of pursuit, picking her way through scrub brush and loose rock. The fire glow faded behind her, replaced by starlight and shadow. Somewhere ahead, men were moving fast, crashing through undergrowth without regard for stealth.
She found Rascal and Striker flanking through a parallel draw, moving to cut off Teague's retreat.
"Where's Shadow?" she hissed.
Striker pointed deeper into the canyon. "He went after Teague on foot. Two men with him—Teague's backup."
"Alone?"
"He told us to flank." Striker's voice was grim. "He wanted Teague for himself."
Of course he did. Teague had burned her barn. Poisoned her land. Destroyed what little she'd managed to rebuild. Shadow would take that personally.
Ramona pushed past the brothers and kept moving.
The canyon narrowed as she went deeper, walls rising on either side, the sky shrinking to a ribbon of stars. She could hear something ahead—voices, movement, the sounds of men who knew they were being hunted.
She climbed a sandstone ridge and looked down.
Teague was there, in a dry creek bed fifty feet below. Two men flanked him, weapons raised, scanning the darkness. They'd stopped running, backed into a corner where the canyon walls closed to a dead end.
And Shadow was closing in.
She could see him moving along the opposite ridge, silent as his namesake. Rascal and Striker were somewhere behind her, setting up the pincer that would trap Teague with nowhere left to run.
The hunter had become the hunted.
Teague must have sensed it. He spun, searching the ridgeline, his broken-rodeo body tense with the particular awareness of prey that knew death was coming.
"I know you're out there!" he shouted into the darkness. "Show yourself, biker! Let's finish this!"
Shadow didn't answer. Just kept moving, patient as a predator, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
Ramona held her breath.
This was it. The man who'd burned her whiskey, poisoned her well, destroyed years of work with chemical spite. After tonight, he wouldn't destroy anything ever again.
But not yet. Not here.
Shadow's radio crackled—Hatchet's voice, barely audible. "Compound's secure. What's your position?"
The sound carried in the canyon quiet. Teague's head snapped toward Shadow's position.
"There!"
Gunfire exploded across the creek bed. Teague and his men opened up on Shadow's ridge while Shadow returned fire, the canyon walls echoing with thunder. One of Teague's men went down. Then the other.
But Teague was moving.
The big man scrambled up a crack in the canyon wall, moving faster than his broken body should have allowed. Shadow pursued, firing as he climbed, but the angle was wrong—too steep, too much cover.
"He's getting away!" Ramona shouted.
Shadow didn't stop. He launched himself after Teague, disappearing over the ridge, the sounds of pursuit fading into the darkness beyond.
Rascal appeared at Ramona's side, breathing hard.
"Striker's circling north. We'll cut him off."
"Shadow—"
"Is doing what he does best." Rascal's pale eyes were cold in the starlight. "Hunting. Teague won't get far."
But even as he said it, the sounds of pursuit grew more distant. Teague knew this country. Knew the hiding places, the escape routes, the ways to vanish that only came from decades of burying secrets in these canyons.
Ramona stared into the darkness where Shadow had disappeared.
The fire still burned on her land behind her. Her distillery in ruins, her property poisoned, everything above ground destroyed. But the cellar had held. The whiskey had survived.
And tomorrow, Teague would pay for what he'd done.
She just had to trust that Shadow would come back.
She just had to trust.