Chapter 7
Two days after Nora moved into the compound, Slayer found her under a brother's Fat Boy with a torque wrench in her hand and grease up to her elbows, arguing with Diesel about clutch cable tension.
"You're overtightening it," she said from under the bike. "You pull that cable any tighter, he's going to lose his fingers at a stoplight."
"I've been setting cables for fifteen years."
"And you've been overtightening them for fifteen years. Give me the gauge."
Diesel looked at Slayer in the doorway like a man requesting permission to strangle someone. Slayer shook his head once, and Diesel handed her the gauge.
She had the cable set in four minutes. Diesel checked it, and the expression on his face was the particular agony of a man who had to admit a woman was right about his specialty in front of his president.
"It's good," he said, like the words physically hurt him.
"I know it's good." Nora rolled out from under the bike and sat up, pushing copper hair off her face with the back of a greasy wrist. She saw Slayer and something softened behind the shop-floor attitude, a flicker of warmth she didn't bother hiding anymore. "Morning."
"Morning." He leaned against the garage doorframe and let himself look at her.
Grease-smeared, hair falling out of its knot, wearing one of his old flannels over her tank top because she'd run out of clean shop shirts two days ago and hadn't asked for it — she'd just taken it off the hook by his door.
The sight of her in his shirt, in his garage, arguing with his brothers like she'd been here for years, did something to the back of his throat he couldn't name.
Mine, the word said again. Louder every day.
"Chapel in twenty," he said. "Full table."
Diesel straightened up. The banter dropped out of the room like someone had pulled a plug. Chapel meant business, and business meant the war they were standing in the middle of.
Slayer turned to go, then stopped.
"Nora."
She looked up.
"Keep the shirt."
He walked out before she could answer, carrying the image of her face — surprised, pleased, trying not to show either — into the chapel like a man pocketing a photograph.
* * *
The chapel table was full. Bronco at his right, Hawk and Diesel flanking, Trench at the far end trying to look like he belonged there instead of like a kid at his first grown-up dinner.
The heavy barn-wood table Maddox had built filled the old freight office, and the door was shut, and the room smelled like coffee and leather and the focused quiet of men about to plan a fight.
Slayer laid it out.
"Kell Marchetti is gone. Vasko knows it by now or he will by tonight. He sent his night driver and his driver didn't come back. That tells him three things: the shop's not undefended, the Mayhem are on the ground, and his soft approach just died in a parking lot."
"So he escalates," Bronco said.
"He escalates. And the next layer isn't a reckless kid with a crowbar. It's Bishop."
The name landed on the table like a dropped round.
Even Trench knew it. Bishop Rvariel — forties, heavyset, patient.
An ex-repo man who ran Vasko's enforcement layer and handled collections when a block wouldn't go quiet.
He was the one who'd put the last holdout in the hospital.
Methodical where Kell had been reckless, professional where Kell had been hungry.
"Bishop doesn't come at you head-on," Slayer said. "He watches first. Learns your schedule, your habits, your weak points. Then he hits the one that breaks you."
"We've already seen movement," Hawk said. First words he'd spoken in chapel, and every head turned. "A tail on the delivery run yesterday. Someone followed the parts truck from the distributor all the way back to Brighton. Peeled off a block out, but they were there."
"And the warehouse across the spur," Bronco added. "Been empty for six months. Lights on last night. Somebody's using it."
Slayer let the silence hold. The brothers needed to feel the weight of it — the board shifting, the game changing from a reckless night-driver to a professional who would take his time and hit them where it actually hurt.
"Here's what we know," he said. "Vasko's got a core crew of strippers and drivers for the chop operation. A layer of enforcers under Bishop for the dirty work. And a rotating bench of local hires for fencing and lookout. That's more men than Kell brought to a parking lot. Bishop will use them."
"So we hit first," Diesel said.
"We watch first. Same as him. We find out where Bishop's staging, how many men he's got, and when he's planning to move.
Then we hit first." Slayer looked around the table.
"Bronco, I want eyes on that warehouse across the spur.
Hawk, run the tail backward — find out where they're watching from.
Diesel, the compound doesn't sleep. Rotating watch, two men minimum, until this is done. "
"And the woman?" Trench asked.
Every eye went to Slayer.
"The woman," Slayer said, and his voice went quiet the way it went quiet when something mattered, "stays inside the compound. She's not cargo and she's not a hostage. She's under Mayhem protection because Vasko came for her on our ground, and nobody touches what's ours."
He didn't say mine. He didn't have to. Every man at the table heard it.
"Anything else?"
Bronco leaned back. "Just that she fixed Diesel's carb in thirty seconds and set a clutch cable better than he does, and if we're keeping score, she's more useful in the garage than half the patches at this table."
"Including you?" Diesel muttered.
"Especially me. I'm terrible with carburetors."
Slayer almost smiled. Almost. "We're done. Stay sharp. Bishop's watching and he'll move when he's ready."
* * *
He found Nora on the back steps of the compound after chapel, sitting in the late-afternoon sun with a beer and a view of the rail spur.
The freight trains were running, the long rumble of BNSF cars shaking the ground every twenty minutes, and she was watching them the way she watched everything — cataloging, measuring, filing it away.
He sat down next to her. Close enough that their shoulders touched. She didn't move away.
"Chapel go well?" she asked.
"As well as it goes when you're planning for a man who puts people in hospitals."
She took a drink of her beer. "Bishop."
"You heard."
"I hear everything in this building. The walls are eighteen inches thick but the doors are half-inch pine." She looked at him. "I'm not going to pretend I don't know what's coming, Slayer. That's not how I work."
"I know how you work." He took her beer, drank from it, and handed it back. She stared at him.
"Did you just drink my beer?"
"Yeah."
"Without asking."
"Yeah."
She looked at the bottle, looked at him, and laughed — that rough, warm sound that hit him square in the chest every time. "You're getting comfortable."
"So are you." He nodded at the flannel she was wearing. His flannel. "You took my shirt off the hook this morning without asking."
"You told me to keep it."
"I told you to keep the one you were wearing. That's a different one."
She grinned. "You've got six. I figured you wouldn't miss two."
He should have let it go. Should have kept the conversation light, kept the distance that a president was supposed to keep between club business and the woman sitting on his back steps in his clothes drinking his beer.
Instead he said, "You remind me of something I lost."
She went quiet. The freight train rumbled past, shaking the steps under them.
"My family ran an Adams County spread," he said.
"High plains east of Denver. Cattle and hard ground and a senior water decree my people filed in 1898.
Fifth generation on the same land." He watched the rail cars pass.
"Front Range water-rights buyout took it.
The big developers bought the decree and the water went to subdivisions, and the ranch dried up and scattered. "
"Slayer —"
"I built the Mayhem out of the men who lost their ground the same way.
Cousins, ranch hands, neighbors. Men who'd worked hard country their whole lives and got told the ground wasn't theirs anymore because somebody with money decided they wanted it.
" He turned to her. "Watching you stand in that burned-out lot refusing to be cleared off ground you built with your own hands is the exact thing I couldn't save. And I will not lose it twice."
The silence between them was different from every silence that had come before. Heavier. More honest. She looked at him like she was seeing something she hadn't expected to find behind the cut and the scar and the quiet, and she set down her beer and put her hand on his jaw.
"You're not going to lose it," she said. "Because I'm not going anywhere, and neither is my shop, and neither is that sign. You hear me?"
He turned his face into her palm and pressed his mouth to the callused center of it. A kiss that wasn't about heat or claiming or the war on their doorstep. A kiss that said: I see you. You see me. That's enough.
She left her hand on his face for a long time, her thumb tracing the deep scar on his cheek, and the freight train shook the ground under them and the sun dropped behind the foothills and neither of them moved.
Then Bronco's voice came from inside the compound, sharp and clipped in a way that wasn't banter.
"Pres. We got a problem."
Slayer was on his feet before the sentence finished. Nora was right behind him.
Bronco was at the front window with a pair of binoculars, watching the street. "Warehouse across the spur. Just got a delivery. Three SUVs, tinted windows, and a box truck. They're unloading equipment."
Slayer took the binoculars and looked. Across the rail spur, the warehouse that had been dark for six months was lit up. Men were moving crates from the box truck through a roll-up door. He counted eight. Armed.
"Bishop's setting up a staging point," Slayer said. "He's not watching us from a distance anymore. He's moving in next door."
Nora appeared at his shoulder. He didn't have to look to know she was there — he could feel her the way he could feel weather changing, a warmth and a weight at his right side that had become as natural as breathing in the space of a week.
"How close?" she asked.
"Close enough." He handed the binoculars to Bronco. "Double the watch. Nobody sleeps alone. And nobody leaves the compound without a brother at their back."
He looked at Nora.
"Nobody," he said.
She held his eyes. He watched her weigh it — the independence she'd fought for against the reality of armed men setting up shop across the tracks. She was too smart to argue and too stubborn to agree easily, and the combination of those two things in one woman was going to be the death of him.
"Nobody," she said. "Including you."
He almost smiled.
"Including me."