Chapter 9
Bishop came three days later, and he came the way professionals come — quiet, coordinated, and from two directions at once.
Slayer was in the chapel going over the watch logs when the first explosion shook the building.
Not a bomb — a fuel drum. The reserve diesel they kept in the side bay for the generators went up with a percussive whump that blew the bay door off its tracks and sent a column of black smoke rolling across the lot.
Diversion. He knew it before the glass stopped falling.
"Garage side!" Bronco was already moving, pulling his piece from his waistband. "They're coming through the garage!"
Slayer grabbed his weapon off the chapel table and hit the great room at a run.
Through the high windows he could see the fuel fire lighting up the side bay in orange and black, and beyond it, shadows moving along the fence line — six, maybe eight men, coming through the rail spur gate that the explosion had just blown open.
Bishop's crew. Armed. Moving in formation, not scattered. Professional muscle, not street kids with crowbars.
Hawk and Diesel were already in the garage, flipping the heavy workbenches onto their sides for cover.
Trench came down the mezzanine stairs three at a time with a shotgun that was almost as long as he was tall.
The compound was waking up to war, and the brothers moved with the grim speed of men who had trained for exactly this.
Nora.
The thought hit him like a fist. She'd been in the garage ten minutes ago, working on a brother's exhaust. He scanned the bay through the smoke and didn't see her and his heart stopped for one full beat.
Then he heard her voice, sharp and clear through the chaos.
"Slayer! They cut the fence at the cold-storage side too. I can see four more coming from the east."
She was at the high window above the parts counter, binoculars in hand, reading the field the way she read her block — every sightline, every approach, every blind corner.
She'd gotten to the one vantage point in the building that could see both the rail spur and the cold-storage side, and she was calling it out like she'd been doing it her whole life.
He wanted to scream at her to get upstairs and lock the door. He wanted to throw her over his shoulder and carry her to the safest room in the building.
Instead he said, "How many total?"
"Ten, maybe twelve. Split group. Six on the rail side, four or more on the east. They've got a truck backing up to the roll-up door — they're trying to breach the garage."
"Bronco, take Hawk and hold the rail side. Diesel, Trench, you're on the east fence with me." He looked up at Nora. "You stay on that window. You're my eyes. Anything moves, you call it."
"I'm not going anywhere."
No, she wasn't. And God help him, he loved her for it.
The thought landed and he didn't have time to examine it because Bishop's crew hit the garage door.
The truck rammed the roll-up and buckled it inward. Two men came through the gap before the metal stopped screaming, and Diesel met the first one with a wrench the size of a man's forearm. The crack of steel on bone echoed off the concrete walls and the man went down in the oil and sawdust.
The second man had a gun. He got off one shot that sparked off a lift column before Trench put him on the floor with the shotgun butt, the kid moving faster than Slayer had ever seen him move, fear and adrenaline and the desperate hunger to prove himself all channeled into one clean strike.
On the rail side, Bronco's voice carried over the gunfire — short, controlled bursts, the brothers holding the fence line the way they held every line, with their bodies and their fists and the absolute refusal to give ground.
"Two more coming around the east corner!" Nora called from the window. "They're carrying gas cans. They're going to try to burn the garage."
Slayer moved.
He went through the side door and caught the first man at the corner of the building, driving him into the brick wall hard enough to crack the back of his head against it.
The gas can hit the gravel and rolled. The second man swung a pipe and Slayer took it on his forearm — pain exploded up to his shoulder — and drove his forehead into the man's face. Cartilage crunched. The man dropped.
More were coming. He could hear them on the gravel, boots and breathing and the ratchet of a shotgun being pumped.
Then Nora's voice again, closer now. Not from the window.
"Slayer, behind you!"
He spun. A heavyset man was coming around the dumpster line with a sawed-off — and between him and Slayer, a steel door slammed open and Nora was there, shoving the dumpster into the man's path with her shoulder and her whole body weight behind it.
The dumpster caught him at the knees and he stumbled, the shotgun discharging into the air, and Slayer closed the distance in three strides and put him on the ground.
He grabbed Nora's arm and pulled her behind the dumpster, his body covering hers, his heart hammering so hard he could feel it in his teeth.
"I told you to stay on the window."
"He was going to shoot you in the back."
"Nora —"
"You're welcome."
He looked at her. Smoke in her hair, grease on her hands, eyes blazing with the same fire he'd seen in the burned-out lot the first night.
She was pressed against the brick wall behind the dumpster with his arm braced above her head and his body shielding hers, and even now, even in the middle of a firefight, the proximity of her hit him like a drug.
"When this is over," he said, his voice low enough that only she could hear it, "you and I are going to have a conversation about following orders."
"I don't take orders."
"I know." He kissed her. Hard, fast, a brand pressed to her mouth in the middle of a war. "Stay behind me."
"Beside you."
"Beside me."
They moved together around the corner of the building, and the fight shifted.
Bishop was in the garage.
Slayer found him standing among the overturned benches and the scattered tools, heavyset and unhurried, directing his remaining men with hand signals like a foreman on a job site.
He'd come in through the breached roll-up while the perimeter fight drew the brothers outside, patient and methodical to the last.
He had a gun in one hand and a phone in the other. Reporting to Vasko. Running the assault by committee even now.
He saw Slayer and didn't run.
"Carmichael," Bishop said. He knew the real name. He'd done his homework. "Mr. Vasko asked me to deliver a message. The woman and the block, or the building and everyone in it. His terms."
"Here's my terms."
Slayer charged him across the garage floor.
Bishop was bigger and he was ready for it.
He sidestepped and caught Slayer across the ribs with the butt of the gun, a heavy blow that drove the air out of his lungs.
Slayer staggered, caught a lift column, and used it to swing himself around and drive his boot into Bishop's knee.
The big man buckled but didn't go down — he was built like a truck and he fought like one, absorbing damage and coming forward.
They traded blows among the lifts and the tool chests, the gun lost somewhere in the first exchange, both men fighting with fists and elbows in the close quarters.
Bishop got an arm around Slayer's throat and squeezed, and for three seconds the world went gray and narrow and Slayer could hear nothing but his own pulse and the distant sound of Nora screaming his name.
He drove his elbow backward into Bishop's floating ribs. Once. Twice. The arm loosened. He spun out of the hold and hit Bishop with a combination that started in his shoulders and ended with the big man's head snapping sideways, blood arcing from his mouth in the harsh overhead light.
Bishop went to one knee. He looked up at Slayer with the flat, professional eyes of a man who had put people in hospitals for a living and was realizing for the first time that the math wasn't working in his favor.
"The woman isn't worth this," Bishop said. Blood ran down his chin.
Slayer hit him one last time. The sound it made was final.
Bishop went down among the lifts and the tools and he didn't get up, and the phone he'd been reporting on skittered across the concrete floor and went dark.
The compound went quiet in stages. The gunfire stopped. The shouting stopped. Bronco's voice called all-clear from the rail side, and then Hawk's from the east fence, and then it was just the crackle of the fuel fire burning itself out in the side bay and the sound of men breathing hard.
Slayer stood over Bishop's body in the wrecked garage and took inventory. His ribs screamed. His forearm was swelling where the pipe had caught him. His throat was bruised from the chokehold, and when he swallowed he tasted copper.
He looked up.
Nora was standing in the breached roll-up doorway.
She had a fire extinguisher in her hands that she'd pulled off the wall, and the side bay behind her was thick with white chemical foam where she'd fought the fuel fire while he'd fought Bishop.
Her copper hair was plastered to her face with sweat and chemical spray, and she was bleeding from a cut above her ear where something — glass, debris, a fragment from the explosion — had caught her.
She'd fought the fire while he'd fought the man. Side by side. Different battles, same war.
He crossed the garage to her. She set down the fire extinguisher and he took her face in both hands and looked at the cut above her ear and the blood running down her temple, and the rage and the relief and the fierce possessive love he'd identified in the first thirty seconds of the fight rose up and choked him.
"You're bleeding," he said.
"So are you." She put her hand on his ribs where Bishop had hit him, and he flinched, and she flinched with him. "Hospital."
"No hospital."
"Slayer —"
"No hospital." He pulled her against him, his arms around her and his face in her smoky hair, and he held her in the wrecked garage with Bishop on the floor behind them and the chemical foam settling in the bay and his brothers bleeding and alive around them. "I'm fine. We're fine."
Bronco appeared in the doorway. He looked at Bishop on the floor, at the wrecked garage, at the president holding his woman in the middle of it all, and he didn't say a word. He just nodded and went to work.
Hawk had a gash on his arm that needed stitches.
Trench had taken a hard hit to the shoulder but was on his feet and refusing to sit down, the young brother too wired on adrenaline and pride to acknowledge pain.
One brother laid up from the fuel explosion — burns on his forearms, bad enough to bench him.
The cost was real. But they were standing, and Bishop wasn't.
Slayer released Nora long enough to look at the board. Bishop was dead. His crew was scattered, broken, dragged off Mayhem ground. And somewhere out there, Vasko's phone was ringing with silence where Bishop's report should have been.
Only two men stood between the Mayhem and the end of this: Tomas Delacroix, Vasko's lieutenant, the disciplined one who kept the chop operation running, and Vasko himself.
Slayer looked at Nora. She was sitting on an overturned toolbox letting Bronco clean the cut above her ear, and she was already arguing with him about the angle of the bandage. Bloodied, smoke-stained, bruised — and giving orders to a man twice her size while he patched her up.
Mine, the word said. Not a claim anymore. A fact.
The war was narrowing. And Slayer was going to end it.