Chapter 20
Slayer opened the armory cage at noon and the brothers went to work.
The cage sat in the back of the garage behind a steel door with three locks, and it held everything the Mayhem had accumulated over years of holding ground the system wouldn't hold — weapons, ammunition, body armor that had seen better decades, and the particular tools of a club that solved its problems without calling anyone who carried a badge.
Bronco inventoried while Hawk distributed, and the compound transformed from a home into a fortress in the space of an afternoon.
But the fortress was only half the plan. The other half was four hundred feet down Brighton Boulevard, and it belonged to Nora.
Slayer walked the block with her at two o'clock, the thin autumn sun cutting sharp through the high-altitude air, the smell of legal grow houses and diesel and the cold-storage building's new activity leaking across the dead end.
He walked beside her instead of in front of her, because the partnership was load-bearing now and he'd stopped pretending otherwise.
She led. He followed. On this ground, she was the authority.
"The gap between my shop and the cold storage is thirty-two feet," she said, pacing it off with the long stride of a woman who'd measured this block with her own body a thousand times.
"Vasko's crew has to come through it to reach the compound.
There's no other vehicle access from the south — the rail spur blocks the east, the fence blocks the west, and the dead end means they can't circle behind us. "
"So the gap is the funnel."
"The gap is the kill zone." She stopped and turned to face him, standing in the space between her father's shop and the building Vasko had taken.
"I've rigged windshield stock across the inside of the shop windows — tempered panels that will blow outward when they breach the front.
Anyone coming through gets a face full of safety glass at chest height.
It won't kill them, but it'll slow them down and blind them for the seconds you need. "
She walked him through the rest. The plate glass she'd positioned as reflectors near the pole lights — angled to throw light into the gap and create glare for anyone approaching from the south.
The heavy equipment she'd moved to create cover positions on the shop side — her compressor, her van lift, the steel workbench that had held them both on the first night.
The side door she'd rigged to slam shut on a spring, funneling anyone who entered the shop toward the front where the glass trap waited.
She'd turned her own business into a weapon. Again. The same spine that had dropped a glass rack on a man earlier, scaled up to a block.
"You did all this with Trench?" Slayer asked.
"Trench moved the heavy stuff. I did the thinking." She looked at him. "Is it enough?"
He looked at the gap, the shop, the rigged windows, the positions she'd created. A woman who built things for a living had built a trap out of the materials of her own trade, and it was sound.
"It's enough." He put his hand on her face. Traced the freckle on her cheekbone with his thumb. "You're extraordinary. You know that."
"I'm a glass shop owner who's very angry about her vans."
He almost smiled. Then his hand slid from her face to the back of her neck and he pulled her in and kissed her, hard and brief, in the gap between her shop and the enemy's building, on the ground they were about to fight for.
"When this starts," he said against her mouth, "you stay inside the compound. Not the shop. The compound. Behind eighteen inches of brick. Promise me."
"I promise I'll be where I'm useful."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's what I'm giving you." She held his eyes. "I won't be stupid. I won't be reckless. But I'm not going to make a promise I might have to break. You know me better than that."
He did. God help him, he did.
By five o'clock the compound was set.
Bronco had the fence line covered — positions behind the razor wire with clear sight lines down the gap and across the rail spur.
Hawk was on the compound roof with the best vantage point on the block, his silence and his patience turned into assets.
Diesel and Trench held the garage, the buckled roll-up door they'd finally repaired now reinforced with steel plate.
Redline had the bikes staged in the back lot, engines ready, in case the fight needed to move.
The old ladies were gone. Slayer had sent them to the Foothills Roadhouse at the mouth of Coal Creek Canyon with two brothers for escort, and the compound felt emptier without them — quieter, harder, a building stripped down to its fighting weight.
Nora was in the great room, checking the front windows.
She'd taped them in the pattern her father had taught her for hurricane season when she was twelve — X-patterns that wouldn't stop the glass from breaking but would hold the fragments together and keep them from becoming shrapnel.
She was doing it with the same calm competence she brought to everything, and Slayer watched her from the chapel doorway and felt the full weight of what he was about to risk.
Not the building. Not the block. Her.
She turned and caught him watching. Crossed the room to him. Put both hands flat on his chest the way she had that first night in the shop, when she'd pushed him against the workbench and kissed him with glass dust in her hair.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey."
"We're going to be fine."
"I know."
"You don't know. You're standing there looking at me like you're memorizing my face, and I need you to stop because it's freaking me out."
He laughed. Short, rough, surprised out of him the way her laughter always surprised him. "I'm not memorizing your face. I see your face every day. I'm just —"
"Just what?"
"Just thinking about how I'm going to marry you when this is over."
The words landed in the quiet compound like a stone in still water. Her hands went still on his chest. Her eyes went wide. And then the slow grin came — the devastating one, the one that landed like a decision.
"Ask me properly and I'll think about it," she said.
"I'll ask you properly when Vasko's in the ground."
"Then put him in the ground fast, because I'm not a patient woman."
He kissed her forehead. Held his mouth there for three heartbeats. Then he stepped back and became the president, the man who held ground, the leader his brothers would follow into the dark.
"Positions," he said to the room. "Everybody on the line. This is what we're here for."
The brothers moved. Quiet, focused, each man going to the place he'd been assigned with the grim certainty of men who had chosen this life and everything it cost. Nora went to the front window one last time, checking the tape, and Slayer took his position at the gate with his weapon and his cut and the full weight of the Mayhem at his back.
The sun dropped behind the foothills. The light went gold and then red and then gone. The pole lights came on in the lot and threw long shadows across the razor wire and the fence line and the dead-end block that two families had built and one man had come to take.
Brighton Boulevard went quiet.
Then, from the south, the sound. Engines. Multiple. Growing louder. Headlights sweeping through the dark, one pair after another, turning onto Brighton and coming north.
Slayer's hand tightened on his weapon.
Here they come.