Chapter 12
The call came from Talley at four in the morning, and it came wrong.
Squall had the phone to his ear before the second ring, his body going from sleep to awake the way it always did — no confusion, no lag, just the instant shift of a man who'd learned to wake fully on a pitching deck in the dark. Dana stirred beside him but didn't open her eyes.
"Three trucks on the harbor road," Talley said. His voice was shaking. "Heading for the shop. At least ten guys. They've got bats, crowbars — I saw a shotgun, Squall. They're going to take the place apart."
The shop. Not the compound.
Squall was on his feet, pulling on his jeans, his boots, reaching for the cut on the floor. "How far out?"
"Five minutes. Maybe less."
"Call Diesel. Call everyone. Get to the shop and do not engage until we're there."
He hung up and Dana was already sitting up, the sheet falling away, her eyes sharp in the dark.
"The shop," she said. Not a question. She'd heard enough.
"Deane's hitting Prescott Marine. Full crew."
She was out of bed and dressed before he'd finished lacing his boots — jeans, boots, her hair twisted up and shoved under the ballcap she'd been wearing since the fire.
She didn't ask if she could come. She walked out the door ahead of him and he didn't try to stop her, because the shop was hers and they both knew there was no version of this where she stayed behind.
They took the coast road at ninety, Dana's truck behind his bike, Diesel and Anvil roaring up from the compound behind her.
Wraith was already gone — he'd been out when the call came, which meant he'd be there first, which meant God help anyone who walked into his sightline before the rest of them arrived.
The harbor road opened up ahead and Squall could see it — lights at Prescott Marine that shouldn't be there, the yellow-white of work lamps through the bay doors, moving shadows inside.
The sound reached him next, even over the engine — the crash of things breaking, the ring of metal on metal, the systematic destruction of a building.
He killed the headlight and rolled into the lot.
Three trucks, as Talley had said. A box truck and two pickups, parked at angles across the gravel.
Men moving inside the shop, tearing it apart — the lift, the bench, the tools.
Through the open bay door he could see two men pulling the hydraulic lines out of the working lift with crowbars, and a third swinging a bat into the tool rack on the wall. Not stealing. Destroying.
And standing in the middle of it, directing the demolition with the calm authority of a man conducting an orchestra, was Deane.
He looked exactly the way Squall had imagined him — tall, gray-haired, lean in the way of a man who stayed sharp through discipline rather than bulk.
He wore a dark jacket and stood with his hands in his pockets, watching his crew tear apart the shop that Dana had rebuilt from a fire with the unhurried patience of someone who'd done this a hundred times.
Squall counted heads. Eight crew inside, plus Deane. Two more standing by the trucks, watching the road. Ten on twelve, but the two at the trucks hadn't seen the bikes yet.
Diesel pulled up beside him. Anvil behind. Talley's bike idled at the lot entrance.
"Where's Wraith?" Diesel asked.
A scream from the far side of the building answered the question.
One of the road lookouts went down hard, dragged sideways into the shadow between the trucks, and didn't get back up.
The second lookout spun toward the sound and Wraith materialized behind him like a bad dream and put him on the ground with a chokehold that took three seconds to do its work.
The road was clear.
"Front door," Squall said. "Loud."
They went through the bay like a wave.
Anvil hit the first man inside — the one with the bat — and put him through the tool rack he'd been demolishing.
The crash was spectacular, sheet metal and socket sets exploding across the concrete, and every head in the building turned toward it.
Diesel came through behind Anvil and caught two men at the lift, dropping the first with a straight right that spun him off his feet and driving the second into the lift column hard enough to ring the steel.
Squall went for Deane.
The enforcer saw him coming and moved — not back, not away, but sideways, pulling a pistol from inside his jacket with the smooth economy of a man who kept his weapon where his hands already lived.
The gun came up fast and Squall hit him before it leveled, driving his shoulder into Deane's chest and slamming them both into the workbench.
The gun went off. The round punched through the ceiling and brought down a shower of plaster and old fiberglass. Squall caught Deane's gun hand and smashed it against the bench edge — once, twice — and the pistol clattered away across the concrete.
Deane was fast. Faster than Vasco, colder, his body wired with the specific efficiency of a man who fought for a living and kept the receipts.
He drove an elbow into Squall's temple and the world flared white for a half-second.
Squall staggered, and Deane hit him again — a short hook to the ribs that found the space between the leather and the bone and made him feel every year he'd spent on a fishing deck.
Around them, the shop was a war. Anvil had two men down and was working on a third.
Diesel was trading blows with a heavyset crew member near the second bay.
Talley — brave, stupid Talley — had come through the side door and was swinging a tire iron at a man twice his size with more courage than technique.
Dana's truck pulled into the lot. Squall saw it through the bay door in the middle of a fight he couldn't afford to look away from, and the fear that went through him was so sharp it almost cost him.
Deane seized the opening. He grabbed a pry bar off the floor and swung it at Squall's head.
Squall ducked. The bar hit the lift column behind him and the vibration sang through the whole structure.
He came up inside Deane's reach and hit him — three shots, ribs, solar plexus, jaw — driving the enforcer back across the floor toward the ruined tool rack.
Deane stumbled on a scattered socket set and went to one knee.
He reached for his ankle. A second weapon. Of course.
Dana came through the bay door with a four-foot breaker bar in both hands.
She didn't hesitate. She didn't scream. She swung the breaker bar into Deane's reaching arm with the full-body rotation of a woman who'd spent her life torquing bolts, and the crack of the impact echoed off the walls. Deane's arm folded wrong and the backup pistol skidded away unfired.
He looked up at her. The cold, professional calm in his eyes broke for the first time — not pain, but surprise. The surprise of a man who'd underestimated a target and was paying for it.
Squall pulled his own weapon.
"You took a man off his porch," he said. "You burned her shop. You came back to finish it." He leveled the gun at Deane's chest. "Wrong waterfront."
He fired twice.
Deane went backward onto the concrete and didn't move.
The shop went quiet in stages — the fighting dying out as Meer's crew saw their leader down and the math changed.
Two tried to run and Wraith materialized at the bay door to convince them otherwise.
Three more dropped what they held and put their hands up.
Anvil stood over two unconscious men and one who was conscious enough to wish he wasn't.
Squall stood over Deane's body with the gun still in his hand and the taste of plaster dust in his throat and looked at Dana.
She was standing three feet away, the breaker bar still in her grip, her chest heaving, her eyes wide and dark and blazing.
There was a cut on her forearm where a piece of flying debris had caught her, and her knuckles were white on the bar's shaft, and she looked like a woman who'd just done the hardest thing she'd ever done and hadn't blinked.
"You were supposed to stay in the truck," he said.
"He was going for a gun."
"I know."
"So I hit him."
"I know."
He reached out and took the breaker bar from her hands. She let him. Her fingers were shaking now — the adrenaline crash starting, the tremor that comes after the body realizes what it just did. He set the bar on the floor and took her hands in his, and she gripped him hard enough to hurt.
"You're bleeding," she said, looking at his temple.
"You're bleeding," he said, looking at her arm.
"We match."
He pulled her against him. Right there in the middle of her destroyed shop, with Deane's body on the floor and the brotherhood securing the room and the bay doors open to the harbor and the first gray light of dawn showing on the water.
He held her and she held him back, and the shaking in her hands transferred into his chest and became something that felt like a heartbeat they were sharing.
Diesel appeared beside them, breathing hard, a split lip darkening his chin. He surveyed the damage: the lift torn apart, the bench overturned, tools scattered, the second bay — the one she'd fought to save from the fire — now gutted by crowbars and bats.
"How bad?" Squall asked without letting go of Dana.
"Shop's trashed. Both bays, the bench, the hydraulics. They went through it with intent." Diesel paused. "We've got one brother hurt — Talley took a hit to the ribs. Nothing broken. Meer's crew, eight down, Deane's done."
"Meer wasn't here."
"No. He sent his dog and his dog is dead."
Squall looked at the devastation around them. The shop that Dana had reopened on one bay after a fire, that she'd restocked from three suppliers in twenty minutes, that she'd refused to abandon when every smart move said to walk away — reduced to wreckage for the second time in a week.
Dana pulled back from his chest and looked at it too. He watched her face for the break — the moment when the cumulative weight of it finally cracked the foundation. The fire, the kidnapping, the supply chain, and now this. Any other person would have folded by now.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. One pass. Quick. Done.
"I'm going to need new lifts," she said.