Chapter 4
The cooler had been her pride.
Commercial grade, temperature-controlled, big enough to hold two hundred dollars worth of inventory and every wedding order for the next three weeks. Paige had spent six months saving for it, installed it herself with YouTube tutorials and stubborn refusal to pay contractor rates.
Now it lay in pieces across her shop floor.
Glass from the door scattered like ice chips. Roses trampled into pulp. Lilies crushed under boot prints. The refrigeration unit itself had been attacked with something heavy—sledgehammer, maybe, or a crowbar swung hard enough to crack the compressor housing.
They'd come sometime after dawn. She'd been upstairs packing when she heard the crash, and by the time she made it down with the baseball bat she kept by her bed, they were gone.
Nothing but destruction left behind.
Paige stood in the middle of her ruined shop and felt something cold settle in her chest. Not panic—she'd burned through panic years ago, somewhere on a road outside Kandahar when an IED turned the truck ahead of hers into scrap metal. This was different. Quieter.
Rage.
The bell over the door chimed, and she spun with the bat raised before her brain caught up to what her eyes were seeing.
Tourniquet filled the doorway, cutting off the morning light. His gaze swept the destruction—glass, flowers, the gutted cooler—and his expression went flat in a way that made the temperature in the room drop.
"When."
"Sometime in the last hour. I was upstairs."
He moved through the debris with careful steps, reading the damage the way she'd watched him read her the day before. His hand brushed the cracked compressor, came away wet with condensation and flower pulp.
"They weren't looking for quick." His voice was low, controlled. Dangerous. "This took time. They wanted you to see it."
"I see it."
"And?"
She lowered the bat. "And I'm not signing his goddamn papers."
Something flickered in his eyes—approval, maybe, or recognition. He pulled out his phone, dialed, spoke in clipped sentences she didn't try to follow. When he hung up, his attention was entirely on her.
"This changes the timeline. Greer's not waiting for you to crack—he's gutting your cash flow so you can't afford to fight. That cooler, those orders—"
"Three weddings this month." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Two hundred in perishable inventory. The cooler itself was eighteen hundred, and I still owe four payments."
"Insurance?"
"Deductible's a thousand. And my premiums will triple after a claim." She laughed, and it tasted bitter. "He's done the math. He knows exactly how much damage to cause before it's cheaper to sell than rebuild."
Tourniquet closed the distance between them. Not threatening—protective. His body angled toward the door like he expected Greer's crew to walk back in any second.
"Pack your tools. Your client files. Anything you can't replace." His hand found her elbow, grip firm but not painful. "We're leaving."
"I can't just—"
"You can, and you are." He turned her toward the stairs, and the authority in his voice brooked no argument. "That cooler was a message. The next message comes with fire, and you're not going to be here when it does."
She wanted to fight him. Every stubborn inch of her wanted to plant her feet and refuse to be moved from the ground she'd claimed.
But she'd driven convoys through ambush corridors. She knew the difference between holding a position and dying on pointless ground.
"Twenty minutes," she said.
"Ten."
She made it in eight.
Her hands moved on autopilot—client binder, laptop, the lockbox with three months of receipts.
Tools she'd accumulated over four years: pruning shears, floral tape, the wire cutters her mother had given her when she'd announced she was opening a shop instead of re-enlisting.
Clothes went into a duffel. Everything else stayed.
When she came back downstairs, Tourniquet had gathered every salvageable arrangement into a plastic tub. Roses with broken stems, orchids that might survive if she got them into water soon, a bucket of lilies she'd been prepping for a funeral.
"You didn't have to do that."
"They're still alive." He lifted the tub like it weighed nothing. "Seemed wrong to leave them."
Something cracked in her chest. Just a little. Just enough to let something warm slip through.
She locked the door behind them—pointless, maybe, given the destroyed window, but the habit was too ingrained to break—and followed him to his truck. Not a bike today. A black pickup with mud on the wheel wells and enough cab space for her duffel, her tools, and a tub of half-dead flowers.
"Where are we going?"
"Safehouse. Twenty miles outside town, single road approach, forest on three sides." He opened the passenger door for her, and the gesture felt both old-fashioned and entirely natural. "Greer's people won't find you there."
"And if they do?"
His smile didn't reach his eyes. "Then they'll wish they hadn't."
She climbed in. The cab smelled like leather and pine, with something underneath—antiseptic, maybe. Medical supplies. The scent of a man who kept tourniquets in his glove box the way other people kept napkins.
He pulled onto Main Street, and Paige watched her shop shrink in the side mirror. Four years of work. Four years of proving she could build something that wasn't a convoy manifest or a casualty report.
Her phone buzzed. Then again. Then a third time.
"That's going to be the Hendersons," she said, pulling it from her pocket. "Their daughter's wedding is Saturday."
She answered on the fourth ring.
"Mrs. Henderson. Yes, I know. I'm aware there was—" She closed her eyes, centering herself. "There was an incident at my shop this morning. Some damage. No, the arrangements for Saturday are—"
She stopped. The arrangements for Saturday were crushed pulp on her floor.
"The arrangements are being handled. I have backup inventory, and I'll be working from an alternate location for the next few days. Yes. Yes, I understand how important this is. Your daughter's wedding will have every flower we discussed, exactly as planned. You have my word."
She hung up and immediately dialed the next number in her call log.
"Mr. Carver, this is Paige from Kirkland Flowers. I'm calling about your mother's memorial service. There's been a change of location for my operations, but I wanted to assure you that—"
Tourniquet drove in silence while she worked through her client list. One call after another, each one requiring the same steady voice, the same professional calm. Yes, there was damage. No, it wouldn't affect their orders. Yes, she had contingencies in place.
Lies, mostly. But lies that bought time.
The town fell away behind them. Pine trees closed in on both sides of the road, and the November sky hung low and gray, threatening snow that wouldn't come for another few weeks. Northern Minnesota in late autumn—beautiful and brutal in equal measure.
She finished her last call—a sympathy arrangement for a widow in Babbitt—and let the phone drop to her lap.
"How many orders are you going to lose?"
She turned to look at Tourniquet's profile. Strong jaw, focused eyes, hands steady on the wheel.
"Depends on how fast I can source replacement inventory.
I've got suppliers in Duluth who might be able to rush a shipment, but that's money I don't have and credit I've already maxed.
" She rubbed her eyes. "Three weddings, two funerals, a dozen everyday arrangements.
If I can salvage half of what's in that tub, I might be able to cover the funerals. The weddings..."
"We'll figure it out."
"We?" She raised an eyebrow. "You arranging flowers now?"
"I'm making sure you're alive to arrange them." His grip on the wheel tightened slightly. "The rest is logistics."
"Logistics." She laughed despite herself. "You sound like my CO."
"Worse ways to sound."
The road curved, and a turnoff appeared—unmarked, half-hidden by overgrown brush. Tourniquet took it without slowing, the truck handling the rough terrain like it was built for exactly this purpose.
The trees opened into a clearing. A cabin sat at the far end, simple and solid, with a covered porch and windows that looked recently reinforced. Solar panels on the roof. A generator housing beside the door. No other structures visible, no other roads leading in.
"Home sweet safehouse," Tourniquet said.
He parked and killed the engine, but didn't move to get out. Instead, he turned to face her, one arm draped over the steering wheel.
"You handled those calls like nothing was wrong."
"Something's very wrong." She met his eyes. "But my clients don't need to carry that. They've got weddings and funerals and lives that don't stop because some contractor decided to destroy my cooler."
"Compartmentalization."
"Survival skill."
His gaze held hers for a long moment. Something passed between them—recognition, maybe. Understanding.
"I spent four deployments watching men die and then eating dinner like nothing happened," he said quietly. "Because the ones who weren't dead still needed me functional."
"And now?"
"Now I restock med kits at two in the morning because if I stop preparing, I have to start feeling."
The words hung in the cab, heavy and honest.
Paige reached out and touched his hand where it rested on the wheel. Brief contact. Acknowledgment.
"Compartmentalization," she said.
"Survival skill," he agreed.
Then he opened his door and stepped into the cold November air, and the moment passed like it had never happened.
But she felt it settle somewhere in her chest, warm against the rage.
A man who understood.
She grabbed her duffel and followed him toward the cabin, her phone already buzzing with another client call she'd return once she was inside.
The work didn't stop. It never stopped.
But for the first time since Greer's name had entered her life, she wasn't carrying it alone.