Chapter 14
The tire shop gave him the truck.
Not willingly. Mitchell's didn't hand out customer information to bikers who showed up after midnight with blood in their eyes. But Mitchell owed the club a favor from last spring, and Forge had a way of reminding people what favors meant.
Gray Dodge Ram. Registered to a rental agency that leased to parolees the regular companies wouldn't touch. Forge ran the plates through the compound's system and had an address in eleven minutes.
Isolated. Quiet. The kind of place a man chose when he didn't want neighbors asking questions.
Trauma rode with Forge and Static, three bikes cutting through Fayetteville's empty streets at 1:30 AM. No headlights until they hit the main road. No comms until they needed them. Three men who'd spent combined decades moving through darkness toward people who deserved what was coming.
They killed their engines a quarter mile out and walked the rest.
The house was small—clapboard siding, tin roof, a sagging porch lit by a single bulb that attracted moths and not much else. The gray Dodge sat in the driveway, engine cold. One window glowed yellow in the back of the house.
Kitchen.
Trauma signaled. Forge circled left toward the back door. Static posted at the tree line, covering the driveway and the only road out.
Nobody was leaving this house tonight.
Trauma moved up the porch steps, testing each board for creaks. The front door was unlocked—sloppy, arrogant, the mistake of a man who thought he was the scariest thing in Fayetteville.
He wasn't.
The living room was bare. Mattress on the floor. Fast food wrappers. A duffel bag half-packed with clothes. Jarrett lived like a man ready to run at any moment—no roots, no possessions, nothing tying him to a place he'd burn down without thinking twice.
The smell hit him three steps from the kitchen.
Gasoline.
Trauma's jaw locked. He drew his sidearm and moved.
The kitchen was a bomb factory.
Six five-gallon cans of gasoline lined against the far wall, red plastic gleaming under the overhead bulb.
Beside them, a cardboard box stuffed with rags—some dry, some already soaked and sealed in plastic bags.
A road map of Fayetteville lay open on the counter, Amy's diner circled in black marker with arrows marking the building's corners and a note scrawled in the margin: Start at the kitchen. Grease fire covers the accelerant.
Jarrett stood at the sink, his back to the doorway, wringing out another rag over a bucket of gasoline.
Calm. Methodical. Humming something tuneless while he prepared to burn Amy's life to the ground.
"Step away from the counter."
Jarrett's hands went still. The rag dripped into the bucket. He didn't turn around.
"I was wondering when you'd show up," he said.
"Step away."
"You know what's funny?" Jarrett set the rag down—slow, deliberate. "Kyle said you'd come. Said you'd track me down after the diner visit. He wanted you to."
"Then Kyle's going to be disappointed with the results."
Jarrett turned.
He was smiling.
That dead-eyed, empty expression Amy had described—the man who sat in booths without ordering, who left photographs of graves on tables, who enjoyed fear the way normal people enjoyed food. But underneath the stillness, something was coiled. Ready.
"You think killing me stops anything?" Jarrett said. "Kyle's got seven men left. He's got plans you haven't found yet. He's got—"
"He's got a dead man talking."
Jarrett's hand moved.
Fast—faster than Trauma expected from a wiry frame that looked built for patience, not speed. The knife came from behind his back, a fixed-blade tactical piece he'd been palming since he heard the floorboards creak.
He lunged.
Trauma caught his wrist and redirected the blade, but Jarrett was already twisting, rotating his body, using momentum to wrench free. The knife slashed across Trauma's forearm—shallow, burning, a line of fire from elbow to wrist.
The gun was wrong for this. Too close, too tight, the kitchen too small for clean shots with gasoline cans three feet away.
Trauma holstered it and closed the distance.
Jarrett slashed again—a horizontal arc aimed at Trauma's throat. Trauma ducked under it and drove his fist into Jarrett's ribs. Bone flexed. Jarrett grunted but didn't fold, spinning the knife into a reverse grip and stabbing downward.
The blade caught Trauma's shoulder. Punched through leather and muscle and scraped bone.
Pain exploded white-hot down his arm.
He grabbed Jarrett's knife hand with both of his and squeezed.
Bones ground together. Jarrett screamed—a sharp, animal sound that echoed off the kitchen walls. The knife clattered to the linoleum.
Trauma didn't let go.
He drove Jarrett backward into the counter, into the map of Amy's diner with its careful markings and its arson notes, and slammed his head into the edge hard enough to crack the laminate.
Jarrett sagged. Blood sheeted from a gash above his ear.
But he was still smiling.
"She's going to burn," he slurred. "Maybe not tonight. Maybe not you. But Kyle won't stop. He'll send someone else. Someone worse than me—"
"There's nobody worse than you."
"You'd be surprised."
Trauma picked up the knife from the floor.
Jarrett's eyes tracked the blade. The smile faltered—not much, just a crack in the mask, the first real emotion he'd shown since Trauma walked in.
Fear.
Good.
"You went to her diner," Trauma said. "Sat in her booth. Left a picture of her aunt's grave."
"Kyle told me to—"
"Kyle's not here." Trauma stepped closer. "Kyle sent you. Kyle always sends someone else—Trent, Clint, you. He doesn't have the guts to face what's coming, so he sends men to do what he's too scared to do himself."
"He's not scared of you."
"He should be."
Trauma looked at the gasoline cans. Six of them. Thirty gallons. Enough to turn the diner into a crater, to destroy everything Amy's aunt had built, everything Amy had fought to keep.
Start at the kitchen. Grease fire covers the accelerant.
Jarrett hadn't just been planning arson. He'd been planning to disguise it—make it look like an accident, a grease fire that got out of control, the kind of thing insurance investigators would write off and police would file away.
He'd been planning to erase Amy's diner from existence.
And then leave her with nothing but a grave to visit.
"You took a picture of her aunt's headstone," Trauma said quietly.
"So?"
"So that was a mistake."
He moved.
Jarrett tried to block—hands up, desperate, the smile gone completely now. But he was dazed from the counter, bleeding from his scalp, his broken hand hanging useless at his side.
The knife went in below the sternum.
Up and in. The angle a combat medic knew by heart—the path between ribs, through diaphragm, into the organs that kept a man alive. Not the quick strike of a fighter. The precise cut of someone who understood exactly what a blade did to a body.
Jarrett's eyes went wide.
His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
No sound came out.
Trauma held him up—one hand on the knife, one hand on his shoulder—and watched the life drain from those dead eyes. Watched the stillness that had terrified Amy become permanent.
"That's for the photograph," he said.
Jarrett slid off the blade and hit the floor.
He didn't move again.
Trauma stood in the kitchen, blood dripping from his shoulder and his forearm, surrounded by gasoline cans and arson supplies and the body of a man who'd planned to burn his woman's diner to ash.
His hands were shaking.
Not from fear. Not from adrenaline. From the cold, absolute certainty that he would do this again—for her, for the diner, for the life she'd built from flour and stubbornness and her aunt's recipes.
He'd do worse.
The back door opened. Forge stepped in, took one look at the scene, and nodded.
"Kitchen's clear," Trauma said.
"I can see that." Forge moved to the gasoline cans, checking each one. "He was serious about this."
"Mapped the whole building. Had the fire pattern planned."
"The map stays. Police find this place, they find an arsonist with accelerants and a plan. Self-explanatory."
Trauma looked at Forge. "Since when do we leave evidence for police?"
"Since the evidence makes our job easier." Forge pulled out his phone. "Cleanup handles the body. The rest stays. Anonymous tip tomorrow morning. Cops find the gasoline, the map, the plan. They connect it to Kyle's crew—adds pressure from both sides."
Smart. Forge was always smart about the aftermath.
Static appeared in the doorway. "Driveway's clear. No movement on the road."
"Call it in," Trauma said. "I need to get to the diner."
"Brother." Forge caught his arm—the uninjured one. "Your shoulder needs attention."
"It can wait."
"It's deep."
"It can wait."
Forge held his gaze for a beat, then let go. He knew better than to argue with Trauma about wounds when Amy was the reason he was standing in a dead man's kitchen at 2 AM.
Trauma walked out of the house and into the Carolina night.
The pine trees stood black against a sky full of stars. His bike waited at the end of the dirt road, chrome catching moonlight. Blood ran warm down his arm, soaking into his sleeve, dripping off his fingertips into the red clay.
He'd deal with the shoulder later.
Right now, he had a diner to check.
The ride took eighteen minutes.
Trauma pulled into the lot at 2:45 AM and killed his engine. The building sat dark under the security lights, cameras blinking from the corners, the new motion sensor flicking on as he crossed the gravel.
He walked the perimeter first.
Every door. Every window. Every corner where the building met the ground. He checked the locks Amy had installed, tested the frames, ran his hands along the walls looking for signs of tampering.
Nothing.
The diner was intact. Standing. Safe.
He pressed his palm flat against the front door—the same door Amy had repainted to cover Kyle's message, the same door she opened every morning at six to feed soldiers and nurses and the insomniacs who needed somewhere to go.
The paint was smooth under his hand. Solid.
Behind him, the sky was starting to lighten at the edges. Pink and gray, the first hint of a Carolina dawn that would bring Amy down this road in her beat-up Camry with the dented fender and the bumper sticker that said Pie Fixes Everything.
She'd open the door. Fire the grill. Start the coffee.
And she'd never know how close she came to losing all of it.
Trauma sat on the front steps, shoulder throbbing, blood drying on his hands, and watched the sun come up over the parking lot.
Three down.
One to go.