Chapter 18
The call came at two in the morning.
Marley fumbled for her phone in the dark, still half-asleep, and answered without checking the number. "Hello?"
She sat up. Wake stirred beside her, instantly alert, his hand finding her hip in the darkness.
"What kind of disturbance?"
A pause. "I think you should come see for yourself, ma'am."
The line went dead.
Marley stared at the phone in her hand, her heart dropping into her stomach like a stone into still water. She knew what that pause meant. Knew what that careful, official tone was trying not to say.
"Marley." Wake's voice was low, urgent. "What is it?"
"The bar." The words came out flat, distant. Like someone else was saying them. "Something happened at the bar."
They were dressed and out the door in three minutes. Wake took his bike, Marley took her truck, and they drove through the dark Ozark night without speaking. The back roads were empty, the trees closing in like walls, and Marley pushed the accelerator harder with every mile.
Please let it be a break-in. Please let it be vandals, kids, something small.
She knew it wasn't.
The deputy's car was parked in the lot when they arrived, lights flashing red and blue across the gravel. Two other vehicles—one a neighbor's truck, the other a sedan she didn't recognize—sat near the entrance. The deputy himself was standing by the front door, his face grim in the strobing lights.
"Miss Boone." He nodded as she approached. "I'm sorry. We got the call about an hour ago from a neighbor who heard the commotion. By the time we got here, they were gone."
"They?"
The deputy stepped aside and let her see.
The door was off its hinges. Marley walked through the frame and stopped, her boots crunching on broken glass.
They'd destroyed everything.
The bar top—the solid oak surface her uncle had built with his own hands, the one she'd wiped down ten thousand times—was split down the middle like someone had taken an axe to it.
Every bottle behind the bar was shattered, liquor pooling on the floor in sticky lakes of amber and gold.
The mirror that had hung on the back wall for thirty years was cracked into a spider web of fractures, and sprayed across it in red paint was a crude boar's head.
Razorback.
Marley moved deeper into the wreckage. The pool table was slashed, felt hanging in ribbons, pockets ripped out.
Tables were overturned, chairs broken into kindling.
The jukebox—that ancient Wurlitzer that only played country and had been singing sad songs since before she was born—lay on its side with its glass front smashed in, silent for the first time in her memory.
She heard Wake come in behind her. Heard his sharp intake of breath.
"Marley—"
"Don't." The word came out colder than she'd meant it. Colder than she'd known she could sound. "Just... don't."
She walked through the devastation, stepping over broken glass and splintered wood, cataloging the damage with numb precision.
Cash register smashed. Kitchen door kicked in.
Coolers emptied and tipped over. They'd even gone after the photographs on the walls—pictures of her uncle, of regulars, of thirty years of the Anchor's history—ripping them down and stomping them into the debris.
Everything. They'd destroyed everything.
Wake appeared at her side, close but not touching. She could feel the tension radiating off him—the fury he was holding back, the protective rage that wanted to wrap around her and shield her from this.
But there was nothing to shield her from. The damage was done. The bar she'd fought to save, the only home she'd ever known, was lying in pieces around her feet.
"Samples," Wake said quietly. "The young one. Maddox's attack dog."
"You're sure?"
"The tag." He nodded toward the spray-painted boar on the mirror. "That's his signature. He marks territory. Likes people to know who hurt them."
Ty Samples. Marley remembered him—the jumpy one who'd grabbed her bourbon that first night, the one who'd leaned too close and talked too loud. The one Maddox called off like a dog on a leash.
The leash was off now.
"How many?" she asked.
"Probably eight, maybe nine. Enough to do this in an hour and disappear before the law showed up."
Marley bent down and picked up a photograph from the debris. Her uncle, maybe twenty years younger, standing behind the bar with a beer in his hand and a grin on his face. The glass was cracked. The frame was broken. But his face was intact, smiling up at her like nothing had changed.
I kept it open for you, she thought. I held on when everyone said to let go. And this is what I get.
"Miss Boone?" The deputy had followed them inside, picking his way carefully through the wreckage. "I'll need a statement. And if you have any idea who might have—"
"I know who did this." Marley's voice was still cold. Still distant. "Nomad bikers called the Razorbacks. Led by a man named Colt Maddox. The one who did the actual damage is named Ty Samples."
The deputy blinked. "That's... very specific."
"They've been trying to take this bar for weeks." She set the photograph down on what remained of the bar top, propping it against a broken bottle. "This is their way of saying they're done asking."
"I'll file a report, but—" The deputy looked around helplessly. "Without witnesses, without evidence, there's not much we can do."
"I know."
Marley walked away from him, deeper into the wreckage.
She heard Wake talking to the deputy in low tones—probably explaining that the Ridgerunners would handle it, probably warning him to stay out of the way—but she didn't care.
Didn't have room to care about anything except the destruction around her.
The back of the bar was worse than the front. The stockroom was gutted, boxes torn open and scattered across the floor. The tiny office where she'd done her books and paid her bills was ransacked, papers everywhere, the old desk her uncle had used for decades overturned and splintered.
But in the corner, wedged behind a fallen shelf, she saw something.
A bottle.
Marley crouched down and reached for it, her fingers closing around cool glass. She pulled it out and held it up to the dim light filtering through the broken windows.
Her uncle's private reserve. The eighteen-year bourbon he'd bought to celebrate something—she couldn't remember what—and never opened. He'd always said he was saving it for a special occasion. And then he'd died before that occasion ever came.
She'd kept it behind the bar for three years. A memorial. A reminder. A promise that someday, when things were good enough, she'd finally pop the cork and toast to his memory.
The bottle was intact. The only thing in the entire bar that had survived.
Wake found her there, crouched in the wreckage with the bottle in her hands. He didn't say anything. Just stood there, waiting, giving her space to feel whatever she needed to feel.
Marley stood up slowly.
Something had shifted inside her. Something that had been holding on, fighting, refusing to give up—it hadn't broken. It had hardened. Crystallized into something cold and sharp and absolutely certain.
She looked around at the ruins of her bar. At thirty years of history torn apart in one night. At the Razorback tag on the mirror and the broken jukebox and the photographs scattered like trash across the floor.
Then she looked at Wake.
His face was tight with barely contained fury. She could see it in his jaw, his shoulders, the way his hands kept curling into fists. He wanted to hurt someone. Wanted to make Samples pay for every shattered bottle and broken chair and destroyed memory.
Good. She wanted that too.
"Marley," he said carefully. "We don't have to do anything tonight. We can—"
She twisted the cap off the bourbon and took a long drink.
It burned going down. Eighteen years of oak and smoke and her uncle's memory, filling her chest with fire. She lowered the bottle and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
"It's time," she said.
Wake's eyes met hers. She watched understanding dawn—watched him recognize the cold fury that had replaced her grief.
"You sure?"
"Samples came after my bar." Marley's voice was flat, certain, colder than she'd ever heard it.
"He came after my uncle's memory. He came after the one thing I've spent three years holding onto.
" She set the bottle down on the ruined bar top with a decisive thunk.
"I want him dead. And I want to be there when it happens. "
Wake was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded.
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"You're mine." He stepped closer, framing her face with his hands, those lake-water eyes burning into hers. "That means your enemies are my enemies. Your war is my war." His thumbs brushed her cheekbones. "You want Samples? We'll give you Samples."
Marley leaned into his touch. "Tonight?"
"Tomorrow night. We need to find him first." His jaw tightened. "But I promise you—that bastard won't see another sunrise."
She kissed him. Hard and fierce, tasting bourbon and rage and the promise of violence.
"Good," she said against his mouth.
She pulled back and looked around her bar one more time. At the wreckage. At the destruction. At the end of everything she'd fought to hold onto.
Then she picked up the bourbon, tucked it under her arm, and walked out the door.
There was nothing left to save here. The only thing left was revenge.
And she intended to get it.