I moved and I didn't think about it whether it was a good idea before I did it. I came around the counter with the bat in both hands, swung at him, and the impact caught him across the shoulder as he threw himself sideways off the stool. He hit the floor, the stool crashed over, and for one perfect second I was standing over him with the bat raised and the fury of several generations of Lanes in my arms.
One of the men by the door grabbed me from behind. Arms around my chest, lifting me off my feet, the bat jerked out of my hands. I kicked, connected with his shin, heard him swear. The other one came in from the side, got hold of my arm, and between them they had me, my feet off the ground, my arms pinned, the bat clattering away across the floor.
The older Jackal got up. Rubbed his shoulder. Looked at me with an expression that had shifted from boredom to something colder.
"That," he said, "was stupid."
He walked past me toward the jukebox. My grandmother's jukebox, the one she'd loaded with songs all those years ago, the one that still played Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, and all the music she'd loved. He looked at it for a second. Then he put his boot through the front of it.
The glass shattered. The machine screamed, a distorted wail of damaged electronics, then went silent. He kicked it again, harder, and the whole unit rocked backward, crashed against the wall, and something inside it broke with a sound that was final.
I screamed at him. Words I don't remember, fury I couldn't contain, fighting against the arms that held me. The man holding my right arm twisted it, pain shot up to my shoulder, I gasped, and he twisted harder and I stopped fighting because if he went further something was going to break.
"Hold her there," he said.
He walked through the stop. Methodically, room by room, and he was destroying it. The pie case, the stools, the shelves behind the counter. The photographs on the wall, my grandparents at the opening in 1974, my grandfather shaking hands with the first trucker who'd ever pulled in. Glass breaking, wood splintering, the systematic dismantling of everything I owned.
The two men holding me didn't speak. They held me in the middle of the room while the sounds came from every direction and I stood there and listened to my life being torn apart. The rage was so hot, so huge, it was almost calm. A white-hot stillness at the center of something enormous.
The man from the kitchen came back through. His knuckles were bleeding, his boots wet. He'd broken the pipes. Water was running, the hiss of it spraying across the kitchen floor, and the fryer oil would be spreading with it I was sure, the whole back of the building turning into a slick, ruined mess that would take weeks to clean if it could be cleaned at all.
The gray-bearded Jackal came back to the main room. He stood in front of me, close, his face level with mine.
"This is what happens," he said. "Not the window. Not a warning. This. And the next time, it won't be the building."
He put his hand on my face. He held my jaw, his fingers digging into my cheeks, forcing me to look at him, and the intimacy of the grip was a violation that went deeper than pain. He held me there, those dead eyes on mine, and said, "The Angel can't protect you. His club can't protect you. You are alone in thisbuilding on the far side of nowhere. We can come here anytime we want, do anything we want and no one is coming to save you. Do you understand?"
I spat in his face.
He didn't flinch. Wiped his cheek with the back of his hand. Looked at what was on it. Looked at me.
"Burn it," he said, without breaking eye contact with me
One of the men moved toward the kitchen. I heard the click of a lighter and the terror hit me so hard my vision went gray because they were going to do it, they were actually going to do it, the oil on the floor, the gas line to the cooker, my grandparents' building, fifty years of Lane's on the highway.
I fought. Harder than before, harder than I knew I could. I wrenched my arm free from one of them, swung my elbow into his face, felt the crunch of cartilage. He staggered back, blood pouring from his nose, and I was free for one second, two, lunging for the bat on the floor.
The other one tackled me. I hit the ground hard, the air driven out of my lungs, his weight on my back, my face against the floor of my truck stop, and smoke was in the air. Faint, chemical, the first breath of something catching in the kitchen, and the man's knee was in my spine, my hands were pinned, I couldn't move, and the smoke was getting stronger. I knew, this was it. This was how it all ended, and there was nothing I could do about it.
SIX
ROOK
Church ran longer than expected because I needed to make sure everyone was briefed and we needed a plan.
I laid out everything. The Jackals working the truck stop, the broken window, the threat, the escalation. I laid out the route they were running, the business they were pushing through Lexie's place, the pattern of visits I'd mapped from her descriptions. I gave the table intel, clean and thorough, the way I'd been trained, and I watched Angel's face stay perfectly still while his hands went white on the edge of the wood.
The vote was unanimous. The discussion was short. When Angel said "we ride," it was a formality. The brothers were already standing.
We were gearing up in the lot when my phone rang. Billy Hancock, calling from a number I'd given him two days ago with instructions to use it if anything happened at the stop while I was gone.
“Lots of bikers, they just pulled in," Billy said. His voice was tight, clipped, the voice of a man apparently watching from across the road and wishing he could do more. “They went inside. I can hear breaking glass, I have no clue what they are up to, but Lexie is inside and it doesn’t sound good.”
I was on my bike before he finished talking. The engine kicked over and Ghost was beside me, already rolling, his face blank and ready in a way that meant someone was about to have a very bad day. Behind us the lot erupted, engines firing in sequence, Razor, Priest, Duke, Doc, Angel bringing up the rear. The compound emptied.
The highway from the compound to Lexie's stop was eighteen minutes at the speed limit. I was determined to make it in far less. The road was a blur of asphalt and pine. The mountains didn't exist, the sky didn't exist, and the only thing in the world needing to get to her quicker than should be possible.
I knew. Like I always knew, the pattern assembling itself behind my eyes while my hands worked the throttle. The timing of their move, after their threat, they came after I left and when I went to church. They'd known. They'd waited for me to leave because a patched Angel in the building complicated the math, and they'd moved the moment they weren’t going to get challenged. I'd walked into it and I'd left her alone because I needed the club behind me. But they'd used that against her, and every mile of highway between the compound and the stop was a mile of failure in my eyes.