Chapter 6

Silas was in his truck before the kid finished talking.

"Wade, get Reagan on the phone," he called over his shoulder, already moving. "Tell her not to go home if she's not there yet. Somewhere public. Now go."

He didn't wait to see if Wade had heard him right. He was already behind the wheel, already turning the key, and the engine caught with a roar that cracked off the fence line like a gunshot.

His hands weren't steady. He noticed that somewhere in the back of his mind, distant and strange, the way a person notices their own heartbeat only once it's pounding too hard to ignore. Ten minutes. Her apartment was ten minutes away if the lights cooperated, and tonight nothing was cooperating, red after red after red, every second feeling like it was being carved straight out of his chest.

His phone buzzed against the dashboard mount. Wade's name flashed on the screen. He hit speaker without slowing down.

"She's not picking up," Wade said, breathless, an engine already starting somewhere behind his voice.

"Try her again."

"I've tried twice, Silas—"

"Try her again." His voice cracked on the last word, and he hated how much it sounded like fear instead of command. "She has to pick up. She has to."

He ran the red light on Fifth Street with his palm flat against the horn. In his mirror, headlights swung hard out of the clubhouse lot behind him, gaining fast. Wade, on his own bike now instead of still standing frozen at the desk, and something in Silas eased half an inch knowing he wouldn't be walking into whatever waited for him completely alone.

He turned onto her street and the world tilted sideways for the second time in two days.

There was smoke. Thin and gray, curling up from somewhere behind the building instead of the front, nothing like the shop fire, nothing anyone driving past would notice unless they already knew to look. A single police cruiser sat angled against the curb, lights spinning silent and useless, no fire trucks yet, no ambulance, just one officer standing near the side alley with his flashlight raised toward the dark.

Silas didn't park the truck so much as abandon it in the middle of the road.

"Reagan!" Her name tore out of him before his boots hit the pavement. "Reagan, where are you—"

"Silas."

He spun so fast he nearly lost his footing.

She stood across the street wrapped in someone's borrowed jacket, her hair damp with sweat, her face pale but whole, entirely, blessedly whole, and whatever sound came out of his chest when he saw her wasn't a word at all. It was closer to the breath he'd been holding since the moment he read that text.

He crossed the street in four strides and had her in his arms before either of them decided that was allowed to happen, one hand curled against the back of her head, the other locked around her waist, holding on the way a man holds onto something he genuinely believed he might lose ten minutes ago.

"I'm okay," she said, muffled against his shoulder, shaking despite the words. "I wasn't inside. I was still at the coffee shop when it started. I'm okay, Silas."

"What happened." He pulled back only far enough to look at her, hands still braced on her arms like he needed the proof of her solid and real under his palms. "Tell me exactly what happened."

"Someone got into the storage unit behind the building." Her voice wavered, and she pressed a palm flat against her sternum like she was trying to hold something in place by force. "The one where I kept the extra inventory from Mom's shop, everything I'd managed to save before the first fire. It's gone. All of it. Burned on purpose, right when I would have been home if I hadn't left for the coffee shop tonight."

Something cold settled behind his ribs. "If you hadn't left when you did."

"I know." Her eyes lifted to his, wide and frightened in a way he'd never once seen on her, not even during the worst nights of her father's illness, not even at the hospital two nights ago. "This wasn't random, Silas. Whoever did this knew exactly where I'd be and exactly what I still had left to lose."

Wade's bike rolled up behind Silas's truck, engine cutting out fast, and he was off it and crossing the street before the kickstand had even fully caught.

"Officer over there says the fire stayed contained to the one storage unit," Wade said, low enough that only the three of them could hear him. "No other units touched. Whoever did this knew exactly which door to hit."

"Which means they knew which one was hers." Silas's jaw tightened, and beneath his hands he felt Reagan flinch, slightly, at the certainty in his voice. "This isn't Grant working alone anymore. This is somebody giving very specific instructions to somebody else, and Grant's never been sharp enough to plan something this precise."

"You think it's Ellery himself."

"I think we need to find Grant tonight, before he gets the chance to disappear the way his father taught him to."

Reagan's fingers tightened into a fistful of Silas's shirt, grounding herself against him without seeming to fully realize she was doing it. "He's not answering my calls. I tried three times on the way here."

"He wouldn't be." Silas kept one arm firmly around her, unwilling to let even a few inches of distance open between them again tonight. "Not if he already knows you found that phone. Not if he already knows what you know."

Wade's phone buzzed in his hand. He glanced down, and whatever color remained in his face drained out of it in an instant.

"What," Silas said. "What is it."

Wade turned the screen toward him without a word.

A photo, sent from a blocked number, no message attached at first glance. Grant's car, parked at the edge of an old industrial lot on the far side of town, the same lot the club used to store equipment years ago, long before Marcus Ellery ever came sniffing around their territory the first time.

Beneath the photo, a single line of text.

Tell your brother if he wants his answers, he knows where to find them. Alone.

Reagan's fingers dug harder into Silas's arm. "That's not from Grant. Is it."

Silas stared at the message for a long, silent moment, something ice-cold settling into the pit of his stomach, something telling him this had never been fully about Grant at all, not from the very beginning.

"No," he said quietly. "I don't think it ever was."