“I should go,” she said, but she didn’t hang up.
“You should,” I agreed.
Neither of us moved.
“I miss you,” she finally said, so low I almost didn’t catch it.
My heart stuttered. Not the way it’s supposed to, but the way an engine does when it’s half frozen and somebody’s forcing the ignition. I swallowed hard, tracing the edge of the phone with my thumb.
“You’re not making this easier,” I said.
“You don’t make things easy,” she replied, and that was fair.
The radiator hissed, filling the silence with its own dying animal noises.
“They’re going to hurt you,” she said, voice back to a trembling whisper. “My father—he’s not what he seems, Axel. He’ll burn the whole town down to get at you. At us.”
“I know,” I said. “Let him try.”
“Why don’t you just leave?” she asked, and I heard the plea behind it.
“Because then he wins. And I’m tired of running.” I sat up, grinding my knuckles against my knees, like maybe if I hit myself hard enough, I’d stop feeling things. “I want you. That’s not a safe thing to want, but there it is.”
There was nothing but breathing on the line for a while.
“I want you too,” she said, “but I can’t be the reason you get killed.”
I grinned, split lip aching as it tore open again. “Your daddy’s men can beat me bloody every day, princess. I’m not backing down.”
She let out a sound that was half sob, half laugh. “You’re insane.”
“Wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”
This time, she hung up first. I sat there, listening to the absence of her voice, staring at the knife and the empty space beside me on the bed.
Maybe Vin was right, maybe I was a liability. But there was something about forbidden fruit that made me hungrier, and I knew—absolutely fucking knew—that I’d walk into the church naked and unarmed if it meant getting another hour with her.
I tossed the burner onto the mattress, rolled onto my back, and watched the ceiling cracks make constellations in the dark. They looked like fault lines to me, as if the whole building was just waiting to split open and swallow me down. I smiled anyway, blood running salty in my mouth.
Tomorrow, I’d be the one making the first move.
16
Axel
I’d been parked on my Harley outside the Fable Christian Church’s “charity distribution center” for three hours, just long enough for my tailbone to form a perfect mold of the leather. It was mid-September, the air sticky-sweet with ragweed and diesel, and every few minutes a skein of blue cigarette smoke drifted over from Shivs and DJ, who were doing surveillance from the world’s most conspicuous getaway van, a maroon 2001 Dodge Ram with “BASTARD’S AUTO REPAIR” airbrushed across the side in flaming script. Subtle as a dick joke at Sunday school.
Most people would say watching a warehouse at 2 a.m. is boring. Those people have never tried to sit absolutely still while hopped up on enough Monster energy to kill a horse, scanning for threats with one eye and praying the other doesn’t spasm from nicotine withdrawal. I had eyes on the main loading bay, noting the comings and goings, a rotation of white panel vans,no plates, always arriving in pairs and always trailed by a beat cop in an unmarked Crown Vic. The first time the cop got out to help offload boxes, I felt a stab of pity for anyone still dumb enough to believe in “good guys.”
I thumbed my burner and sent a two-word text—“Showtime soon”—to the Ram. Shivs responded with a string of knife emojis, which I interpreted as enthusiasm. DJ, who’d spent the last half hour silently eating dry ramen cakes, just nodded across the dash. They were the brains and brawn, respectively, and I’d drawn the short straw as cat burglar.
At 2:17, right on schedule, the night shift changed. The door guard—a slab-faced ex-altar boy named Connelly—wandered out to piss behind a dumpster. The second guard, who’d been scoping out camgirls on his phone, headed off to the break room. That left maybe ninety seconds for me to get in, get the dirt, and get out before the rotation snapped back. Shivs made a bird call from the open window of the van. I rolled my eyes but answered with a low whistle anyway, just to keep him from getting creative.
I ghosted across the gravel, sticking to shadows, every nerve humming like I’d licked a live wire. The loading-bay doors were locked, but the side entrance had a punch code lock—paranoid, but not enough to stop a bastard with a decent memory and a cell phone camera. Earlier that day, I’d watched an intern punch in the sequence while arguing with her boyfriend on speaker. 1953. The year of the church’s “rebirth,” according to the gold plaque bolted to the main gate. Religious people think symbolism is subtle; they’re wrong.
The door clicked open, and the air hit me. Sour ammonia, fryer oil, and something sharp underneath, like battery acid. I stepped in, boots silent on the concrete, and shut the door behind me with a soft snick. The warehouse was a football field of organized chaos: crates stacked twelve feet high, rowsof shrink-wrapped boxes, and in the far corner, a cluster of battered shipping containers that looked like they’d been pulled straight off a cartel pier in Tijuana. Light spilled from a half dozen sodium lamps overhead, painting everything in sickly orange.
I went straight for the crates, pulling my phone out to snap quick shots of any label that didn’t look like bulk food aid. The first one I cracked open was filled with AR-15s, each one bubble-wrapped and tagged with a church “donor” number. The serials were filed off, sloppily, like someone had started the job sober and finished it after three shots of Old Crow. I didn’t bother to check the next crate—same donor numbers, different shape. Inside: bricks of what looked like Sudafed, the kind you can’t even get over-the-counter anymore. Down the row, blue chemical drums, each with a smiling “Fable Christian Church” sticker as if that’d fool an EPA agent for half a second.
