The air smells like char and chemicals and the specific acrid stink of a building that burned hot and fast.
And Tildie.
She's sitting on the back of an ambulance, a shock blanket around her shoulders, an oxygen mask hanging loose around her neck.
Her chocolate brown hair is singed on one side.
There's soot on her face, on her arms, on the freckles across her nose that are barely visible under the gray.
She's holding a cup of something and her hands are shaking.
I'm at her side before the truck is fully parked.
"Tildie." I'm in nurse mode before I even think about it. Hands on her shoulders, checking her pupils, her breathing, the singed hair for signs of scalp burns. "Look at me. Are you hurt? Did you inhale smoke?"
"I'm fine." Her voice is raw. Scratchy. She inhaled something whether she admits it or not. "I got out. I was in the back doing inventory when I smelled it. Grabbed my phone and went out the service door." Her eyes fill. "Leah, the bar. Ellie's bar. It's?—"
"I know. I see it. But you're alive and that's what matters right now."
Ruger's bike roars into the parking lot.
He's off it before it stops moving, helmet ripped off, crossing the distance to Tildie in strides that eat the ground.
He takes her face in his hands the way Coin takes mine—rough, gentle, desperate—and he doesn't say anything.
Just looks at her. Checks her. Breathes.
"I'm okay," Tildie says to him. "Ruger, I'm okay."
He doesn't answer, just pulls her against his chest and holds her, and over her head his eyes meet mine, and what I see in them is the same thing I saw in Coin's eyes in the parking garage.
The cold. The calculation. The quiet, lethal promise of a man deciding what happens next.
Ellie arrives twenty minutes later.
Someone called her.
She pulls up in her sedan, gets out, and stands in the parking lot looking at the smoldering remains of her life's work.
Backroads.
The bar she built from nothing.
The place where the club gathered, where Tildie found safety, where Ruger brought Bloodhound after the worst nights, where deals were made and grief was processed and family was held together over plates of food and glasses of whiskey.
Gone.
Some walls are standing but the inside is destroyed—black, hollowed out, still smoking.
Forty years of memories turned to char and rubble.
Ellie stands there for a long time.
I watch her, waiting for the tears, the breakdown, the grief.
She's earned it. God, she's earned it.
But, it doesn't come.
