Silence. His eyes closed briefly.
“Fuck,” he said softly. “Damage report.”
The silence stretched. 8-Ball’s hands were fists at his sides. Jersey’s jaw was grinding so hard I could hear his teeth.
“Yeah,” Blackjack said finally. “Far side of the racks. Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been better. Anyone hurt?” a sigh of relief. “Good. Lock it down. Inventory everything. Whatever walked, we assume it’s going to be pointed at us.”
He hung up.
For a second, he just stood there in the yard surrounded by his men, phone hanging from his fingers.
Then he did something I wasn’t expecting. He laughed. Once. It wasn’t an amused one. It was the sound a man makes when something in his head snaps into place in exactly the way he’d hoped it wouldn’t.
“Strip club,” 8-Ball said quietly.
“Bar,” Spade added.
“Gunshop and armory,” Jersey finished.
Blackjack nodded.
“They firebombed Sin City’s front and shot the windows out,” he said. “The Lodge took rounds through the glass and doors so bad they’ll be finding shards for a year. Outlaw Armory got hit on its far wall. Glass, racks, some stock gone. No bodies.”
“They wanted that,” I said. “No body count. Just damage.”
“They threatened us to our faces,” Turnpike said from behind me, voice low. “While their friends went around town and took swings at every kind of money we make.”
He shook his head, lips curling.
“That’s deliberate,” 8-Ball said. “Message work. ‘We know your flesh. We know your liquor. We know your hardware.’ Three different income streams. Three broken fucking fingers.”
“Most people would bow after that,” Spade muttered. “Kiss the ring, say sorry, blame it all on a misunderstanding.”
Everyone looked at Blackjack.
He slid his phone back into his pocket. When he smiled, it was all teeth.
“Devils Aces don’t fold,” he said. “We double down.”
A low, vicious sound rolled through the yard. Agreement. Approval. Hunger.
I felt something inside my ribcage even answer it.
Libertyhad said once that war doesn’t make a man anything. It just shows you what he already is. Watching Blackjack in this moment, I believed it.
He turned to me and Jersey.
“This is going to get worse before it gets better,” he said. “Roman’s going to hear that his docks and his city aren’t the only things Tesauro’s playing with. He wanted a war. We’re going to give him one. But we’re not doing it blind.”
He looked back toward the road where the SUVs had vanished.
“They think they’re the only ones who know how to send messages,” he said. “They think they can bleed our businesses and scare us. They forgot the part where we can make them bleed back.”
The yard started moving again as orders were shouted—crews to go check on the clubs and armory, others to reinforce the gate, some to clean and reload and sit waiting.
I caught Jersey’s eye.
He looked different here than he had in my bunker back at the compound. Shoulders a little straighter. Jaw set. That same quiet heat in his gaze when it landed on me.
