We all wore earpieces. Angel’s voice, calm and low, confirming positions.
Mia walked out the front door at ten in the morning and started arranging the flower buckets on the sidewalk.
Through the window in the back room door, she was visible.
She moved the buckets into position with the practiced ease of a woman who’d done this a thousand mornings, adjusting stems, tilting the displays toward foot traffic. She looked exactlylike what she was. A florist opening for business in a small Montana town.
But her hands were shaking. The tremor was visible from fifteen feet away, her grip on the bucket rims a fraction too tight. She was terrified and she was doing it anyway, and the combination put an ache in my chest that I couldn’t breathe around.
She came back inside. Took her position behind the counter. The bell rang as the door closed behind her.
“I think someone was watching me,” she said. She was addressing the room, the earpieces, the men concealed around her. Her voice was steady but her eyes were moving. “Across the street. A car I didn’t recognize.”
Rook’s voice came through the earpiece. Calm, clipped. “Confirmed. Dark sedan, Idaho plates, three occupants. They’re moving. ETA two minutes.”
Angel’s voice. “Positions. We’ve got company.”
The shop held its breath. Flowers in their buckets. The cooler humming. The whole place catching the morning light. A perfect reproduction of normalcy with armed bikers behind it.
I put my hand on the Sig at my hip and waited.
I heardthe car doors before the bell. Several sets of boots on the sidewalk, unhurried, the pace of men who’d done this work before and expected it to be simple. One woman alone in a flower shop. Walk in, finish the job, walk out.
The bell rang.
Three men. The one in front was tall with a shaved head and a jaw that had been broken and reset crooked. The two behind him were broader, younger, hired weight. All three worejackets despite the warm morning, the shape at their waistbands obvious to anyone who knew what to look for.
Mia was behind the counter. Standing. Hands flat on the surface, back straight. She looked at them the way she’d looked at every customer who’d ever walked through her door.
The tall one looked around the shop. His eyes moved over the flowers, the cooler, the ceiling. They stopped on the front windows.
“New glass,” he said. Smiled. “Looks good. Be a shame to have to replace it twice.”
“Can I help you with something?” Mia said.
He turned his full attention to her. The smile stayed but the eyes behind it were flat, professional, the eyes of a man sizing up a job.
“You’re a hard woman to put in the ground, Mia. Marco’s tired of waiting.”
The sound of her real name in this man’s mouth made my jaw lock.
“I know exactly what I cost Marco,” she said. “Twenty years to life in a cell. And he couldn’t get what he needed done with a compromised Marshal and a hundred thousand dollars. So he sent you. He must be desperate.”
The smile vanished. His jaw tightened and his right hand drifted to his waistband, fingers brushing the grip of whatever he was carrying. The two behind him read his body language and shifted their weight, hands moving, the room tipping toward the edge.
I came through the door.
No rush. Deliberate. I positioned myself behind Mia and to her right, close enough that she could feel me, close enough that every man in the room could see my hand on the Sig.
The tall one’s eyes locked onto me. The cut. The gun. My stance, weight forward, balanced, a man who’d spent six yearsdoing bad things to bad people and didn’t have to think about what came next.
His hand hovered at his waistband. Calculating.
“Don’t,” I said. Calm. “You won’t clear the holster before I put you on the floor. And even if you got past me, you won’t get past my brothers.”
His eyes narrowed. “What brothers?”
Ghost materialized from the storeroom doorway. One second empty, the next occupied. Pale eyes, flat expression, a shotgun held low against his thigh.
