Page 41 of Property of the Bikers

She finishes her tea, sets the mug on the table, and squeezes my hand once, briefly, on her way out. The door clicks shut.

I get ready for bed slowly, moving through the new bathroom with its unfamiliar layout, brushing my teeth at the new sink, and looking at my reflection in the new mirror. The same face that looked back at me from Viktor’s bathroom mirror two weeks ago, sharper now maybe, or just tired in a way that reads as sharp.

I get into the new bed, pull the wool blanket up, lie in the dark, and listen to the compound settle into its night. The baby moves, a slow, comfortable roll, and I rest my hand on my stomach and close my eyes.

Through the window, the south-facing sky is clear and salted with stars, and the mountains are dark shapes at the edge of everything, patient and permanent and entirely indifferent to what happens in this compound or any other.

I think about the guard rotation.

It’s a small thing. The north circuit ran twenty minutes late tonight, the flashlights appearing on the fence line at nine forty instead of nine twenty, where they’ve been every night since I arrived.

I watched from the window, noticed, looked for the reason, and found one easily enough. Two men, a schedule adjustment, Ghost covering a gap. Reasonable. Documented, probably, in whatever system Reeve runs.

A twenty-minute variance in a rotation that has run on time every night for two weeks.

I find the reasonable explanation. I hold it, I close my eyes, and I let myself have the quiet because I’m tired and the baby is well and my blood pressure is down and the mountains are still there, and for forty-eight hours nothing has been wrong.

Chapter Nineteen

REEVE

My phone goes off at three fourteen in the morning, and I’m sitting up before I’m fully awake.

That’s not a trained response. It’s just what happens when you’ve spent enough years in situations where a phone going off at three in the morning means something has already happened and the call is the notification rather than the warning. Your body learns the difference between a phone ringing at noon and a phone ringing at three in the morning, and it responds accordingly before your brain has finished loading.

I look at the screen.

Ghost. Two words in the message below his name. Auto shop.

I’m dressed in four minutes and in my truck in five and pulling through the compound gate in six, and the road to the auto shop is twelve minutes at this hour with no traffic. I make it in nine.

I see the glow before I see the building.

It’s not a full fire by the time I arrive. Ghost got the call earlier, the rotation men spotted it on their circuit, and the volunteer fire department out of Millhaven has already had a crew on it for forty minutes.

What’s left is the aftermath of a fire that burned hot and fast and has now been reduced to a building that is structurally standing but functionally destroyed, the walls black and wet, the roof of the main bay collapsed inward, the smell of it reaching me through the closed windows of my truck before I’ve pulled off the road.

I park behind the fire department vehicles and get out.

Ghost is standing on the gravel lot in front of the building, talking to one of the firefighters, a young man in full gear holding a clipboard, and Ghost has the expression he wears when he’s absorbing information he doesn’t like and isn’t going to show that he doesn’t like it. He sees me cross the lot, ends the conversation with a nod, and walks toward me.

“Both bays,” he says. “Workshop, storage, the office at the back. Total loss on the equipment inside. The exterior walls held, but the interior is gone.” He looks at the building. “The fire department is calling it accidental pending investigation. Electrical fault in the workshop.”

“It wasn’t electrical,” I say.

“No,” Ghost says. “It wasn’t.”

I walk toward the building.

The fire department has the perimeter taped, and a firefighter moves to stop me at the tape line. I show him the documentation that identifies me as a co-owner of the property, and he steps back.

I duck under the tape and walk toward the nearest entry point, the side door of the main bay, which is standing open and leads into a space that used to be a functional workshop and is now a landscape of blackened metal and collapsed timber and the particular debris of a fire that burned everything it could reach.

I don’t go inside. I stand at the threshold and look.

You learn to read fires the same way you learn to read anything else, by looking at enough of them to understand the vocabulary. A fire that starts from a single source and spreads outward has a pattern. It burns hottest at the origin point, and the damage radiates from there, lighter at the edges, heavier at the center, the story of it written in the gradient of the destruction.

This fire doesn’t have that pattern.