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A silver Lexus was at her curb, in the space I usually parked. Her door was shut and the sign said CLOSED. Through the door glass I could see a pair of boots on the floor. The prospect, lying unconscious.

I put the bike on the sidewalk and went through that door with my shoulder. The lock tore out of the frame.

Brynn was on the floor by the chairs with blood on her mouth. A man in a ball cap stood over her. He turned with his hand going to his belt, and I hit him in the throat before the gun cleared. He folded. I took the gun off him and tossed it to Gage, who’d come through the door behind me.

Inés Cordero was backed up against the wall by the curtain, holding her purse in both hands. I went right past her, knowing Gage and my brothers outside wouldn’t let her get away.

The back room was wrecked. Her sewing machine was on the floor on its side. The rack was over, and there were hangers and thread from one end to the other, and her big shears lying open in a pool of blood. It looked like she’d thrown everything she owned at him.

Ava-Rose was against the far wall with her hair down around her face and her right wrist red and blistering. The driver stood with his back to me. He had her by the throat with his good hand. His other arm hung at his side, dripping blood on the floor.

I took him by the back of his collar and his belt and pulled him off her. I ran him through the curtain, across her shop floor and out the broken door into the street.

He was bigger than me, but I didn’t give a shit. I put him on his back in the road outside her shop.

The whole town was out. There were faces in every window on the street, watching the commotion.

My brothers had pulled up in a line along Main. They got off their bikes and stood beside them in their cuts, and they let me work.

I knelt on the driver’s chest and hit him.

I hit him for her window, for her slashed tires, and for the night she walked home with him crawling along behind her. He got his good arm up and I went through it. His nose went, then his cheek, and I kept going.

Then I took hold of his right hand. The one he’d had on her throat.

“I told you,” I said. It was the first thing I’d said since I walked in. “I told you what I’d do.”

I laid his hand flat on the curb and brought my boot heel down on it.

He screamed. I did it again, and I felt it go.

I’d have kept on. I know that about myself. I had his blood on my hands and I was nowhere near done. I’d already made my peace with how dangerous loving Ava-Rose was going to make me, and this man was about to understand just how dangerous that was.

As I lifted my fist in the air to go again, Lock got both arms around my chest from behind and tried to haul me off the man.

“Havoc, enough, brother. He’s done.”

With that, a hand touched my back. Small, flat between my shoulder blades.

“Havoc. I’m here. I’m all right. Look at me.”

I looked. Ava-Rose was standing in the street behind me with her burned wrist held against her chest. She was white as paper. She was looking at me, at all of it, the blood and what was on the ground. She’d seen exactly what I was and what I was capable of.

She kept her hand on me anyway.

I let go of him. Lock let go of me. I got to my feet with my hands split open and shaking with the adrenaline rush.

I was covered in another man’s blood. Half of Salvation was watching, and my sister was standing in the laundromat doorway with a split lip.

I took Ava-Rose’s face in my hands and kissed her.

Right there in the road. I kissed her the way I’d wanted to for years, in front of every person either of us had ever known, and she grabbed my cut in her fist and kissed me back. When I lifted my head there was blood on her cheek from my knuckles. I tried to wipe it off and made it worse.

“Mine,” I said, loud enough for the back row. “She’s my old lady. Anybody confused about that?”

Gage had walked Inés Cordero out onto the sidewalk by her elbow as she kept trying to shake him off and cussing him out in Spanish. The false smile was gone. Without it she was a tired woman in an expensive blouse, with a boss in Deming she had to go home to and explain that Salvation still couldn’t be bought.

Preacher stopped in front of her.