By the time the third vase hit the floor, I knew this wasn’t random.
Glass burst against the tiles like gunshots, water and stems skidding across the floor. The air, which should have smelled like roses and eucalyptus and that faint green note of fresh stems, reeked of sweat and cheap cologne and something metallic I didn’t want to name.
“Please—” My voice scratched out of me before I could stop it. “I can pay, just— just take the register and go.”
The tallest of the three men turned. Black mask, black jacket, gloved hands. All anonymous, except for the way he moved—efficient, bored. Like wrecking my shop was just another task, something he’d forget by dinner.
“This isn’t about money, sweetheart,” he said. His voice was muffled but smooth. He picked up a bucket of white lilies and flung it sideways. Water slapped cold against my ankles. “It’s about a message.”
My fingers dug into the counter so hard they hurt. “A message to who?”
He smiled under the mask. I couldn’t see it, but I felt it. “He’ll know.”
Behind him, the shortest one kicked over my workbench. Foam blocks, wire cutters, ribbon, the boutonnières I’d been making for a teenager’s prom—everything scattered in a slow-motion spray that made my throat close.
Not the bench. I’d sanded that wood myself. I’d painted these walls, scrubbed this floor, fought the landlord for a secondhand refrigeration unit that barely held temperature.
“Stop,” I choked, taking a step out from behind the counter before common sense snapped at my heels. Three of them. One of me. The front door’s bell had already given up, hanging broken on one hinge.
The tall man’s gaze slid down me—jeans, flour-dusted sneakers, apron with my shop’s logo bleeding under a smear of dirt. “You’re lucky, Miss Hart.”
He knew my name.
Ice crawled under my skin. “How—”
“Wrong place, wrong time. But you stay behind the counter, don’t call the cops, don’t do anything stupid…” He shrugged. “Maybe the boss keeps liking you alive.”
“Your boss?” My voice jumped an octave. “Who is your boss?”
He laughed, a low sound. One of the others slapped a spray of carnations off their hooks, petals ripping like soft paper.
“You don’t want that answer.” The tall man took one last slow look around, as if assessing his artwork. “Tell him we were… persuasive.”
“Tell who?” Frustration burned through the fear. I wanted a name to pin this to, something solid to hate.
He crooked his head, thoughtful. “You really don’t know, do you?”
The shop door opened with a metallic shriek. For a second I thought it was another one of them, a fourth mask. My stomach plunged.
It wasn’t.
The man in the doorway didn’t wear a mask. He didn’t need one.
He filled the entrance without even trying, dark suit cutting clean lines against the morning light. The street noise outside—buses, a distant siren, some kid’s bicycle bell—blurred to a hum behind him. He stepped over broken glass without looking down, and his eyes—dark, intent—took in everything at once. The overturned buckets. The lilies on the floor. Me.
Then his gaze cut to the tallest man.
“Out,” the newcomer said quietly.
No raised voice. No theatrics. Just a calm, clipped command that rolled through the shop like a cold wind.
