Clara Bishop didn’t scare easy.
She’d spent two decades running Clara’s Bar & Grill, which was more battlefield than business most nights. She’d patched up black eyes in the women’s bathroom, thrown drunks out by their belt loops, and once—just once—shoved a shotgun under the bar when a bootlegger with a knife got too twitchy.
And when he’d tried to call her bluff, she hadn’t even blinked.
He had.
But as she stood in the narrow hallway behind the bar, staring at the apron still hanging on its hook—Vivienne’s apron, untouched since three nights ago—a different kind of weight curled low in her gut.
It wasn’t suspicion.
It wasn’t irritation.
It was dread.
Real, old-blood dread. The kind that didn’t come with a reason, just a certainty that something was wrong and it was too late to st
