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jedibuttercupPG-13; Fast & Furious. 5800 words. Letty/Dom, Brian/Vince; 4th of Much Ado About Racing.
When Letty woke in the morning to an empty bed and the cross necklace wound around a fat stack of cash on the nightstand, she knew they still had a long way to go.
Title: Alarums and Excursions
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Fixit for the opening of Fast & Furious, incorporating events from Los Bandoleros, the flashbacks in Furious 7, and a particular reveal from F9.
Notes: Continuing the theme of Shakespeare-style stage directions as titles for this series. I meant for the Letty POV part of this series to overlap with the start of Fast & Furious, but the last entry came to a natural close before that; hence this second part belatedly added. :)
Summary: When Letty woke in the morning to an empty bed and the cross necklace wound around a fat stack of cash on the nightstand, she knew they still had a long way to go. 5800 words
It wound up being easier than Letty would have thought to get back into the swing of things in LA without Dom. As much as they'd been a part of each other's lives since they were teenagers, their relationship wasn't the only-- or even the primary-- reason they'd stayed in the same orbit so long, despite everything that had changed over the years. The team was what had held them together, and the team hadn't been destroyed when Dom ran for the border, no more than it had when he'd been gone before. It had just... reconfigured around the latest changes, like an old car rebuilt to handle a new course.
Maybe if the rest of them had stayed scattered, it would have been different. If Jesse had died and Leon never came back, or Brian had left Vince behind when he ran off to Miami for a while, or Letty found Dom in Mexico and stayed there. Or if Mia hadn't been willing to forgive them all for being idiots and welcomed them back into her home. But sitting around the table at Sunday barbeque every week, turning wrenches and bantering with the guys at the garage, and chatting with her new friend Han over the phone, she found herself more concerned about everything Dom was missing than about the fact she was still missing him.
Letty loved him-- would always love him-- but man, he could be such a dick sometimes. She got why; of course she did. She'd been there for all the reasons. But that didn't change the fact that ever since his dad had died-- since what happened with Linder, and especially after the fallout when he came back from his time in Lompoc-- he'd been chasing one adrenaline rush after another, as if the past didn't matter and neither did the consequences. Well, it had finally started to catch up with him. And it was only thanks to one ex-cop who cared a little too much that those consequences hadn't been a lot worse for all of them.
Maybe that was why when Dom finally called Han, and Han passed the word on where her boyfriend had gone to ground, she asked him not to spill all the news they'd been gossiping about over the last couple years. Dom did deserve an earful, but not from a casual new friend who hadn't even met most of the concerned parties.
"You sure about that?" Han sounded a little skeptical. "I know if it was me, and someone I knew had news from back home...." He let his voice trail off, pointedly.
Letty snorted. "Not if he doesn't ask, man. And why should he? He doesn't even know you met me. Don't worry; I'll be right behind you, and I'll fill him in on what he needs to know. Why else did you think I asked you to call me?"
"Well, I didn't like to make assumptions," Han said, tone like a verbal shrug. "All right. But I won't lie to him. He's been good to me."
"Wouldn't even ask," Letty assured him. For all his issues, Dom did have a way of drawing in good people like iron filings to a magnet; once someone was in his inner circle, they were family, and they usually upheld the faith he put in them. Maybe they should've trusted Brian more from the beginning, knowing that. But then again, they'd had their reasons for being wary, some of which had even turned out to be true. It was just that the team had ended up mattering more.
"I'll be on a plane this evening. I'll text you more details when I get here. See you then."
"Thanks, Han. Have a good flight," she replied, then hung up to start making her own plans.
"The DR?" Mia asked, eyebrows lifted, when she caught Letty packing. "I would have guessed Cuba before the Dominican Republic, but Abuelita has family all over. You planning on staying after you find him?"
Letty eyed Dom's sister, the concerned frown on her face and the arms crossed protectively over her chest, and sighed. "I dunno. It depends on a few things. What the hell he's up to. Whether he even wants me there."
Mia scoffed, unimpressed with that argument. "Of course he wants you there. He might not think you should be there, but that's another story altogether."
Mia would know about that after the truck heists; not that she'd thought it was the brightest idea they'd ever had, but she'd chafed at being relegated to the cover story. The crime hadn't been the problem for her; she'd been worried about the dangers and how little allowance the team had made for things going wrong. But the one thing Dom had been actively cautious about in all that was his sister's safety. Letty wasn't worried about Dom trying to shove her in the same box, though; he'd learned better than that a long damn time ago.
"The thing is, you know what Brian and Vince said when they came back from Miami," Letty shrugged helplessly. She'd miss Mia and the others too if she did stay with Dom, but they had things well in hand here; the team didn't really need her either, not anymore. "The FBI would need a lot more than we have to give them if we ever want Dom to come home again. Otherwise, they'll throw the book at him if they catch him. I can make sure he keeps in better touch if I do stay with him, though. I get him not wanting to bring the cops down on you too, but not even giving you an emergency number is total bullshit."
Even Jakob had kept in better touch, at least at first. As completely as Dom had deleted him from all their lives, neither she nor Mia had ever breathed a word, but he'd exchanged letters for about a year... until he found something else to move onto that he thought was too dangerous for his little sister to know about. But then, maybe that experience was why Dom tried so hard never to look behind him; he was still carrying that hurt all these years later. One day, that would probably come back to bite them all in the ass, too. But in the meantime, Letty was here to remind Dom that there were good things in his rearview, still. Things worth holding onto.
"You'd better," Mia said, eyes welling with tears as she folded Letty close in an impulsive hug.
The boys were all waiting when she got down the stairs. Vince had the grill going, and Brian snatched the duffel right out of her hand in exchange for a Corona. Leon and Jesse were setting the table outside, gently bickering in the warm afternoon air, and Rome was pacing around beside the garage, gesturing expansively as he bantered with someone over the phone, probably Brian's friend Tej from Miami.
"You didn't really think you'd get away that easy?" Brian teased her.
Letty rolled her eyes at him. "I figured you were probably lurking as usual, and if you weren't I'd call when I got there," she said, making a fist and bumping his chest with it. Much as he might have grown on her, they weren't quite on hugging terms yet. Maybe after she got back, if she didn't stay with Dom. Or after Dom came home, if she did. Provided they found a way that would work.
He set the duffel down, then shooed her outside, snagging a few more Coronas to hand to the others. "You'd better call anyway. Otherwise, you know we'll be on the next plane after you," he warned.
"Because Vince worries, right?" she teased him back, remembering when she'd found him and Vince in the garage before her trip to Mexico. "Even though he pretends he doesn't."
Brian's cheeks were a little flushed, but of course the bastard had no shame. Not that she had any room to throw stones there. "Yeah, let's go with that," he said, grinning. Then he went to join Vince by the grill, hooking an arm around his boyfriend's waist and giving him shit about his cooking, to judge by the way the elbows and the laughter started flying. Then the others swarmed in around her to offer their own contributions, whether hugs or advice or-- from Jesse-- a random diatribe about the heat and humidity in the DR and how that affected engine performance, and she relaxed and decided to let herself enjoy it.
It wouldn't be forever. It never was. But that didn't mean it wasn't nice to part on a good memory before taking her next step.
It was partly in memory of that impromptu barbeque, and partly out of irritation at finding Dom with his arms around a pair of skanks yet again when she finally tracked him down at the nightclub Han directed her to, that she ended up deciding Dom didn't need to know everything, after all. That Mia was okay, sure. She wouldn't leave him hanging about his sister. But the rest of it? Only if he asked, the asshole.
And of course he didn't ask. It was like Dom had completely restarted his life; the people there already looked to him as padrino, and the job he was planning seemed to be at least as much to help them out as it was for the cash. At first glance, that was a good thing; at least he'd started looking beyond the next quarter mile. But that didn't mean he'd got any better about dealing with the scars of the past. Reconnecting with her seemed about the limit of how far he was willing to go; he distracted her anytime she tried to talk about anyone else.
Fair enough, Letty figured; there'd be time. She made the call to let Mia and the rest know she was safe, then let him drive her out to the beach to remind him why it had been a stupid idea to ever leave her behind.
You feel that? How could you be three thousand miles away from that?
Can't, he said. And this time, she almost thought he meant it.
Apart from Han, he'd also brought in two local guys, Tego Leo and Rico Santos; that made five of them on the crew, and given the bullshit Dom was planning, she knew they would need every one of them to pull it off. Plus the right vehicles, the right equipment, and a shit-ton of practice to make sure they really could rip a tanker trailer off a truck without wrecking either themselves or the gas. Given all of that-- it was still insane, but not that much more insane than their acrobatics on the delivery trucks. What was different this time, she found, was all the rest of it: settling down to play domestic with Dom. There was a little local garage he worked at, and a whole community of people he was plugged into, and every one of them embraced Letty just as readily.
In a way, it made her realize just how young they'd really been when they first got together. How young they'd still been when he'd walked out of Lompoc, still grieving his father, cut off from the only job he'd ever really wanted, and left with responsibility for the mortgage, the garage, the store, and his fifteen-year-old sister. They'd never really had an opportunity to grow their relationship apart from everything else they were enmeshed in; the team had been a blessing, but also, she was starting to see, had kept them from really getting to know one another on an adult level. Sex was easy. Driving was easy; working with cars and following Dom's lead. Writing up a grocery list, deciding who did what chore, and moving past chemistry to genuinely enjoying one another's company when nothing adrenaline-worthy was on the table turned out to take a lot more work.
She thought of Brian saying 'I'm in it for the long haul,' and the soft expression on Vince's face. The history the boys had brought back from Miami gave their relationship a weight and focus she'd never seen in any of Vince's previous attempts at dating, or Brian's fledgling attempts with Mia back in the day; it helped make them an actual couple, not just a couple of teammates hooking up. Letty felt like maybe she was making that transition herself now with Dom; they weren't just convenient to each other anymore, they were in it for keeps.
Maybe that was why, after they finally pulled off the first gas heist and walked away from the afterparty feeling like they were on top of the world, Letty said 'yes' without hesitation when he asked her to marry him. In that moment, it didn't matter what they'd left behind them, or that none of the others were there to cheer them on; she could imagine no other future than being at his side for the rest of their lives. When the others would find out, whether they'd ever make it back to Los Angeles or not, that was all still hundreds of miles down the road.
Maybe there was a little bit of selfishness and living-for-the-present there for her, too. Something beautiful to hold close to herself before she had to share it with anyone else, or split his attention with those they'd left behind. What did it matter, anyway? They were committed to each other now, and he was still a wanted man; it wasn't like either of them would be heading home anytime soon to face the music.
Of course, that turned out to be wishful thinking. Dom still hadn't unlearned the bad habit of leaving his problems in his rearview and hitting the NOS; he'd just taken her with him for a while. One of the heists almost ended in disaster, leaving a flaming wreck to alert the cops, and when he tracked her down after they'd finished their reduced delivery he came out with a bullshit line that ripped the silver lining right out of her cloud.
"I'm a walking target. I don't want you around when they catch up to me," Dom said, like that was a normal thing for a man to say to his partner after all they'd been through. Especially on a warm night at the beach, cuddled up against his new bride with the sound of waves in the background and the moonlight in their hair.
"Ride or die, remember?" Letty frowned back at him. He damn well better; it had been in their vows.
He turned toward the surf lapping against the rocky shoreline below them as if he didn't want to hear it. She'd seen that grim expression on his face before, and it sparked a surge of anger in her gut. "Dom, how long have we been doing this? And now, all of a sudden out of nowhere, it's too dangerous? Come on."
Dom didn't say anything to that either, just staring at her, and she took his face in her hands, frustrated. "We'll figure it out. We made it back to each other, didn't we? And the whole rest of the family made it back to LA, even Brian. We've always found a way; we'll do it this time, too."
Dom pulled back a little at the mention of Brian's name, briefly startled out of his brooding. "Wait-- even Brian? What are you saying? He came back after what he did to our family? Mia wouldn't."
Letty snorted. "Mia didn't. And he's not a cop anymore, anyway. He gave you his keys, remember? You were doing your own thing out here, you've got no room to complain how we picked up the pieces on our own."
He looked like he was biting back a lot more things to say, but she leaned in to press her lips briefly against his, then tried again to get through to him. "Never mind about Brian. What I'm trying to say is, maybe things can't ever go back the way they were, exactly. But they didn't before either, and we made it work then. You don't have to do this bullshit martyr routine, Dom. For better and for worse, remember?"
His expression finally softened at that, and he murmured the last words back to her, leaning forward to thread his hands through her hair and return the kiss with interest.
Dom didn't make any promises, though. And when Letty woke in the morning to an empty bed and the cross necklace wound around a fat stack of cash on the nightstand, she knew they still had a long way to go.
Han was the only one of the crew left when Letty walked out of the room she'd spent so many months in, duffle slung back over her shoulder. She'd been forced to limit what she packed-- you stay in one place for long, you accumulate a lot of little things that don't fit easily into one piece of luggage-- but she'd grabbed the essentials, including the silver necklace still wrapped around the cash. She couldn't bring herself to actually wear it, not when it felt like Dom had left their marriage behind with it, but she could never have left it behind, either.
Leo and Santos were already gone; they'd probably left just after Dom. Han had waited, though, indulging in a last conversation with Cara while Letty snagged something to eat. Cara was probably there to drive him to the airport; she'd have to get a cab or something herself.
"Where are you off to next?" she asked him, grateful for even that much of a farewell. It would have stung to have rolled out of there entirely alone, heading back toward Los Angeles with nothing much to show for her time away other than a little extra financial cushion.
"Haven't decided yet," Han replied, giving her a crooked smile. "How about you? Back to California?"
"Where else?" Letty shrugged. "I learned my lesson about chasing after Dom the last time, and I still have family to get back to. Not much point in going anywhere else. How about you? Anyone waiting back in Mexico?"
"Not really. Been pretty much drifting since I left Atlanta, looking for somewhere to land. I'd like to make it to Tokyo eventually, but there's no real timeline on that." Han nudged a toe against his own duffel bag, waiting next to the door, then gave her a considerate look. "How'd you feel about me drifting your way for a while?"
"To Los Angeles?" she asked, feeling stupidly grateful and a little annoyed at herself for that. "You sure about that? I mean, of course we'd be glad to have you. There's always room for guests, and we can hook you into the local scene, if that's what you're looking for. But you'd have to be prepared for a lot of busybodies all up in your business. Just Dom and me's one thing; if you meet the rest you'll be stuck with us for life."
Han was laughing by the time she'd finished. "Give me the hard sell, then."
"Just so you don't say I didn't warn you," she shook her finger at him, then laughed, too. "All right, then. If Cara doesn't mind another passenger to the airport."
"It's all good," Cara replied, then wrapped Letty in a hug of her own. "Look after each other, all right?"
"You know it." Letty smiled, then lifted her duffel back over her shoulder and followed the other two out to the car.
Travel was a beast the way it always was, but it did help to have company on the long way home. Letty took the time during one of their layovers to send a message to Mia asking if they still had room for her and a spare; if it had just been her, she might not have bothered, but with Han along it was the polite thing to do. She got back a long series of exclamation marks and an instant return call. Of course Mia wanted all the ugly details, which was exactly why Letty would have skipped it if it was just her. Some conversations were just easier in person.
The distance did give her more perspective on one thing, though; Letty took a deep breath, clenching her hand around her cell phone, then drifted over to a bank of windows overlooking the tarmac to clear the air about the part even Han didn't know yet. In retrospect, going along with Dom's reluctance to share the news had been more red flag and less romantic gesture; because it wasn't only about them, and never could be.
"You what?" Mia replied, aghast, then hastily backpedaled. "I mean, congratulations! You know I love you. You were already my sister; this just makes it official. I just wish I could have been there to see it. But Letty... you got married and he left you behind? That idiot!"
"I know, right?" Letty laughed, self-deprecatingly. The sky outside was dark and heavy with clouds, a fitting counterpoint to her mood. "I mean, it's not that I don't get it. If they catch him, he's going down hard, and he doesn't want to take anyone else with him. But the whole point of getting married is to share everything, right? Including the hard parts. And it's not like I couldn't get struck by a car or something just as easily back home. I wouldn't take any of it back, but man, he can be such a jackass sometimes."
Mia went quiet for a moment, like she was biting her lip, then sighed. "I think... I think maybe he's afraid. I don't know if he ever stopped, really. I didn't see it before-- not that I was looking-- but having Brian around all the time kind of brings it to mind, you know? Dom never really talked about what happened, any of it."
Yeah, Letty knew. For all Dom pretended it wasn't there, there'd been a blond, blue-eyed brother-shaped hole in the Toretto family ever since Dom had blamed Jakob for their father's death and sent him packing. Whether that was the whole story or not... well, they'd all watched that painful exchange go down, and Letty had obviously taken Dom's side, but Jakob had spent the two years Dom had been in Lompoc desperately trying to hold everything together as best he could. He'd done a half-decent job of it, too; his exile-- and the fact that he hadn't fought it-- had torn a wound in all of them. She'd seen the impact of it in Mia's taste in men as she reached adulthood, in Vince's instant wariness of anyone who fit the mold, in the way Dom had grown attached to Brian so quickly, and it had worried her from the start. Of course Brian had brought his own strengths and baggage to the table, but that didn't erase the reason he'd stuck long enough for that to matter.
"Yeah, well. It's about time he got over it," she replied, clearing her throat. "Shit happens, and I'd rather the next time I see him not be at one of our funerals. But it ain't up to me what he does now. If he ever stops running, he'll know where to find me, but I'm not going to sit still and cry over it."
Mia sniffled a little, then cleared her throat and changed the subject. "Right. Well, anyway, it'll be good to have you home. So tell me about this guy you're bringing with you. It's Han, right? The guy you met in Mexico, who told you where Dom was? So how did that happen?"
Letty glanced back over her shoulder toward the row of seats where Han had parked himself with a bag of chips, watching their luggage. "I wasn't the only one Dom ditched when he left. Han's from Atlanta originally, I think, but he doesn't have anyone to go back to there, and the only other people he knows in the DR are the rest of Dom's crew, who've already scattered. We've talked a lot the last couple years; he's good people. If he needs a place to crash for a while, I didn't think you would mind if I offered."
"Of course not. But you did warn him, right?" Mia teased.
Letty chuckled. "Well, I told him, but I don't think he considered it a warning. He laughed and told me to give him the hard sell already."
"I'll send Brian to pick you guys up at the airport, then, shall I?" Mia said, amused. "Seriously though, what time do you get in? Your car's already at the house, and I'll have the sheets fresh by the time you get here."
"Thank you, Mia. I mean it; it means a lot to have someone to come home to, even if it isn't Dom."
The smile was audible in her sister's voice as she replied. "Of course. What's family for?"
Family was the team who greeted her with open arms and didn't give her shit for leaving in the first place. Family was fresh sheets in the spare bedroom and a DT's shirt with Han's name on the pocket for as long as he wanted them. Family was Brian and Vince turning wrenches in the garage with Letty every night, as she worked out her frustration with Dom and worries for the future putting the Charger back together.
Family was Brian reluctantly agreeing to get in touch with a contact in the FBI after they picked up word of a new drug cartel making inroads in Los Angeles. The usual crowd had been talking; racers were disappearing one by one, talking about big breaks and bigger jobs, flashing cash and moving on. More product was flooding the streets, followed by more raids as the cops fumbled around trying to turn off the spigot. Something like that, the FBI had to already be working a case, and it seemed tailor-made to clear the road for Dom to come home. A target bigger than Dom was, combined with a necessary set of skills that Brian had already proven were thin on the ground among cops; of course Letty was going to offer her undercover services in exchange for a deal.
It would have been better with a cop she knew personally, but Brian did his own research after Bilkins came back with a name, and Agent Gabriela Curnen seemed a decent enough choice to approach. The others on the Braga team-- Agent in Charge Penning, an asshole named Stasiak, a newbie named Trinh, and a transfer from Customs whose name made Brian laugh and say he hoped the guy had learned something about engines in the last few years-- she could take or leave, but as long as Letty got their signature on the deal, that was what mattered.
She tried to get him not to tell the rest of the team, but Brian just raised his eyebrows and told her he wasn't about to declare war in his own bedroom, never mind at DT's, which was exactly what would happen if Vince and the others found out he'd helped her do something that dangerous and kept silent about it. That meant she had to put up with a lot of mother-henning between meetings with the agents and earning her way onto Braga's crew of drivers. Whatever, though; she figured that was a small enough price to pay, if it worked.
And it did... up to a point. It didn't take long for Letty to track down a guy named David Park setting up audition races for one of Braga's lieutenants. Park was just another gearhead, somebody she might have met at Race Wars under other circumstances, but Ramon Campos was something else, ice-cold behind the eyes, and his enforcers made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. Gisele Yashar had a sympathetic smile, but it was the kind she'd aim at you while sending you off a cliff on her boss' orders, and Fenix Calderon was a Molotov cocktail waiting for a spark. Only the fact that the road to Braga-- and Dom's freedom-- lay through them propelled her over the finish line first and convinced her to actually show up when the GPS rang for her first run.
Even with all those red flags, though, Letty hadn't even suspected that that first run was supposed to be her last. That maybe the other undercover CIs hadn't disappeared because they'd been found out, but because they were just two more mice caught in the same trap as all the others. Otherwise, she might actually have given Curnen all the details instead of just letting her know she'd made it in. Luckily for her, Brian had a much more devious mind; he'd convinced Letty to put a tracker in her Plymouth, shielded from most forms of detection, and the minute she told him she'd been called he scattered the team to wait for her to cross back over the border. When the automatic weapons came out and the other drivers started falling, she bolted for her car and made a run for it... and when Fenix chased her down and knocked her off the road, Han was right there to ward him off, scrape her off the pavement, and get her gone.
The next little while was a blur. And not just from the injuries she'd taken in the crash; she wasn't stupid. The deal she'd made with the FBI had hinged on her ability to deliver Braga, which had just gone up in smoke. And Braga's guys were not going to ignore her escape. She'd just made her family's position worse, not better.
They pulled up to a house she didn't recognize-- probably a safehouse belonging to one of the team-- and Han slid an arm around her to help her inside, where Brian and Vince were waiting. Brian tried to babble something about it being all his fault; Letty gave him a disgusted look, then shook off Han and opened her arms.
"Shut up and give me a hug. And then tell me what I've got to do to keep this from blowing back on the rest of you."
Brian folded like a cheap suit, carefully pulling her close and pressing his cheek against her hair. Then he took a deep breath and stepped back to meet her gaze, that insane ability to focus he shared with Dom kicking back in. "What exactly happened? We picked up on the gunfire, but none of us were close enough to see what went down until you sped out of there. Did they figure out who you were? Do they have a mole, like we thought?"
She shook her head. Her face stung; she could feel blood trickling down her cheek, she was pretty sure she'd cracked a couple ribs, and she'd have a few nasty scars where she'd been cut by bent metal and broken glass, but none of her injuries were bad enough to cloud her thoughts. Thank God Han had been there to keep Fenix from finishing her off. "I'm not sure. It wasn't just me; I bolted when I saw the guns, but they were shooting at all the drivers. We thought they were killing the CIs and moving the other drivers up the chain, but I think maybe they've been killing them all this whole time to keep their secrets. Which definitely means they're not gonna let this go."
Brian's expression went grim. "Either way, that fake ID I gave you isn't going to hold up to a determined search. They'll figure out who you are, and it won't be hard to find the rest of us from there. Which means... we're going to have to report you dead. En route to the hospital, maybe. Then stage a funeral. The nurse who helped me and Vince before, she never reported us back then; maybe she'll help again now."
"And then what? I try to track down Dom again?" Letty sighed, carefully lowering herself onto a chair. Vince jumped to help her, one hand wrapped around the handle of a First Aid kit, and she reluctantly let him. Dom had at least sent a message to Mia with an emergency phone number after he left Letty behind, but Letty had been determined not to use it until she had a clean record to offer him.
Brian narrowed his eyes, thinking very hard about something, then met Vince's gaze. "What if we could still get that deal? Put Braga away, clear the way for both of you."
"What? Brian, it was never really on the table; Campos is never gonna let anyone in far enough to finger Braga, and Curnen said the task force was about to get shut down anyway," Letty objected.
Vince's expression went as grim as Brian's as he carefully began dabbing at the gash over her eyebrow. "And they probably know that. They think you're dead, they'll think they're off the hook and go recruit the next team of drivers. That'll give us an opportunity."
"You'd do that?" she said, staring first at him, then at Brian.
Brian shrugged. "Let's be real, the minute he hears-- and even if he doesn't answer, someone's sure to tell him about the funeral-- Dom is going to go through this town like a wrecking ball. Warrant or no warrant. He left you to keep you safe; this just proved him wrong. So one way or the other, it's getting done. But yeah, we got a better chance of everyone walking away from this if we do a little planning beforehand."
"It won't be easy. Whatever you've faced before, this guy has an army, and he's clearly paranoid. There won't be room for any mistakes," Han cautioned them.
"Never is," Brian agreed, then fished a burner phone out of his pocket and tossed it to Letty. "Ride or die, right?"
A pang went through Letty at the words, and she gave him a crooked smile as she caught the phone. "You know it," she said, then waved off Vince as he finished applying a bandage to her forehead. "Give me the room a sec, will you guys? I gotta make a call."
"Shout if you need us," Vince said gruffly, then patted her shoulder and followed Han and Brian out of the room.
Then Letty took a deep breath and dialed the number she'd had memorized for months. "Dom, it's Letty...."
One way or another, this time there'd be no more running.
(x-posted at AO3)
When Letty woke in the morning to an empty bed and the cross necklace wound around a fat stack of cash on the nightstand, she knew they still had a long way to go.
Title: Alarums and Excursions
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Fixit for the opening of Fast & Furious, incorporating events from Los Bandoleros, the flashbacks in Furious 7, and a particular reveal from F9.
Notes: Continuing the theme of Shakespeare-style stage directions as titles for this series. I meant for the Letty POV part of this series to overlap with the start of Fast & Furious, but the last entry came to a natural close before that; hence this second part belatedly added. :)
Summary: When Letty woke in the morning to an empty bed and the cross necklace wound around a fat stack of cash on the nightstand, she knew they still had a long way to go. 5800 words
It wound up being easier than Letty would have thought to get back into the swing of things in LA without Dom. As much as they'd been a part of each other's lives since they were teenagers, their relationship wasn't the only-- or even the primary-- reason they'd stayed in the same orbit so long, despite everything that had changed over the years. The team was what had held them together, and the team hadn't been destroyed when Dom ran for the border, no more than it had when he'd been gone before. It had just... reconfigured around the latest changes, like an old car rebuilt to handle a new course.
Maybe if the rest of them had stayed scattered, it would have been different. If Jesse had died and Leon never came back, or Brian had left Vince behind when he ran off to Miami for a while, or Letty found Dom in Mexico and stayed there. Or if Mia hadn't been willing to forgive them all for being idiots and welcomed them back into her home. But sitting around the table at Sunday barbeque every week, turning wrenches and bantering with the guys at the garage, and chatting with her new friend Han over the phone, she found herself more concerned about everything Dom was missing than about the fact she was still missing him.
Letty loved him-- would always love him-- but man, he could be such a dick sometimes. She got why; of course she did. She'd been there for all the reasons. But that didn't change the fact that ever since his dad had died-- since what happened with Linder, and especially after the fallout when he came back from his time in Lompoc-- he'd been chasing one adrenaline rush after another, as if the past didn't matter and neither did the consequences. Well, it had finally started to catch up with him. And it was only thanks to one ex-cop who cared a little too much that those consequences hadn't been a lot worse for all of them.
Maybe that was why when Dom finally called Han, and Han passed the word on where her boyfriend had gone to ground, she asked him not to spill all the news they'd been gossiping about over the last couple years. Dom did deserve an earful, but not from a casual new friend who hadn't even met most of the concerned parties.
"You sure about that?" Han sounded a little skeptical. "I know if it was me, and someone I knew had news from back home...." He let his voice trail off, pointedly.
Letty snorted. "Not if he doesn't ask, man. And why should he? He doesn't even know you met me. Don't worry; I'll be right behind you, and I'll fill him in on what he needs to know. Why else did you think I asked you to call me?"
"Well, I didn't like to make assumptions," Han said, tone like a verbal shrug. "All right. But I won't lie to him. He's been good to me."
"Wouldn't even ask," Letty assured him. For all his issues, Dom did have a way of drawing in good people like iron filings to a magnet; once someone was in his inner circle, they were family, and they usually upheld the faith he put in them. Maybe they should've trusted Brian more from the beginning, knowing that. But then again, they'd had their reasons for being wary, some of which had even turned out to be true. It was just that the team had ended up mattering more.
"I'll be on a plane this evening. I'll text you more details when I get here. See you then."
"Thanks, Han. Have a good flight," she replied, then hung up to start making her own plans.
"The DR?" Mia asked, eyebrows lifted, when she caught Letty packing. "I would have guessed Cuba before the Dominican Republic, but Abuelita has family all over. You planning on staying after you find him?"
Letty eyed Dom's sister, the concerned frown on her face and the arms crossed protectively over her chest, and sighed. "I dunno. It depends on a few things. What the hell he's up to. Whether he even wants me there."
Mia scoffed, unimpressed with that argument. "Of course he wants you there. He might not think you should be there, but that's another story altogether."
Mia would know about that after the truck heists; not that she'd thought it was the brightest idea they'd ever had, but she'd chafed at being relegated to the cover story. The crime hadn't been the problem for her; she'd been worried about the dangers and how little allowance the team had made for things going wrong. But the one thing Dom had been actively cautious about in all that was his sister's safety. Letty wasn't worried about Dom trying to shove her in the same box, though; he'd learned better than that a long damn time ago.
"The thing is, you know what Brian and Vince said when they came back from Miami," Letty shrugged helplessly. She'd miss Mia and the others too if she did stay with Dom, but they had things well in hand here; the team didn't really need her either, not anymore. "The FBI would need a lot more than we have to give them if we ever want Dom to come home again. Otherwise, they'll throw the book at him if they catch him. I can make sure he keeps in better touch if I do stay with him, though. I get him not wanting to bring the cops down on you too, but not even giving you an emergency number is total bullshit."
Even Jakob had kept in better touch, at least at first. As completely as Dom had deleted him from all their lives, neither she nor Mia had ever breathed a word, but he'd exchanged letters for about a year... until he found something else to move onto that he thought was too dangerous for his little sister to know about. But then, maybe that experience was why Dom tried so hard never to look behind him; he was still carrying that hurt all these years later. One day, that would probably come back to bite them all in the ass, too. But in the meantime, Letty was here to remind Dom that there were good things in his rearview, still. Things worth holding onto.
"You'd better," Mia said, eyes welling with tears as she folded Letty close in an impulsive hug.
The boys were all waiting when she got down the stairs. Vince had the grill going, and Brian snatched the duffel right out of her hand in exchange for a Corona. Leon and Jesse were setting the table outside, gently bickering in the warm afternoon air, and Rome was pacing around beside the garage, gesturing expansively as he bantered with someone over the phone, probably Brian's friend Tej from Miami.
"You didn't really think you'd get away that easy?" Brian teased her.
Letty rolled her eyes at him. "I figured you were probably lurking as usual, and if you weren't I'd call when I got there," she said, making a fist and bumping his chest with it. Much as he might have grown on her, they weren't quite on hugging terms yet. Maybe after she got back, if she didn't stay with Dom. Or after Dom came home, if she did. Provided they found a way that would work.
He set the duffel down, then shooed her outside, snagging a few more Coronas to hand to the others. "You'd better call anyway. Otherwise, you know we'll be on the next plane after you," he warned.
"Because Vince worries, right?" she teased him back, remembering when she'd found him and Vince in the garage before her trip to Mexico. "Even though he pretends he doesn't."
Brian's cheeks were a little flushed, but of course the bastard had no shame. Not that she had any room to throw stones there. "Yeah, let's go with that," he said, grinning. Then he went to join Vince by the grill, hooking an arm around his boyfriend's waist and giving him shit about his cooking, to judge by the way the elbows and the laughter started flying. Then the others swarmed in around her to offer their own contributions, whether hugs or advice or-- from Jesse-- a random diatribe about the heat and humidity in the DR and how that affected engine performance, and she relaxed and decided to let herself enjoy it.
It wouldn't be forever. It never was. But that didn't mean it wasn't nice to part on a good memory before taking her next step.
It was partly in memory of that impromptu barbeque, and partly out of irritation at finding Dom with his arms around a pair of skanks yet again when she finally tracked him down at the nightclub Han directed her to, that she ended up deciding Dom didn't need to know everything, after all. That Mia was okay, sure. She wouldn't leave him hanging about his sister. But the rest of it? Only if he asked, the asshole.
And of course he didn't ask. It was like Dom had completely restarted his life; the people there already looked to him as padrino, and the job he was planning seemed to be at least as much to help them out as it was for the cash. At first glance, that was a good thing; at least he'd started looking beyond the next quarter mile. But that didn't mean he'd got any better about dealing with the scars of the past. Reconnecting with her seemed about the limit of how far he was willing to go; he distracted her anytime she tried to talk about anyone else.
Fair enough, Letty figured; there'd be time. She made the call to let Mia and the rest know she was safe, then let him drive her out to the beach to remind him why it had been a stupid idea to ever leave her behind.
You feel that? How could you be three thousand miles away from that?
Can't, he said. And this time, she almost thought he meant it.
Apart from Han, he'd also brought in two local guys, Tego Leo and Rico Santos; that made five of them on the crew, and given the bullshit Dom was planning, she knew they would need every one of them to pull it off. Plus the right vehicles, the right equipment, and a shit-ton of practice to make sure they really could rip a tanker trailer off a truck without wrecking either themselves or the gas. Given all of that-- it was still insane, but not that much more insane than their acrobatics on the delivery trucks. What was different this time, she found, was all the rest of it: settling down to play domestic with Dom. There was a little local garage he worked at, and a whole community of people he was plugged into, and every one of them embraced Letty just as readily.
In a way, it made her realize just how young they'd really been when they first got together. How young they'd still been when he'd walked out of Lompoc, still grieving his father, cut off from the only job he'd ever really wanted, and left with responsibility for the mortgage, the garage, the store, and his fifteen-year-old sister. They'd never really had an opportunity to grow their relationship apart from everything else they were enmeshed in; the team had been a blessing, but also, she was starting to see, had kept them from really getting to know one another on an adult level. Sex was easy. Driving was easy; working with cars and following Dom's lead. Writing up a grocery list, deciding who did what chore, and moving past chemistry to genuinely enjoying one another's company when nothing adrenaline-worthy was on the table turned out to take a lot more work.
She thought of Brian saying 'I'm in it for the long haul,' and the soft expression on Vince's face. The history the boys had brought back from Miami gave their relationship a weight and focus she'd never seen in any of Vince's previous attempts at dating, or Brian's fledgling attempts with Mia back in the day; it helped make them an actual couple, not just a couple of teammates hooking up. Letty felt like maybe she was making that transition herself now with Dom; they weren't just convenient to each other anymore, they were in it for keeps.
Maybe that was why, after they finally pulled off the first gas heist and walked away from the afterparty feeling like they were on top of the world, Letty said 'yes' without hesitation when he asked her to marry him. In that moment, it didn't matter what they'd left behind them, or that none of the others were there to cheer them on; she could imagine no other future than being at his side for the rest of their lives. When the others would find out, whether they'd ever make it back to Los Angeles or not, that was all still hundreds of miles down the road.
Maybe there was a little bit of selfishness and living-for-the-present there for her, too. Something beautiful to hold close to herself before she had to share it with anyone else, or split his attention with those they'd left behind. What did it matter, anyway? They were committed to each other now, and he was still a wanted man; it wasn't like either of them would be heading home anytime soon to face the music.
Of course, that turned out to be wishful thinking. Dom still hadn't unlearned the bad habit of leaving his problems in his rearview and hitting the NOS; he'd just taken her with him for a while. One of the heists almost ended in disaster, leaving a flaming wreck to alert the cops, and when he tracked her down after they'd finished their reduced delivery he came out with a bullshit line that ripped the silver lining right out of her cloud.
"I'm a walking target. I don't want you around when they catch up to me," Dom said, like that was a normal thing for a man to say to his partner after all they'd been through. Especially on a warm night at the beach, cuddled up against his new bride with the sound of waves in the background and the moonlight in their hair.
"Ride or die, remember?" Letty frowned back at him. He damn well better; it had been in their vows.
He turned toward the surf lapping against the rocky shoreline below them as if he didn't want to hear it. She'd seen that grim expression on his face before, and it sparked a surge of anger in her gut. "Dom, how long have we been doing this? And now, all of a sudden out of nowhere, it's too dangerous? Come on."
Dom didn't say anything to that either, just staring at her, and she took his face in her hands, frustrated. "We'll figure it out. We made it back to each other, didn't we? And the whole rest of the family made it back to LA, even Brian. We've always found a way; we'll do it this time, too."
Dom pulled back a little at the mention of Brian's name, briefly startled out of his brooding. "Wait-- even Brian? What are you saying? He came back after what he did to our family? Mia wouldn't."
Letty snorted. "Mia didn't. And he's not a cop anymore, anyway. He gave you his keys, remember? You were doing your own thing out here, you've got no room to complain how we picked up the pieces on our own."
He looked like he was biting back a lot more things to say, but she leaned in to press her lips briefly against his, then tried again to get through to him. "Never mind about Brian. What I'm trying to say is, maybe things can't ever go back the way they were, exactly. But they didn't before either, and we made it work then. You don't have to do this bullshit martyr routine, Dom. For better and for worse, remember?"
His expression finally softened at that, and he murmured the last words back to her, leaning forward to thread his hands through her hair and return the kiss with interest.
Dom didn't make any promises, though. And when Letty woke in the morning to an empty bed and the cross necklace wound around a fat stack of cash on the nightstand, she knew they still had a long way to go.
Han was the only one of the crew left when Letty walked out of the room she'd spent so many months in, duffle slung back over her shoulder. She'd been forced to limit what she packed-- you stay in one place for long, you accumulate a lot of little things that don't fit easily into one piece of luggage-- but she'd grabbed the essentials, including the silver necklace still wrapped around the cash. She couldn't bring herself to actually wear it, not when it felt like Dom had left their marriage behind with it, but she could never have left it behind, either.
Leo and Santos were already gone; they'd probably left just after Dom. Han had waited, though, indulging in a last conversation with Cara while Letty snagged something to eat. Cara was probably there to drive him to the airport; she'd have to get a cab or something herself.
"Where are you off to next?" she asked him, grateful for even that much of a farewell. It would have stung to have rolled out of there entirely alone, heading back toward Los Angeles with nothing much to show for her time away other than a little extra financial cushion.
"Haven't decided yet," Han replied, giving her a crooked smile. "How about you? Back to California?"
"Where else?" Letty shrugged. "I learned my lesson about chasing after Dom the last time, and I still have family to get back to. Not much point in going anywhere else. How about you? Anyone waiting back in Mexico?"
"Not really. Been pretty much drifting since I left Atlanta, looking for somewhere to land. I'd like to make it to Tokyo eventually, but there's no real timeline on that." Han nudged a toe against his own duffel bag, waiting next to the door, then gave her a considerate look. "How'd you feel about me drifting your way for a while?"
"To Los Angeles?" she asked, feeling stupidly grateful and a little annoyed at herself for that. "You sure about that? I mean, of course we'd be glad to have you. There's always room for guests, and we can hook you into the local scene, if that's what you're looking for. But you'd have to be prepared for a lot of busybodies all up in your business. Just Dom and me's one thing; if you meet the rest you'll be stuck with us for life."
Han was laughing by the time she'd finished. "Give me the hard sell, then."
"Just so you don't say I didn't warn you," she shook her finger at him, then laughed, too. "All right, then. If Cara doesn't mind another passenger to the airport."
"It's all good," Cara replied, then wrapped Letty in a hug of her own. "Look after each other, all right?"
"You know it." Letty smiled, then lifted her duffel back over her shoulder and followed the other two out to the car.
Travel was a beast the way it always was, but it did help to have company on the long way home. Letty took the time during one of their layovers to send a message to Mia asking if they still had room for her and a spare; if it had just been her, she might not have bothered, but with Han along it was the polite thing to do. She got back a long series of exclamation marks and an instant return call. Of course Mia wanted all the ugly details, which was exactly why Letty would have skipped it if it was just her. Some conversations were just easier in person.
The distance did give her more perspective on one thing, though; Letty took a deep breath, clenching her hand around her cell phone, then drifted over to a bank of windows overlooking the tarmac to clear the air about the part even Han didn't know yet. In retrospect, going along with Dom's reluctance to share the news had been more red flag and less romantic gesture; because it wasn't only about them, and never could be.
"You what?" Mia replied, aghast, then hastily backpedaled. "I mean, congratulations! You know I love you. You were already my sister; this just makes it official. I just wish I could have been there to see it. But Letty... you got married and he left you behind? That idiot!"
"I know, right?" Letty laughed, self-deprecatingly. The sky outside was dark and heavy with clouds, a fitting counterpoint to her mood. "I mean, it's not that I don't get it. If they catch him, he's going down hard, and he doesn't want to take anyone else with him. But the whole point of getting married is to share everything, right? Including the hard parts. And it's not like I couldn't get struck by a car or something just as easily back home. I wouldn't take any of it back, but man, he can be such a jackass sometimes."
Mia went quiet for a moment, like she was biting her lip, then sighed. "I think... I think maybe he's afraid. I don't know if he ever stopped, really. I didn't see it before-- not that I was looking-- but having Brian around all the time kind of brings it to mind, you know? Dom never really talked about what happened, any of it."
Yeah, Letty knew. For all Dom pretended it wasn't there, there'd been a blond, blue-eyed brother-shaped hole in the Toretto family ever since Dom had blamed Jakob for their father's death and sent him packing. Whether that was the whole story or not... well, they'd all watched that painful exchange go down, and Letty had obviously taken Dom's side, but Jakob had spent the two years Dom had been in Lompoc desperately trying to hold everything together as best he could. He'd done a half-decent job of it, too; his exile-- and the fact that he hadn't fought it-- had torn a wound in all of them. She'd seen the impact of it in Mia's taste in men as she reached adulthood, in Vince's instant wariness of anyone who fit the mold, in the way Dom had grown attached to Brian so quickly, and it had worried her from the start. Of course Brian had brought his own strengths and baggage to the table, but that didn't erase the reason he'd stuck long enough for that to matter.
"Yeah, well. It's about time he got over it," she replied, clearing her throat. "Shit happens, and I'd rather the next time I see him not be at one of our funerals. But it ain't up to me what he does now. If he ever stops running, he'll know where to find me, but I'm not going to sit still and cry over it."
Mia sniffled a little, then cleared her throat and changed the subject. "Right. Well, anyway, it'll be good to have you home. So tell me about this guy you're bringing with you. It's Han, right? The guy you met in Mexico, who told you where Dom was? So how did that happen?"
Letty glanced back over her shoulder toward the row of seats where Han had parked himself with a bag of chips, watching their luggage. "I wasn't the only one Dom ditched when he left. Han's from Atlanta originally, I think, but he doesn't have anyone to go back to there, and the only other people he knows in the DR are the rest of Dom's crew, who've already scattered. We've talked a lot the last couple years; he's good people. If he needs a place to crash for a while, I didn't think you would mind if I offered."
"Of course not. But you did warn him, right?" Mia teased.
Letty chuckled. "Well, I told him, but I don't think he considered it a warning. He laughed and told me to give him the hard sell already."
"I'll send Brian to pick you guys up at the airport, then, shall I?" Mia said, amused. "Seriously though, what time do you get in? Your car's already at the house, and I'll have the sheets fresh by the time you get here."
"Thank you, Mia. I mean it; it means a lot to have someone to come home to, even if it isn't Dom."
The smile was audible in her sister's voice as she replied. "Of course. What's family for?"
Family was the team who greeted her with open arms and didn't give her shit for leaving in the first place. Family was fresh sheets in the spare bedroom and a DT's shirt with Han's name on the pocket for as long as he wanted them. Family was Brian and Vince turning wrenches in the garage with Letty every night, as she worked out her frustration with Dom and worries for the future putting the Charger back together.
Family was Brian reluctantly agreeing to get in touch with a contact in the FBI after they picked up word of a new drug cartel making inroads in Los Angeles. The usual crowd had been talking; racers were disappearing one by one, talking about big breaks and bigger jobs, flashing cash and moving on. More product was flooding the streets, followed by more raids as the cops fumbled around trying to turn off the spigot. Something like that, the FBI had to already be working a case, and it seemed tailor-made to clear the road for Dom to come home. A target bigger than Dom was, combined with a necessary set of skills that Brian had already proven were thin on the ground among cops; of course Letty was going to offer her undercover services in exchange for a deal.
It would have been better with a cop she knew personally, but Brian did his own research after Bilkins came back with a name, and Agent Gabriela Curnen seemed a decent enough choice to approach. The others on the Braga team-- Agent in Charge Penning, an asshole named Stasiak, a newbie named Trinh, and a transfer from Customs whose name made Brian laugh and say he hoped the guy had learned something about engines in the last few years-- she could take or leave, but as long as Letty got their signature on the deal, that was what mattered.
She tried to get him not to tell the rest of the team, but Brian just raised his eyebrows and told her he wasn't about to declare war in his own bedroom, never mind at DT's, which was exactly what would happen if Vince and the others found out he'd helped her do something that dangerous and kept silent about it. That meant she had to put up with a lot of mother-henning between meetings with the agents and earning her way onto Braga's crew of drivers. Whatever, though; she figured that was a small enough price to pay, if it worked.
And it did... up to a point. It didn't take long for Letty to track down a guy named David Park setting up audition races for one of Braga's lieutenants. Park was just another gearhead, somebody she might have met at Race Wars under other circumstances, but Ramon Campos was something else, ice-cold behind the eyes, and his enforcers made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. Gisele Yashar had a sympathetic smile, but it was the kind she'd aim at you while sending you off a cliff on her boss' orders, and Fenix Calderon was a Molotov cocktail waiting for a spark. Only the fact that the road to Braga-- and Dom's freedom-- lay through them propelled her over the finish line first and convinced her to actually show up when the GPS rang for her first run.
Even with all those red flags, though, Letty hadn't even suspected that that first run was supposed to be her last. That maybe the other undercover CIs hadn't disappeared because they'd been found out, but because they were just two more mice caught in the same trap as all the others. Otherwise, she might actually have given Curnen all the details instead of just letting her know she'd made it in. Luckily for her, Brian had a much more devious mind; he'd convinced Letty to put a tracker in her Plymouth, shielded from most forms of detection, and the minute she told him she'd been called he scattered the team to wait for her to cross back over the border. When the automatic weapons came out and the other drivers started falling, she bolted for her car and made a run for it... and when Fenix chased her down and knocked her off the road, Han was right there to ward him off, scrape her off the pavement, and get her gone.
The next little while was a blur. And not just from the injuries she'd taken in the crash; she wasn't stupid. The deal she'd made with the FBI had hinged on her ability to deliver Braga, which had just gone up in smoke. And Braga's guys were not going to ignore her escape. She'd just made her family's position worse, not better.
They pulled up to a house she didn't recognize-- probably a safehouse belonging to one of the team-- and Han slid an arm around her to help her inside, where Brian and Vince were waiting. Brian tried to babble something about it being all his fault; Letty gave him a disgusted look, then shook off Han and opened her arms.
"Shut up and give me a hug. And then tell me what I've got to do to keep this from blowing back on the rest of you."
Brian folded like a cheap suit, carefully pulling her close and pressing his cheek against her hair. Then he took a deep breath and stepped back to meet her gaze, that insane ability to focus he shared with Dom kicking back in. "What exactly happened? We picked up on the gunfire, but none of us were close enough to see what went down until you sped out of there. Did they figure out who you were? Do they have a mole, like we thought?"
She shook her head. Her face stung; she could feel blood trickling down her cheek, she was pretty sure she'd cracked a couple ribs, and she'd have a few nasty scars where she'd been cut by bent metal and broken glass, but none of her injuries were bad enough to cloud her thoughts. Thank God Han had been there to keep Fenix from finishing her off. "I'm not sure. It wasn't just me; I bolted when I saw the guns, but they were shooting at all the drivers. We thought they were killing the CIs and moving the other drivers up the chain, but I think maybe they've been killing them all this whole time to keep their secrets. Which definitely means they're not gonna let this go."
Brian's expression went grim. "Either way, that fake ID I gave you isn't going to hold up to a determined search. They'll figure out who you are, and it won't be hard to find the rest of us from there. Which means... we're going to have to report you dead. En route to the hospital, maybe. Then stage a funeral. The nurse who helped me and Vince before, she never reported us back then; maybe she'll help again now."
"And then what? I try to track down Dom again?" Letty sighed, carefully lowering herself onto a chair. Vince jumped to help her, one hand wrapped around the handle of a First Aid kit, and she reluctantly let him. Dom had at least sent a message to Mia with an emergency phone number after he left Letty behind, but Letty had been determined not to use it until she had a clean record to offer him.
Brian narrowed his eyes, thinking very hard about something, then met Vince's gaze. "What if we could still get that deal? Put Braga away, clear the way for both of you."
"What? Brian, it was never really on the table; Campos is never gonna let anyone in far enough to finger Braga, and Curnen said the task force was about to get shut down anyway," Letty objected.
Vince's expression went as grim as Brian's as he carefully began dabbing at the gash over her eyebrow. "And they probably know that. They think you're dead, they'll think they're off the hook and go recruit the next team of drivers. That'll give us an opportunity."
"You'd do that?" she said, staring first at him, then at Brian.
Brian shrugged. "Let's be real, the minute he hears-- and even if he doesn't answer, someone's sure to tell him about the funeral-- Dom is going to go through this town like a wrecking ball. Warrant or no warrant. He left you to keep you safe; this just proved him wrong. So one way or the other, it's getting done. But yeah, we got a better chance of everyone walking away from this if we do a little planning beforehand."
"It won't be easy. Whatever you've faced before, this guy has an army, and he's clearly paranoid. There won't be room for any mistakes," Han cautioned them.
"Never is," Brian agreed, then fished a burner phone out of his pocket and tossed it to Letty. "Ride or die, right?"
A pang went through Letty at the words, and she gave him a crooked smile as she caught the phone. "You know it," she said, then waved off Vince as he finished applying a bandage to her forehead. "Give me the room a sec, will you guys? I gotta make a call."
"Shout if you need us," Vince said gruffly, then patted her shoulder and followed Han and Brian out of the room.
Then Letty took a deep breath and dialed the number she'd had memorized for months. "Dom, it's Letty...."
One way or another, this time there'd be no more running.
(x-posted at AO3)
