Season 1, Episode 3
"Fun Town: Teeth Behind the Smile"
Morning put a shine on the lies. Teller-Morrow looked respectable in early light—chrome clean, fresh stickers on the tanks, coffee hot. Inside the office, Cian Teller had a schematic of every lock on the property—cylinders open on a towel like organs. He logged each stamp, matched each key, scratched a note where the numbers didn't sing.
Two were missing.
He felt it in his shoulders first, that wrong-note hum. One missing you could blame on sloppy pockets. Two meant intention.
He closed the ledger when boots clicked on tile. ATF Agent June Stahl walked in like she owned both the room and the camera that would record it. Hair a helmet, smile a weapon, eyes that audited souls for tax.
"Ms. Morrow?" Stahl said to Gemma without looking at her. "Mr. Morrow. Mr. Teller." Her glance snagged Jax, then drifted to Cian—lazy posture, ice eyes, a shape that didn't fit any box she liked.
"Agent," Clay said, genial gravel. "Coffee?"
"I don't drink sugar," Stahl said, and took a cup black, which told you plenty. She set a folder down and fanned photos—warehouse ash, a melted rack, a long lens shot of the orchard smoke stitched to the horizon. "Two fires in forty-eight hours. 'Coincidence' is not a word I use much."
"We prefer 'bad luck,'" Gemma said.
Stahl ignored her, pivoted to Cian. "You manage security?"
"I manage mess," Cian said. "Security is good at making it."
She smiled without warmth. "I'd like your surveillance from the last week. Warehouse, yard, any off-site storage associated with Teller-Morrow." She held his gaze just long enough to make "storage" mean something. "All originals. Chain of custody intact."
Cian let a beat pass, like a man flipping through an internal index. "We had a power issue on the warehouse system the night of the fire," he said, easy. "UPS didn't failover. We salvaged what we could." He slid a labeled thumb drive across—county street cams, neighboring business angles, everything he'd curated to be useful and useless at once. "Copies of third-party feeds we're legally allowed to share."
"Cute," Stahl said, not taking it yet. "I asked for originals."
"And I'm giving you what exists," he said, boredom a blanket over barbed wire.
Jax watched the exchange, that new stillness on him. Clay's jaw worked once and stopped. Gemma lit a cigarette in a place she knew better than to, a middle finger that smelled like perfume and gasoline.
Stahl collected the drive, then a business card. "We'll talk again. Off the record would be smarter for you, Jackson."
"Nothing I do is off the record," Jax said.
"We agree." Her smile flicked, gone. She left a draft of winter in her wake.
Cian waited until the crown vic taillights disappeared, then exhaled the breath he'd been holding and went back to the towel and the opened cylinders. Two blanks unaccounted for: office and storage side door. Manufacturing stamp from a locksmith out on Barrett he used for legit work.
"Change them all," Clay said from the doorway, watching like a bear you couldn't tell was fed. "Today."
"Already doing it," Cian said. He didn't say the part about the missing pair meaning somebody had rehearsed their rooms.
---
Alvarez tested the truce the way men like him do—by walking to the property line and spitting without ever stepping over. Two Mayans cruised past the school crosswalk on too-shiny bikes at noon, helmets mirrored so the parents saw themselves looking back. No patch flashed, no law broken. But the message rolled off them like heat: we can stand in your light.
Juice pinged it from a city camera Cian hadn't admitted still worked. Cian rerouted a patrol car to arrive thirty seconds late and texted Chibs: sidewalk theater. No swing. Eyes. Chibs posted up with a soda and a father face. Tig ate a corn dog like a threat. The Mayans idled, watched, found no reason to bleed, and rolled on.
A package arrived at Teller-Morrow an hour later wrapped in butcher paper like peace. Inside: the cut-steel crow Alvarez had sent yesterday, now polished, the taped .45 replaced with an empty casing. New note, same hand:
> YOU SHOWED CLASS. DON'T MISTAKE IT FOR PEACE. —A
Clay laughed once, the kind that doesn't have joy in it. "Man wants to dance."
"Man wants witnesses," Cian said, flipping the crow and tapping the polished edge. "He's letting his boys see him control the tempo."
"Then we change the song," Clay said.
"Or we stop clapping," Jax murmured.
Two truths. One table.
---
Gemma escalated at the hospital with velvet and razors. She arrived at Wendy's room with a cardigan and a clipboard—not hers, the rehab's. She had Donna on speaker so the conversation sounded like community service.
"You want to keep breathing? You sign," Gemma said, tone warm enough to fool a judge, not a junkie.
Wendy stared through her. "You don't get to run my life."
"I'm not," Gemma said. "I'm running Abel's life until you can be trusted to do it. That starts with a pen." She set the paper down and the pen on top like a gun you offered grip-first.
Wendy's hand shook. "You're a monster."
Gemma smiled sweet. "Monsters keep their babies alive." She leaned in, voice honeyed and lethal. "You say his name to CPS and I will put you in a ground nobody visits. Or—you sign, you get thirty, you get a sponsor, and you get to try and be a mother. Pick."
From the doorway, Tara watched without blinking. She didn't like it. She didn't stop it. She met Gemma's gaze over Wendy's brittle shoulder and they had an entire conversation with no words:
He's not your son.
He's not yours either.
He is ours to protect.
Then do better.
Wendy signed. Gemma thanked her like a wedding. On the way past Tara, she said, "I'm bringing clothes for my grandson later. You want anything for your temper?" and kept walking.
Cian caught Tara in the hallway ten minutes later. "She only knows one setting," he said.
"So do you," Tara answered.
"Mine's jokes."
"And locks," she said. "Be careful which doors you close."
He nodded like he understood architecture.
---
The locksmith on Barrett was the kind of place that sold mailbox keys and secrets. Bells chimed. A man with old hands and sharp eyes looked up over bifocals that had seen a lot of faces in a small town.
"Need help?" he asked.
"Always," Cian said, putting a cylinder on the counter. He spun his story with sanded edges—standard audit, two missing, want to re-key to a restricted blank. "And I'd like your log for duplicates cut on these numbers the last three months."
The man's mouth made a shape that meant no without getting him in court. "That's customer privacy, son."
"Customers tried to burn my house down," Cian said, and let the lazy go out of his eyes. "No names. Just numbers."
The old man studied him and measured which oath weighed more. He turned a ledger—paper, of course—so the boy could read without reading. Pencil entries, dates, manufacturers. Two weeks before the warehouse fire: two duplicates on the office cylinder stamp. Cash. Initials for the order: C.M.
"Clay Morrow?" the old man asked, neutral as a plumb line.
"Could be anyone with those letters," Cian said, throat dry. "You remember who?"
The man shook his head. "Cash and a call-in. 'For a client, rush.'"
"Who picked up?"
"Runner," he said. "Kid. Ball cap. Kept his head down."
Cian snapped a photo of the page with his phone. The old man didn't stop him. He paid too much for the re-key kit and left, the bell chiming like a clock.
He rode slow back to Teller-Morrow, wind cold against his teeth. C.M. lived a thousand places in this county. But here it lived one. The part of him that liked precision wanted to run every other C.M. down before he got to the door. The part of him that had lived in this family his whole life knew men sometimes used their own names when they were certain nobody would dare ask.
Clay was behind the bays, cigarette burning a neat hole in the air. Cian held up the ledger photo. "Shop cut two duplicates on our office cylinder two weeks before the fire. Cash order. Initials C.M."
Clay's gaze dipped, rose. "Lot of C.M.s."
"Yeah," Cian said. He didn't blink. "You make me that order?"
Silence. The highway hummed. A magpie hopped on the fence, head cocked like it wanted gossip.
Clay took one last drag and pinched the cigarette out between finger and thumb because pain is a language. "You're asking me if I gave keys to the men who hit us?"
"I'm asking who you trusted with the office when I wasn't there," Cian said, flat. "So I can plug the hole properly."
He saw it land—the slot between accusation and engineering he'd carved on purpose. Clay stepped in closer. The old leather of his cut creaked; the heat coming off him had shape.
"You don't walk up to me with a store clerk's scribbles and make it scripture," Clay said, voice low enough to vibrate bone. "You bring me things I can use or you keep your mouth shut. You hear me?"
"I hear you," Cian said. He refused to step back because men like Clay measured inches. "If those keys were yours, say it so I stop hunting ghosts. If they weren't, say it so I know where to hunt."
Clay's hand settled on Cian's shoulder. Heavy. Father and president and wolf in one grip. "You watch your tone."
"I watch everything," Cian said.
They stared. The magpie flew off, bored. Clay let go first, which wasn't the same as losing.
"I ordered a duplicate a month ago," he said finally, each word a nail. "Dropped mine in a barrel. Didn't want to wake you to open your goddamn office at two a.m. That's the C.M. you found. Now go change the locks like I told you."
It was the answer a normal day would accept. It did not explain two keys. It did not explain the neat, practiced pry or the feeling of rehearsal on the grainy tape burned into Cian's skull. He nodded like he'd been schooled. "Done."
"Good boy," Clay said without meaning to, and walked away with shoulders that didn't relax.
Cian watched him go, jaw tight. He texted Juice: pull wage reports for locksmith runners. Find me the kid with the ball cap.
Juice: on it. also Stahl pulled DMV logs on us. eyes up.
"Always," Cian muttered.
---
He finished the re-key by late afternoon—new cylinders seated, new numbers stamped, a fresh ledger with controlled blanks in Gemma's safe. He stuck the old pins in a coffee tin and marked them TRASH because lying well is ninety percent organization.
Jax found him on the roof at dusk, both of them looking down on the yard like men watching a kingdom they didn't fully own.
"Stahl?" Cian asked.
"Poked the NICU, asked polite questions like she wasn't counting guns while she did it."
"Alvarez?"
"Smiling."
"Mom?"
"Worse," Jax said, a ghost of a grin. "Effective."
They stood with it. The town put its lights on one by one. A moth battered itself stupid against the neon OPEN until Cian reached over the edge with a long arm and flicked the sign off. He gave the idiot a break.
"Two keys are missing," he said, eyes on the street. "Clay says one was his. I believe him. I don't know about the second."
Jax was quiet for a time. "There's a lot I don't know right now," he said, voice low. "I'm not sure which question gets me killed first."
"Pick the ones you can live with if you never get an answer," Cian said. "And the ones you can live with if you do."
Jax huffed a laugh that wasn't laughter. "You're good at this."
"I'm lazy," Cian said. "Efficient is what lazy learns when it loves something."
They climbed down when the wind went cold. The Reaper on the wall caught the last light and grinned like a bad omen you were foolish enough to keep as a pet.
Cian palmed the hidden wall in the office, felt the little drive sleeping like a sin, and told himself—again—that he wouldn't wake it until it saved a life or ended one.
Out front, a siren wound up somewhere too close to be random. The scanner hissed: "Units to Fun Town—assault reported near the midway."
Tig popped his head in, eyes already bright. "Field trip?"
Cian slid the last new key onto his ring, felt its weight. "Fun Town," he said. "Let's go see how fun."
"Fun Town: Teeth Behind the Smile"
Fun Town looked harmless in daylight—cotton candy, cheap prizes, the whole town pretending life could be won with rings and luck. Underneath it, the ground vibrated with engines and bad intentions.
Cian rolled in behind Tig and Chibs, parked where he could see the midway and the service lane behind the food trucks. Gemma's voice had sent them—girl hurt, Oswald wants the club, now—and when Gemma told you to move, you did. Elliot Oswald stood outside the first-aid tent with a face made out of murder and money. His wife was inside with a nurse and a small girl who wouldn't stop shaking even with a blanket on.
Clay and Jax were already there. Clay did the public handshake and condolences. Jax did the part that mattered: took Oswald ten steps away from the sympathetic eyes so a man could say what he actually wanted.
"Find him," Oswald said, voice raw. "Make him unable to do it again." He swallowed. "I don't want him dead. I want him alive and… done."
"Understood," Jax said. No lecture, no absolution. Just logistics.
Cian drifted toward the vendor row, lazy posture in a crowd that looked right past him. He popped his burner and pulled the day's permit list off the county site with two thumb flicks—food, games, staff, ride crew. If a man hurt a kid in daylight, he was either stupid or sure he could vanish into the machinery. Both left trails.
"Security feed?" Juice asked in his ear from a car at the edge of the lot.
"County's got two cams that barely work and one Ring doorbell some genius hung on a funnel cake truck," Cian said. "Give me every back-of-house lot between eleven and one."
"On it."
Tig worked the carnies the way only Tig could—smiling like knives, asking questions like jokes. Chibs posted up at the exit gate with a soda and father-eyes. Clay and Jax walked the ride line, taking in faces, gathering quiet nods. People in Charming told the Reaper things they wouldn't tell the badge. That was the contract, ugly and effective.
Cian cut behind the dart booth into the service lane. Truck tires had baked hot ruts. Someone had tried to hide in the shadows and left impatience in their footprints. He crouched, ran two fingers along a skid mark where a van had braked hard, then followed the track to a maintenance trailer with a cheap lock and a fan wheezing in a window. He listened—voices inside, men speaking soft, the kind of soft you use when you're deciding whether to run or fight.
He texted Jax a pin. Jax slid into view on the other side of the lane like they'd rehearsed.
"Two," Cian whispered. "One heavy. One breathing fast."
Jax nodded once. They didn't knock.
The door blew inward. Tig introduced a wrist to a jaw. Clay took the big one against the wall and made the wall helpful. The second tried to go low; Jax redirected him into the workbench and took his running away with a knee. Cian closed the door and leaned on it, because sometimes your job in a room is to be the room.
"Who?" Clay asked.
"Nobody," heavy said through a mouthful of blood. Which was always wrong; men were always somebody.
"Where were you between noon and one?" Jax asked the fast breather.
"Break," he gasped. "Smoking." His eyes danced the way a rat's will when it can smell the hole but not see it.
Cian's phone buzzed once. Juice: camera by a corndog cart caught a dude leading a kid toward the maintenance lane at 12:42. Ball cap. Orange wristband.
Cian thumbed back: freeze frame. He caught the still when it arrived—a profile, grainy, but the nose knew. He turned the phone so the fast one could see his own outline in gray.
"Break?" Cian said.
The guy swallowed. "It wasn't me."
"Weak alibi," Tig said. "Try again."
The lock clicked behind Cian. He didn't move, just turned his head a fraction. Elliot Oswald stood in the doorway, shoulders squared, color gone. He saw the man on the floor and something inside him died and stood up again in a different shape.
"Is it him?" Oswald asked, voice cracked.
Jax didn't answer for him. "We'll confirm," he said. "Then you tell us what you want."
Oswald's eyes didn't blink. "I already did."
---
Confirmation took eight minutes. Juice found the second angle—back of house, recycling bins, the same ball cap, the orange wristband, the wrong hand moving too fast at the wrong time—and the corndog vendor remembered a guy borrowing the staff wrist stamp to "visit his girlfriend." Cian lifted prints off the trailer door with tape and a glove, because sometimes he still liked to show off. The match didn't matter. The town already knew.
They brought the man to a maintenance bay no camera could see. No grandstanding. No speech. The room stank of oil and cleaner and the cheap cologne of men who think they're invisible. Jax stood with a box cutter he didn't want to use and a look on his face like he'd rather burn the world than put that blade down.
"Last chance to say something that makes you human," Jax said.
The man cried and swore and begged. None of it sounded like a person.
Oswald shook his head once. "Do it." He didn't look away.
Clay stepped aside without being asked. Cian put a hand on the man's shoulder and leaned his weight there the way you steady a deer before you cut it free from wire. He didn't watch the blade. He watched Oswald—watched a father carve a new religion out of something brutal and decided.
It was quick and it was not clean. Tig had the ice chest ready because Tig was an event planner in hell. Chibs wrapped what needed wrapping and sterilized what he could. The man screamed once and then like a siren until the sound fell apart. Jax's jaw worked the whole time; he didn't waver a millimeter. When it was over, he looked ten years older and exactly the same.
Oswald took the chest himself. "Thank you," he said, and his voice came from somewhere below his ribs. He looked at Jax and then at Cian. "I don't forget."
"You shouldn't," Cian said.
Oswald nodded and walked into the daylight like a man taking a ghost for a ride.
They left the rapist alive, patched and bleeding, with a card to a free clinic and a warning that even he understood. Cian stood in the doorway when the man tried to look at him like a plea might find a human. "You're still breathing," Cian said. "That's more mercy than you deserved." He stepped aside.
Outside, the Ferris wheel kept turning like nothing happened. Charming likes its illusions.
---
Alvarez sent his second test as the sun slid west—the same two Mayans came back slow, an extra patch with them, chrome winking. They idled by the game alley like tourists, bought a caramel apple, and bit it in half without breaking eye contact. It was theater; Cian appreciated the staging. He watched from the shade, texted Chibs: no swing. family day. Jax lingered in their line of sight, calm as a loaded gun on a table.
The Mayan with the caramel apple lifted his stick in salute. "Heard you had a bad apple," he said, smiling as he talked.
"Fun Town's full of clowns," Jax said.
Caramel winked on teeth. Laughter. They left when they decided they were done, which was the point they wanted to make: we decide. Clay flexed a jaw and said nothing. Tig chewed a toothpick like it owed him money. Cian logged the plates and the rhythm of the engines—bikes have fingerprints if you listen.
---
Stahl did her squeeze on a bench near the carousel, because she understood staging too. She sat with a file on her lap and sunglasses on like a woman enjoying a day off. When Cian passed, she said, "Mr. Teller," and patted the bench like a serpent patting a sunlit rock.
He sat because running is confession. She slid a photo out—grainy storage-unit frame from the facility's own camera, not the gate log he'd scrubbed. Jax's silhouette in the hall. A timestamp that belonged to last night.
"Off the record, hm?" she said, smile thin. "You kids and your secrets."
Cian didn't blink. "Storage units are where Americans keep their bad decisions. I assume you have one."
She let it drift. "You refused to give me originals. I can compel them."
"You can compel nothing I don't have," he said. "You'll get everything that exists."
"You're cute," she said, and the word sounded like a threat. "Here's my prediction: you boys start a war you can't afford, and I will film you burying your friends. The arson goes federal, the guns go federal, and I hang the rope nice and neat. You could avoid a lot of pain if you told me who struck the match."
"Maybe," Cian said, standing. "But pain's cheaper than treason."
Her smile went winter. "Ask your mother what loyalty costs."
He didn't give her the satisfaction of a flinch. He walked away and let the carousel music try and fail to cover the way her words landed.
---
The kid in the ball cap turned up where Cian least wanted him: at the back of the locksmith's shop on Barrett, dropping a white envelope into a Mayan prospect's open palm. The corner of the lot had a view of the service door and the ashtray—carnies and runners smoked alike.
Cian watched from his bike in a wash of shade, phone in his hand, camera long since off. He didn't need a picture to remember faces. The prospect wore new leather and old nerves; the kid wore guilt like a shirt. The prospect tucked the envelope, handed over a small bag the size of a pack of screws. The kid palmed it and didn't look inside, which meant he already knew.
Juice's text popped before Cian asked: locksmith runner: Cody Mendez. C.M. Moonlights at the fair, paid cash, no paper trail on two duplicate cuts the week before the fire. Boss says "rush for a client."
Cian typed: client who?
Juice: number on the call-in is blocked.
Cian watched the handshake break. C.M. had been the initials in the ledger. Could be runner. Could be someone using a convenient lie. Clay's explanation still sat like a coin in his pocket—one duplicate because he'd lost his, waking nobody up at 2 a.m. That accounted for one missing key. The second smelled like this kid and the Mayans. Smelled like rehearsal.
Cian swung off the Dyna and walked over with his hands in his pockets. The prospect stiffened. The kid's eyes did rat math again.
"Cody," Cian said lightly, as if they'd scheduled this. "Ball cap suits you."
"Hey, man, I—" Cody started.
"You deliver keys and envelopes and you don't ask to who," Cian said. "That keeps you alive until it doesn't."
The prospect took a half-step like he wanted to make a mistake. Cian stared at his boots until the man remembered which side of town he was standing on.
Cody swallowed. "It was just a rush job. I don't—"
"You do," Cian said. "You do enough to get hurt." He took the bag from Cody's palm like he was relieving a friend of something heavy. Inside: two restricted blanks and a tiny brass cylinder—office stamp. "You change your runner job. Today."
Cody's voice got small. "If I don't?"
Tig's voice came from nowhere like laughter. "Then I introduce you to Mr. Regret."
Cody nodded fast, the way a boy does when he realizes men have been talking about him in rooms without windows. The prospect faded. Cian kept the cylinder. He didn't crush Cody because he might be useful alive. Efficiency, not mercy.
He texted Jax as he walked away: runner = Cody Mendez. Likely second duplicate. Mayan handoff behind locksmith.
Jax: Clay know?
Cian: He knows what he needs—for now.
---
Night put a hard edge on the day. Teller-Morrow thrummed—compressor, laughter, music Gemma approved. Oswald came by late with a bottle and a face that was nothing like morning's. He shook Jax's hand and Clay's and hugged Gemma like a man hugging a saint he didn't believe in. He thanked Cian with a grip that hurt, then left before gratitude turned into tears.
Stahl's crown vic idled across the street until it didn't. Alvarez's boys stayed off the property line—polite, as advertised. Hale drove by twice, slow; Unser didn't, which meant he was doing real work.
In the office, Cian filed the new cylinders and the runner's blanks into a coffee can labeled FUSES, because organization makes good liars. He checked the hidden drive with the warehouse footage, touched it like a pet he didn't want anyone to see, and told himself—again—he'd only use it when it saved lives or ended one.
Jax found him behind the bays with two beers and the thousand-yard stare men inherit in this family.
"You good?" Jax asked.
"Define good," Cian said.
Jax took a pull. "You okay with what we did?"
"No," Cian said. "Yes. Both." He looked at the asphalt. "It wasn't justice. It was a solution."
"Sometimes that's the only kind we can afford."
They sat with that. The wind moved a paper cup across the lot like a small, stupid miracle. From inside, Gemma laughed, bright and tall. Clay's rumble followed. The Reaper on the wall caught the neon and grinned because that's what it does, no matter who stands under it.
"Clay order the second key?" Jax asked after a while, quiet enough to be private.
"Runner's initials match the ledger," Cian said. "C.M. Cody Mendez. He brought Mayans a cylinder behind the locksmith today."
Jax exhaled through his teeth. Relief and new worry mixed. "So it wasn't Clay."
"It wasn't not Clay," Cian said. "It just wasn't that Clay." He stood, finished his beer, crushed the can flat with a lazy stomp. "I'll keep pulling threads. If the sweater unravels, I'll tell you before anyone else freezes."
Jax gave him the brother look that meant I hear you even when it hurts. "ATF will push tomorrow."
"Let 'em," Cian said. "I moved the cameras from 'helpful' to 'stubborn.' Stahl can get mad at a hard drive."
Jax grinned, small, real. "You and your screens."
"Me and my manners," Cian said. "Chaos behaves if you ask nicely."
He went inside, bumped the scanner down a notch so the moth could find the dark, and sat with his laptop in his lap, drawing new routes across Charming that made bad men late and good men lucky. Outside, the Ferris wheel lights blinked out one by one. Inside, the club kept breathing.
Tomorrow would bring Alvarez's third test, Stahl's paper, Hale's sermon, and a boy in a ball cap trying to learn the right fear. Cian would be there, lazy like a loaded spring, aiming the wildfire without pretending he could put it out.
—End of S1E3. Want me to roll into S1E4 Part A ("Patch Over"): Devil's Tribe trip, Cian running comms and making his first clean kill the hard way, and the Clay–Jax friction starting to hum like a live wire?