Chapter 18
FLYNN
The cedar smells the same as the day I built it.
Three years ago. April. I'd measured every plank with a laser level, countersunk every screw with a torque driver set to exactly eighteen inch-pounds, and sealed the grain with two coats of marine-grade polyurethane because weather is the enemy of discipline and I refuse to lose a war to rain.
Forty-seven planks. Six feet tall. Perfectly plumb.
I lift the sledgehammer.
The party noise drops away. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe the trombone solo is still blasting and the dwarf contractors are still singing and Mrs. Patterson is still spinning her dahlias.
But all I hear is my own breathing, deep and even, the way the warband masters taught me before a charge.
In through the nose. Out through the teeth. Find the target. Commit.
The target is plank number one.
I swing.
The cedar explodes. Not cracks. Not splits.
Explodes. Splinters spray across both lawns like confetti, sharp little fragments of perfect grain and marine-grade polyurethane catching the last of the sunset, and the sound is enormous, a deep wooden CRACK that echoes off the houses and silences the trombone solo for exactly one heartbeat before someone on the street whoops.
Plank two.
I don't pause. The hammer comes back over my shoulder and the weight of it sings through my arms and my hips rotate the way they did when I was seventeen and swinging a maul into siege gates in the Ashfeld campaigns, and the second plank disintegrates into a shower of pale wood fiber that drifts across Junia's mud-caked flower beds like snow.
Three. Four. Five.
Each swing tears something open inside me that I didn't know was sealed shut.
Every plank I bolted into this fence was a promise I made to myself after the warbands.
No more disorder. No more unpredictability.
No more waking up in the dark unsure if the person beside you would still be alive by morning.
Build the wall. Maintain the wall. The wall is safety. The wall is control.
Six. Seven.
The crossbeams give. A whole section folds inward, and I drive the hammer through it like a battering ram, splitting the horizontal supports into kindling.
My shoulders burn. My shirt is soaked through with sweat and golem mud and something that might be beetle guts from two days ago that I somehow missed in the wash. I don't care.
I don't care.
That's the part that cracks me wider than the cedar.
Eight. Nine. Ten.
I'm roaring now. Not words. Just sound. The deep, chest-rattling bellow that my people use when we mean something too big for language.
The dwarf contractors answer with a drinking chant.
Someone bangs a spatula against the keg.
The whole street picks up the rhythm, pounding and stomping and hollering, and the fence keeps shattering under my hammer in perfect time.
Twenty. Twenty-five.
Splinters in my forearms. Don't care. Blood mixed with sap on my knuckles. Don't care. A long sliver of cedar catches my jaw and draws a thin line of green across my skin. Don't. Care.
Thirty.
Thirty-five.
Forty.
I'm breathing like a forge bellows. The hammer head is dented. Both backyards are carpeted in destroyed wood, a battlefield of precision engineering reduced to mulch, and the final property border between 4712 and 4714 Cedarbrook Estates no longer exists.
Her lawn bleeds into mine. Wild clover creeping across the border into my Kentucky bluegrass.
A rogue vine from the apology plant she threw over the fence two weeks ago already snaking through the wreckage.
My geometric gravel path ends abruptly at a riot of purple wildflowers that have no business sprouting overnight but are growing anyway because Junia's magic doesn't give a damn about timelines.
I plant the hammer head in the dirt. Lean on the handle.
Forty-seven planks. Gone. Every one.
The crowd is screaming. The keg is fountaining because someone kicked it during the stomping. Mrs. Patterson has her lobster-claw mitts raised above her head like she just witnessed a knockout.
I don't look at any of them.
I look at her.
Junia stands on her side of the property line.
Mud on her boots. Bug guts on her collar.
Hair wild from the golem fight, from the greenhouse break-in, from the two weeks of absolute catastrophe that started the morning she dropped a bag of fertilizer on my boots.
Her eyes are wide and wet and her mouth is open and she's gripping a red plastic cup so hard the sides have buckled inward.
I step over the debris. Wood crunches under my boots. One stride. Two. The property border disappears beneath my feet and it means nothing, it's just dirt, it was always just dirt, and I was the fool who built a fortress on top of it and called it peace.
Three strides. Four.
I stop in front of her. Close enough to see the pulse jumping in her throat. Close enough to smell her, green things and rain and that cheap vanilla shampoo that has no business smelling that good.
"No more fence."
She looks up at me. Way up. The cup creaks in her fist.
"No more fence," she repeats.
I drop the sledgehammer. Twelve pounds of dented steel hits the grass with a thud that shakes both our lawns.
Both.
Ours.
I kiss her.
Not gentle. Not careful. Not the way a reformed warband orc who alphabetizes his spice rack and irons his shorts is supposed to kiss. I kiss her like the fence was the last thing standing between me and oxygen and I just took my first real breath in a decade.
My hands find her waist. Mud-caked overalls, warm skin underneath, the ridge of her hip bone pressing against my palm.
She drops the red cup. It bounces off my boot and rolls into the wildflowers and neither of us watches it go because her fingers are already climbing my front, fisting the front of my ruined shirt, pulling me down to her with a strength that has no business living in a body that small.
The crowd noise blurs into nothing.
Her mouth tastes like cheap beer and cheaper frosting from Mrs. Patterson's victory cake and something underneath both that's purely her, warm and green and reckless.
Her teeth catch my lower lip. A sound comes out of me that I haven't made since the siege camps, low and raw and hungry, and her answering laugh vibrates against my tongue.
"Inside?" she whispers against my jaw.
"No."
The word surprises both of us. But the sky is wide open above our heads, purple and gold, the last of the sunset bleeding into the first scattered stars, and the grass beneath our feet is ours.
Not mine. Not hers. Ours. I want the sky and the dirt and the open air. No walls. No roof. No more barriers.
I pull back just enough to look at her. "Here."
Her pupils swallow the color of her irises. She nods.
I scoop her up. One arm under her knees, the other behind her back, and she weighs nothing, she weighs absolutely nothing against the memory of siege gates and falling trees and forty-seven cedar planks, and I carry her past the fence wreckage to the flat stretch of grass where her wildflower border meets my bluegrass. The exact center of the combined yard.
I set her down on the grass and she pulls me with her, fingers hooked in my collar, and my knees hit the ground on either side of her hips and the earth is soft from the golem battle, churned and damp and alive, and I don't care about the mud, I don't care about the stains, I don't care about any of it.
Her hands push under my shirt. Palms flat against my stomach. Her fingers trace the ridges of the runic tattoos that climb my ribs, the old warband marks that I've hidden under cotton and discipline for years, and her touch is so light it almost hurts.
"These are beautiful."
"They're scars."
"I know."
She pulls the shirt over my head. I let her.
The night air hits my skin and the tattoos pulse faintly, green-gold, the old magic responding to something it recognizes.
Her mouth presses against the lowest rune on my left side, just above the hip, and my spine locks and my hands dig into the grass on either side of her head, ripping up fistfuls of perfectly maintained Kentucky bluegrass that took me three seasons to cultivate.
Gone.
Worth it.
I unclip the straps of her overalls with fingers that can snap a two-inch oak branch but tremble now against the brass hardware.
The fabric falls away from her shoulders.
Underneath, a thin cotton tank top, paint-stained, torn at the hem, the most beautiful garment I have ever seen on a living being.
"You're shaking," she says.
"I'm terrified."
"Of what?"
I lower myself until my forehead rests against hers. Our breath mingles. The stars multiply above us, hundreds of them now, punching through the darkening sky like someone drove pins through velvet.
"Of not being enough."
Her hand cups my jaw. Thumb tracing the thin green line the cedar splinter carved into my cheek. "Flynn Danger, you just demolished a forty-seven-plank fence with a dented sledgehammer in front of the entire neighborhood."
"Forty-seven."
"You counted."
"I always count."
She grins. Wild and bright and devastating. "Then count this."
She kisses my throat. One.
My collarbone. Two.
The scar above my sternum where a crossbow bolt punched through my armor at Ashfeld. Three.
I stop counting.
Her tank top goes. My cargo shorts go. The rest of it goes, piece by piece, scattered across the grass like the cedar splinters, and the cool night air wraps around both of us and we don't feel it because every point where her skin touches mine generates enough heat to grow orchids in January.
She arches against me and the sound she makes is better than any war cry, any victory bellow, any chant the old masters ever taught. My mouth finds the hollow of her throat, the curve of her shoulder, the soft impossible place behind her ear where her pulse drums fastest.