Chapter 4
He came back.
Jocelyn was on her knees in the dirt beside the still house, fighting a copper elbow joint that had been leaking since Tuesday, when the rumble of a motorcycle mixed with something heavier—a diesel engine, deep and steady, coming up her road.
She grabbed the wrench tighter and stood, wiping her hands on her jeans, already calculating the distance to the shotgun propped inside the kitchen door.
Then the truck cleared the tree line and she saw the Harley riding escort beside it.
Anvil pulled up to her gate and killed the engine.
Behind him, a flatbed loaded with lumber, steel plate, and hardware she couldn't identify from this distance rolled to a stop.
A younger guy she didn't recognize was driving—prospect, she'd learned they were called.
The ones who did what they were told and kept their mouths shut.
Anvil swung off the bike and walked toward her with the same unhurried stride she remembered from two days ago. Like the world could wait until he was ready to deal with it.
"Didn't think you were coming back," she said.
"Told you I would."
"Men tell me lots of things."
He stopped at the edge of her yard, hands at his sides, and looked at her the way he'd looked at her barn—assessing damage, calculating what needed fixing.
She wanted to be irritated by it. Instead she felt something loosen in her chest, the same loosening she'd felt in Cipher's office when someone finally said we'll help instead of have you considered selling.
"Club's taking an interest in your situation," he said. "Embry's operation is a problem beyond your property line. But your property's where we start."
"Start what?"
"Making it harder to hit." He nodded toward the flatbed.
"Brought materials. Your barn door needs reinforcing—the hinges are original hardware, wouldn't stop a determined teenager.
Windows need security bars. And that tree line on the south side gives anyone with bad intentions a covered approach to within thirty yards of your house. "
He said it the way she'd describe a fermentation problem—clinical, specific, already thinking about solutions. No drama. No pity. Just an inventory of what was broken and what it would take to fix it.
"I didn't ask for a renovation."
"You asked for help fighting back." His eyes met hers. "Can't fight from a position that's already compromised."
Jocelyn looked at the flatbed. Lumber, steel, boxes of hardware. Hours of work, maybe days. Materials that cost money she hadn't asked anyone to spend.
Accepting it meant admitting she couldn't handle this alone. Four months of telling herself she could, four months of replacing tires and repairing doors and cleaning up whatever mess they left in the night, four months of her grandmother's voice in her head saying Avery women don't need anyone.
But Avery women also didn't lose the land.
"Fine," she said. "But I'm not sitting on the porch watching."
Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile—she wasn't sure his face did that—but an easing of the assessment. Like she'd passed a test he hadn't told her about.
"Wouldn't expect you to."
They worked.
The prospect—kid named Tally who looked barely old enough to drink—unloaded the flatbed while Anvil started on the barn door.
Jocelyn watched him work for exactly two minutes before she went back to her copper joint, because standing around watching a man fix her property would have made her grandmother spin in her grave.
The still house was her territory. Twenty-seven feet of copper pipe, a pot still she'd built from salvaged dairy equipment, a condenser she'd designed herself after three failed prototypes.
The leaking elbow had been a problem for weeks—a hairline crack in the solder that wept every time she ran a batch.
She'd been putting off the repair because fixing it right meant dismantling six joints to access the bad one, and she hadn't had six uninterrupted hours since Embry started his campaign.
She had them now.
The work settled her the way it always did.
Hands on copper, the familiar weight of the wrench, the smell of flux and metal that meant she was building something.
Her grandmother had taught her to work tobacco—the planting, the curing, the careful handling of leaves that would rot if you rushed them.
Distilling wasn't so different. Patience and precision and the understanding that good things took time.
From the barn, she could hear Anvil working.
Not the clumsy banging of someone who muscled through problems, but the measured rhythm of tools used correctly—the bite of a drill, the ring of a hammer finding the sweet spot, the low groan of steel being persuaded into position.
She recognized the sounds the way she recognized good fermentation by smell. Competence had a frequency.
Two hours in, she carried water to the barn and found him inside with his shirt stripped off, sweat cutting channels through the concrete dust on his back.
The barn door hung on new hinges—heavy-gauge steel, the kind that wouldn't shear if someone tried to force entry.
He was welding a crossbar into place with a portable rig, the blue-white arc throwing shadows across the old wood.
She set the water on a hay bale and watched. Not because he was shirtless—though the forge-burn scars that webbed his forearms continued across his shoulders, a map of years spent too close to things that burned. She watched because the welds were beautiful.
Clean, even beads laid down with the steady hand of someone who understood that a weld wasn't just metal joining metal. It was trust. Every joint he made was a promise that the thing would hold.
Her grandfather had welded like that. Before the tobacco killed him, back when the barn was new and the land was flush, he'd built gates and fences with the same patient precision. Her grandmother had kept one of his gates at the property entrance until rust finally took it ten years ago.
Anvil killed the arc and flipped up his hood. Saw the water, saw her watching.
"Joints look good," she said, because commenting on the work was safer than commenting on anything else.
"Should hold against anything short of a vehicle." He reached for the water and drank half of it in one pull. "Your still house copper's quality work. Who taught you to solder?"
"My grandmother. She could solder, weld, plumb, and wire. Said a woman who couldn't fix her own equipment was a woman waiting for a man to do it."
"Smart woman."
"She was." Jocelyn leaned against the barn wall. "The elbow joint's fixed. First clean repair I've had time to do in four months."
He nodded, and she saw him register what that meant—not just a leaking pipe, but four months of deferred maintenance because she'd been too busy surviving to actually work. Four months of her operation degrading while she fought a war of attrition she was always going to lose alone.
"Show me the south tree line," he said. "I want to clear sight lines before dark."
They walked the property together in the late afternoon light, and Jocelyn found herself narrating without meaning to.
The tobacco barn her great-grandmother had built, now used for barrel storage.
The creek that marked the eastern boundary, dry most summers but running enough in spring to matter.
The hill where her grandmother was buried, overlooking the still house and the forty acres she'd refused to surrender.
Anvil listened the way he worked—patient, thorough, taking everything in before deciding what to do with it.
He pointed out vulnerabilities she'd never noticed: a gap in the fence line that gave direct access to her propane tank, a drainage ditch that could hide an approach from the road, the way the tree line on the south side created a corridor of dead ground invisible from the house.
"You've been sleeping with the shotgun," he said. Not a question.
"Bedroom window faces the road. I can see headlights."
"Headlights mean they want you to see them coming." He studied the tree line. "The ones who don't want you to see them won't use the road."
The words landed cold in her stomach. Four months of watching the road, four months of jumping at headlights and engine noise, and it had never occurred to her that the real threat would come from the dark.
"You're not making me feel better."
"I'm not trying to." He turned from the trees to face her. "I'm trying to keep you alive. There's a difference."
She'd said almost the same thing to him two days ago. I don't need to be kept safe. I need help fighting back. There's a difference. Hearing her own logic used against her was annoying in a way that felt uncomfortably like respect.
"What do you recommend?"
"Motion sensors along the tree line. Security lights on the barn and still house. Steel bars on the ground-floor windows." He paused. "And someone here at night until this is resolved."
"Absolutely not."
"Jocelyn—"
"This is my property. I sleep in my own house, in my own bed, with my grandmother's shotgun. I'm not being babysat by a biker I met two days ago."
He didn't argue. Didn't push, didn't explain, didn't do any of the things men usually did when a woman disagreed with them. He just looked at her with those weighing eyes and nodded once.
"Motion sensors, then. I'll wire them tomorrow."
They walked back toward the house in silence that should have been awkward and wasn't. The afternoon had gone gold and soft around the edges, the kind of Carolina light that made everything look like a painting—the farmhouse with its sagging porch, the new steel gleaming on the barn door, the still house where four generations of stubbornness had finally produced something worth drinking.
Jocelyn was reaching for the porch rail when Anvil's hand closed on her arm.
She froze. Not from fear—from the way he'd gone still beside her, every line of his body shifting from relaxed to rigid in a single breath. He was looking past her, toward the road.
A truck had appeared at the property line. Black, windows tinted, moving slow enough to photograph everything—the flatbed, the motorcycle, the new hardware on the barn, the two of them standing in the yard. It rolled past like a predator circling prey, engine barely above idle.
Jocelyn knew that truck.
"Farr," she said.
Anvil released her arm and stepped off the porch.
He walked toward the road with the same unhurried stride he did everything—no rushing, no posturing, just steady forward motion that covered ground faster than it looked.
He reached the edge of the property and stopped, planting himself in the middle of the dirt road like a piece of structural steel someone had sunk into the earth.
The truck slowed further.
Anvil didn't move. Didn't gesture, didn't shout, didn't reach for anything. Just stood there, six-four and scarred and absolutely still, staring through the windshield at whatever was behind the tinted glass.
For a long moment, the truck idled. The engine ticked in the quiet.
Then it accelerated—hard, tires biting gravel, the roar of it fading down the road toward Spring Lake. Running. Not from a threat, but from a promise.
Anvil watched until the dust settled. Then he turned and walked back toward the barn like nothing had happened.
"I'll finish the crossbar before I leave," he said.
Jocelyn stood on the porch with her heart hammering and her hands steady and a feeling in her chest she couldn't name.
Not safety—she'd forgotten what that felt like.
Something closer to recognition. The understanding that she'd been fighting this war with the wrong weapons, and the right ones had just shown up in her yard with a truck full of steel and hands that built things to last.
She went back to her still house and picked up the wrench.
They had work to do.