Chapter 5
The security bars were fighting him.
He didn't mind. The work kept his hands busy and his mind from wandering to places it had no business going. Places like the way Jocelyn had looked at his welds yesterday—not at him, at his work—with the quiet recognition of someone who understood what craftsmanship cost.
Women looked at him plenty. His size drew attention, and the scars drew questions, and the cut drew the kind of women who wanted to ride on the back of something dangerous for a weekend. None of them had ever looked at his welds.
Inside the kitchen, Jocelyn was running her still.
He could hear her through the open window—the clank of copper, the hiss of steam, the occasional muttered curse when something didn't cooperate.
She'd been at it since dawn, making up for four months of lost production with the single-minded focus of a woman reclaiming stolen time.
He liked listening to her work. That was a problem he'd deal with later.
The sun had dropped below the tree line when the engines came.
Not one. Multiple. Coming fast on the dirt road, the throaty growl of trucks running heavy. Anvil killed the welding arc and set down his hood, listening. Two vehicles, maybe three, approaching from the south where the road curved blind through pines.
He was off the ladder and moving before the first truck cleared the trees.
"Jocelyn." He said it once, through the kitchen window. Calm. "Get away from the windows. Now."
She didn't argue. Didn't ask why. He heard her feet hit the floor and the scrape of the shotgun lifting off the counter, and something savage lit in his chest—not fear for her, but a fierce pride that she reached for a weapon instead of a phone.
Three trucks pulled onto the property. Black, heavy, the kind of vehicles men bought when they wanted to feel like the biggest thing on the road. Doors opened and four men stepped out, spreading into a loose formation that said they'd done this before.
Lonnie Farr climbed out of the lead truck last.
The enforcer looked different than Jocelyn had described.
Bigger. Prison-built muscle straining a flannel shirt, shaved head catching the last light, and a grin that belonged on a man pulling wings off something.
He scanned the property—the new steel on the barn door, the security bars half-installed on the windows, Anvil's bike in the yard—and his grin widened.
"Well, well." Farr planted his boots in Jocelyn's dirt like he owned it. "Biker boy came back."
Anvil stepped into the yard. He didn't rush. Didn't posture. Just moved to a position between the trucks and the house with the unhurried certainty of a man who'd already decided how this ended.
"You're on private property."
"So I am." Farr spread his hands, mock-reasonable. "Just here to talk to the lady of the house. Neighborly visit."
"She's not interested in your conversation."
"Maybe I should hear that from her."
"You're hearing it from me."
Farr's grin shifted—less amused, more teeth. He glanced at his men. The biggest one, a slab of muscle with a shaved head and prison ink crawling up his neck, cracked his knuckles with theatrical slowness.
"There's four of us," Farr said. "One of you. Now, I don't know what the lady's paying you—"
"Nobody's paying me anything."
"—but whatever it is, it ain't worth what happens next." Farr took a step forward. "So here's what's going to happen. You're going to get on that bike. You're going to ride back to whatever clubhouse you crawled out of. And we're going to have a conversation with Miss Avery about her future."
Behind him, the porch screen creaked. Jocelyn's voice came sharp as a rifle crack.
"My future's right where it's always been, Lonnie. On my land. Get off it."
Farr looked past Anvil to the porch, and there it was—the laugh Jocelyn had told him about. Low, amused, the sound of a man who found a woman's defiance entertaining. Like she was a dog that had learned a trick.
Something detonated in Anvil's chest. Not rage—rage was hot and sloppy. This was cold. Structural. The precise understanding of exactly which load-bearing points needed to fail for everything to come down.
"Last chance," Farr said, turning back to Anvil. "Walk away."
Anvil didn't walk away.
The big one with the prison ink moved first—probably Farr's play all along, let the muscle test the water while the boss watched. He came in heavy, telegraphing a haymaker that would've dropped a normal man.
Anvil caught the fist.
Not blocked. Caught. Closed his scarred fingers around the man's knuckles like he was gripping a beam and squeezed. Bones ground together. The enforcer's eyes went wide, his mouth opening on a sound that hadn't reached his throat yet.
Anvil pivoted and drove him through the barn wall.
Not the new door—the old siding, three planks of weathered pine that exploded into splinters around two hundred and forty pounds of prison muscle. The man hit the barn floor and didn't get up.
The other two rushed together. Smarter than coming alone, dumber than running.
Anvil met the first one with an elbow that turned the man's charge into a collapse—bone on bone, the wet crack of a jaw unhinging.
The second got his arms around Anvil's waist and tried to drag him down, which might have worked on someone who hadn't spent twelve years keeping his footing on steel beams in high wind.
Anvil planted his feet, grabbed the man by the back of his neck, and introduced his face to his knee. Twice. The arms around his waist went slack.
Three men down in less than thirty seconds. The yard was quiet except for groaning.
Farr hadn't moved.
The enforcer stood by his truck, the grin finally gone, replaced by the flat calculation of a man reassessing the math. His hand drifted toward the small of his back.
"Don't." Anvil's voice came out raw, scraped over gravel and violence. "Whatever you're reaching for, I'll put it through your teeth before you clear the holster."
Farr's hand stopped.
They stared at each other across ten feet of dirt and three bodies. Anvil's blood was up, his hands aching for it, the cold thing in his chest screaming to close the distance and show this man what happened to people who laughed at women defending their homes.
But Cipher's voice was in his head. Don't let this get personal before we're ready to move.
Not yet. Not tonight.
"Take your men," Anvil said. "Get off her property. And tell Embry the math just changed."
Farr looked at his crew—one unconscious in the barn, two curled in the dirt trying to remember how breathing worked. The calculation behind his eyes shifted from fight to retreat, and Anvil watched it happen with the patience of a man who could wait.
"This isn't over," Farr said.
"No. It's not."
Farr loaded his men into the trucks with the efficiency of someone who'd cleaned up after violence before. The engines fired, the headlights swung across the yard, and then they were gone—dust and diesel fading down the dirt road.
Anvil stood in the yard until the sound disappeared. Then he pulled his phone and called it in.
Breach answered on the first ring. "Talk to me."
"Farr hit the property. Four men. They're gone, but he'll be back with more."
"Injuries?"
"Theirs, not mine." Anvil looked at the hole in the barn wall. "She can't stay here alone. Not while Embry recalculates."
"Bringing Pathfinder. Thirty minutes."
The line went dead. Anvil put the phone away and turned to the porch.
Jocelyn stood at the top of the steps with the shotgun at her side and her eyes blazing. Not scared. Furious. Her gaze moved from Anvil to the blood on the dirt to the man-shaped hole in her barn, and her jaw tightened until he could see the tendons in her neck.
"You put a man through my wall."
"I'll fix it."
"That's not the point."
"What's the point?"
"The point—" She came down the steps, boots hitting each one hard. "—is that they came to my home. Again. While I was standing right here. And all I did was hold a shotgun I didn't fire."
The fury in her voice wasn't directed at him. It was directed inward, at herself, and Anvil recognized it because he'd felt the same thing standing in a union hall after Danny fell. The helpless rage of watching someone else fight your battle.
"You weren't helpless," he said. "You were smart. Four-on-one with a shotgun means somebody dies, and it might've been you."
"So what am I supposed to do? Stand on the porch while men destroy my property?"
"You're supposed to let me do what I came here to do."
"I didn't ask for a bodyguard."
"No, you asked for help fighting back." He closed the distance between them, not touching, just close enough that she had to look up to hold his gaze.
Close enough that he could see the pulse hammering in her throat and the fury burning in her eyes and the fear underneath that she'd bite her own tongue off before admitting.
"Embry's going to hear about tonight. He's going to send more than four next time.
And your grandmother's shotgun won't stop what's coming. "
"Don't talk about my grandmother."
"I'm talking about you." His voice dropped, rough and certain. "Your still can't run if you're dead. Your bourbon can't age if they burn the barrels. Everything you've built, everything those women held for four generations—it all ends if you're too stubborn to let someone help you protect it."
She stared at him, chest heaving, the shotgun white-knuckled at her side. He watched the war play out behind her eyes—pride versus survival, independence versus the ugly math of what Embry would bring next.
"I hate this," she said.
"I know."
"I hate that you're right."
"I know that, too."
She looked past him at the barn—the new door with its good hinges, the hole where a man had gone through the wall, four generations of hay and history and stubborn women's work. When she looked back, something had shifted. Not surrender. Decision.
"How long?"
"Until we deal with Embry."
"And my still? My mash? My production schedule?"
"We'll figure it out."
"That's not a plan."
"It's a start." He held her gaze. "Let me give you a start."
Headlights appeared on the road. Two bikes, running fast. Breach and Pathfinder pulled into the yard, killed their engines, and assessed the scene with the economy of men who'd seen worse.
Breach looked at the hole in the barn wall and let out a low whistle. "The fuck happened to that siding?"
"Farr's man."
"Damn. He survive?"
"Unfortunately."
Pathfinder was already walking the perimeter, mental map building in real time. "She coming to the compound?"
Anvil looked at Jocelyn. She stood on her porch with the shotgun and the fury and the decision she'd made, and when she met his eyes, she nodded once.
"Yeah," Anvil said. "She's coming."
Jocelyn turned and walked inside. The screen door banged shut behind her, and through the kitchen window he could hear her moving—packing, shutting down the still, securing the equipment that represented everything she'd built and everything she was trusting him to protect.
Breach appeared at his shoulder.
"You're bleeding," the Marine said, nodding at Anvil's knuckles.
Anvil looked down. His right hand was split across two knuckles, blood drying in the creases of old scars. He flexed the fingers. Nothing broken.
"Should see the other guy."
Breach grinned. "That's what the barn says."
Twenty minutes later, Jocelyn came out with a duffel bag and a jar of bourbon she'd pulled from storage. She locked the farmhouse door, looked back at her property one more time, and walked to the truck without a word.
Anvil watched her go.
Two missions, Cipher had said. Protect her property. Gut Embry's network.
Tonight had just made the third one urgent: Lonnie Farr had stood in Jocelyn Avery's yard and laughed.
There wasn't going to be a fourth time.