Chapter 10
Saturday hit the compound like a holiday.
Jocelyn heard it before she saw it—engines rolling in from every direction, the thunder of Harleys multiplied by dozens until the ground trembled and her coffee rippled in its cup.
She stepped out of the garage into a yard that had transformed overnight from a military-neat compound into something that looked like a festival crossed with an invasion.
Bikes everywhere. Chrome catching the morning sun in blinding flashes, leather and denim and ink-covered arms, men greeting each other with backslaps that would've knocked her off her feet.
Women arriving in trucks and cars, kids running between motorcycles with the fearless confidence of children raised around machines.
Someone had set up a massive grill near the fire pit, and the smell of charcoal and meat was already competing with engine exhaust.
"Saturday open house," Rachel said, appearing beside her with a plate of biscuits. "Once a month, anyone connected to the club shows up. Veterans, families, friends. It's organized chaos."
"Heavy on the chaos."
"You get used to it." Rachel pressed the plate into her hands. "Take these to the bar. And Jocelyn—your brandy's on the shelf behind the top-shelf whiskey. Cipher's orders."
Jocelyn blinked. "My brandy."
"You made it on compound property with compound supplies. That makes it house liquor." Rachel was already walking toward the kitchen. "Congratulations. You're the Bragg Exiles' official distiller."
A title she hadn't asked for, in a world she hadn't chosen. Somehow it made her stand taller.
The day unfolded in waves. Jocelyn carried biscuits, then got drafted into helping Jackie set up the bar, then found herself explaining the difference between bourbon and brandy to a retired sergeant major who was on his third cup of her apple spirits and loudly declaring it the best thing he'd tasted since his last deployment.
"That's not the compliment you think it is," she told him.
"Lady, I drank antifreeze in Kandahar. This is a damn revelation."
By afternoon, the compound hummed with a rhythm she was starting to recognize—not the tense, operational energy of weekdays, but something warmer.
Looser. Families eating together at picnic tables.
Kids chasing each other through the garage while prospects tried not to trip over them.
Old ladies moving through the crowd with the easy authority of women who knew exactly where they stood in the hierarchy.
Jocelyn watched it from behind the bar, pouring drinks she'd made from scratch, and felt something dangerous. Belonging. The whisper of it, anyway—faint, easily denied, but there.
She squashed it. She was here because a meth cook wanted her land, not because she'd chosen this life. The minute Embry was handled, she'd be back on her forty acres where she belonged.
Alone.
The word landed different than it used to.
"Another round for table six." Jackie bumped her hip as she passed. "And stop brooding. You're scaring the prospects."
"I'm not brooding."
"Honey, you've been staring at the same spot for five minutes.
" Jackie followed her gaze toward the yard—toward the workshop, where Anvil had emerged for the first time all day.
He stood at the edge of the gathering with a beer he wasn't drinking, watching the crowd the way he watched everything. Measuring. Weighing.
His eyes found Jocelyn through the bar window.
Held.
Jackie made a sound that was half laugh, half warning. "Yeah. That's not brooding. That's something else entirely."
"Shut up."
"Make me."
Jocelyn poured the round for table six and ignored the heat crawling up her neck.
Dusk came soft, the way it did in Carolina—gold bleeding into amber, shadows stretching long across the yard, the temperature dropping just enough to make the fire pit worth lighting.
The crowd thinned as families headed home, leaving the core group around the flames.
Brothers with their women, prospects cleaning up, the low murmur of people settling into the easy end of a good day.
Jocelyn found a spot at the far edge of the fire's reach. A concrete bench, half-hidden by the workshop wall, where she could watch without being watched. She had a jar of her own brandy and the particular exhaustion of a woman who'd spent eight hours being social after four months of isolation.
The fire crackled. Someone was playing guitar badly. Breach was telling a story that had three brothers laughing hard enough to choke.
"That seat taken?"
She looked up. Anvil stood over her, two drinks in his hands—her brandy in one, a beer in the other. He'd changed at some point during the day. Clean shirt, still wearing the cut, his hair damp like he'd showered. The scars on his hands caught firelight and turned copper.
"Would it matter if it was?"
"No."
He sat. Not across from her. Beside her, close enough that his thigh pressed against hers on the narrow bench. The contact was warm and solid and entirely deliberate.
He handed her the brandy. Kept the beer.
"Your stuff's a hit," he said. "Breach has been telling everyone who'll listen that the compound's got its own distillery now."
"The compound's got a rebuilt suicide still and a bag of bread yeast. It's a long way from a distillery."
"Longer ways have been traveled."
She sipped the brandy. He sipped the beer. The guitar player switched to something slower, and the firelight made the yard look almost soft.
"How many people were here today?" she asked.
"Sixty, maybe seventy. Regulars plus some new faces—veterans from the Spring Lake relocation. Word's getting around about Farr."
"That the Exiles handled him?"
"That someone did." He turned the beer in his hands.
"These guys—the veterans, the families—they've been living under Embry's shadow for years.
Most of them didn't even know it. They just knew that things went wrong if they complained about the wrong neighbor, and nobody at the county office gave a damn. "
"And now?"
"Now they're starting to realize they don't have to be quiet about it."
Jocelyn looked at the fire. Families had been here today. Kids. People who'd served their country and come home to a town that was being slowly eaten by a meth operation nobody would fight.
She'd been so focused on her forty acres that she'd forgotten other people were losing things too.
"I've been selfish," she said.
"What?"
"Four months of thinking this was just about my land. My barrels, my still, my grandmother's legacy." She shook her head. "Embry's been doing this to people all over the county, and I didn't see it because I was too busy fighting my own war."
"You were surviving. That's not selfish."
"It's not enough, either."
He was quiet for a moment. The fire popped, sending sparks spiraling into the dark.
"His name was Danny," Anvil said.
Jocelyn went still. She didn't turn her head, didn't look at him, just held the brandy jar in both hands and waited.
"Twenty years old. Smart kid, good hands, the kind of natural balance you can't teach.
" Anvil's voice was low, pitched under the conversation around the fire.
For her ears only. "I vouched for him. Told the foreman he was ready for high steel.
Put my name on the line because I believed he could do it. "
He drank. Set the beer down.
"The safety cable was supposed to be inspected every sixty days.
Contractor signed off on it—I saw the paperwork.
Rated for three hundred pounds, which was more than enough.
" A pause. "Except it hadn't been inspected.
The cable was frayed at the anchor point.
Rated for maybe a hundred and fifty on a good day. "
Jocelyn's fingers tightened on the jar.
"Danny clipped in at six hundred feet. Started walking the beam like he'd been born up there—steady, confident, the way I'd taught him.
" Anvil's hands rested on his knees. Still.
Too still. "Wind shifted. He compensated, slipped, caught himself.
Textbook recovery. Exactly what the safety line was for. "
"And the cable broke."
"The cable broke." His voice didn't waver. Didn't crack. It just went flat, the way steel goes flat when you hammer it past its tolerance. "I was fifteen feet away. I saw the line snap. Reached for him."
He held up his right hand. The scarred fingers opened, closed, opened again. Grasping at something that wasn't there.
"Missed by less than a second."
The fire crackled. The guitar had stopped. Around them, the compound settled into its evening rhythm, and Jocelyn sat beside a man who was handing her the worst thing that had ever happened to him like it was a piece of raw steel he needed her to see.
"You filed reports," she said.
"Every office in the Southeast. Union halls, OSHA, state oversight. I had the paperwork, had the inspection records, had three witnesses who saw the cable snap." His jaw tightened. "The contractor's lawyers buried it. Said Danny hooked in wrong. Said the cable was fine and the kid made an error."
"And they blacklisted you for pushing."
"Labeled me a troublemaker. Every hall, every job site, every foreman who might've hired me got a call saying Dominic Harrell was a liability."
The name hit her like a spark.
Dominic.
He'd said it without thinking—his real name, the one that belonged to the man who'd walked high steel and vouched for a twenty-year-old kid and lost everything because he wouldn't stop telling the truth. Not Anvil. Dominic.
She held the name carefully, the way she'd hold a fragile piece of copper. Didn't repeat it. Didn't draw attention to it. Just let it settle between them.
"So you came to Fayetteville," she said.
"Broke, blacklisted, and angry enough to put my fist through anything that held still." The flatness in his voice eased, just slightly. "Cipher found me doing cash demolition jobs. Recognized something."
"What?"
"A man who needed to build things more than he needed to break them."
The words hung in the firelight. Jocelyn thought about her grandmother—about a woman who'd held forty acres through the Depression because giving up wasn't in the blood. About four generations of stubborn women who'd built things that others tried to take.
About a man who'd lost everything because a contractor signed a piece of paper he shouldn't have signed, and who'd spent three years building gates and fences and compound infrastructure because his hands couldn't stop trying to make something hold.
She set the brandy down.
Her hand moved to his knee. Covered his hand where it rested—big, scarred, warm from the fire. His fingers went rigid under hers. Every muscle in his arm locked.
She didn't pull away.
Slowly—so slowly she could feel each tendon releasing—his hand turned under hers. Palm up. His fingers closed around hers, rough calluses catching on her skin, and he held on with the careful pressure of a man who knew exactly how much force it took to break things and was using none of it.
Neither of them reached for a glass.
Neither of them pretended.
The fire burned low. The compound settled into silence around them.
And Jocelyn sat on a concrete bench with her hand in a dead man's grip—not dead, she corrected herself, but a man who'd been living like he was—and felt the last of her resistance crack along a fault line she hadn't known was there.
"Dominic," she said softly. Testing it. A whisper the fire almost swallowed.
His hand tightened on hers. Not hard. Just enough.
Like a joint finally catching. Like something clicking into place that had been waiting to hold.