Chapter 12
The sky over Spring Lake was the wrong color.
Anvil was welding a crossbar on the compound's back fence when he saw it—an orange glow on the southern horizon that had nothing to do with dawn. Three in the morning and the sky was burning, and he knew before his phone rang exactly what was on fire.
He answered with the welder still hissing. "Talk."
"Jocelyn's barn." Pathfinder's voice was taut, clipped. "Prospect on night watch saw the glow from the Spring Lake road. Multiple vehicles at the property line. This isn't a drive-by—they're torching it systematic."
Anvil killed the welder. His hands were already moving—gloves off, cut on, keys in his pocket. The cold thing in his chest ignited, and this time he didn't bother trying to contain it.
"How many?"
"Six, maybe eight. Organized. Someone's running them from a truck at the gate."
Breen. Embry's logistics man, the one who scheduled violence like inventory control. Farr was dead, so Embry had sent his supply chain to do an enforcer's job. A corporate mind running a military operation.
Corporate minds made corporate mistakes.
"I'm rolling. Get Breach. Meet me at the south turnoff."
He was on the bike in thirty seconds. The compound gate opened ahead of him—Tally on night duty, wide-eyed—and Anvil blew through without slowing. The Harley screamed down the access road, engine maxed, the wind tearing at his cut as he leaned into the dark.
Jocelyn's barn. Four generations of storage, hay and timber and history. The barrels she'd filled before Embry ever made his offer. The hole in the wall where he'd put Farr's man through the siding, not yet repaired.
All of it burning.
He'd left her sleeping. Two hours ago, she'd been curled against him, her breathing steady, her hand resting on his chest. He'd slipped out to work the fence because his hands needed something to do at three in the morning that wasn't memorizing the way she felt against him.
And while he was welding a goddamn crossbar, they were burning her life.
Breach and Pathfinder caught him at the south turnoff, bikes appearing from the dark like shadows peeling off the road. No words. Breach racked his shotgun while rolling. Pathfinder had his rifle slung across his back.
They killed headlights half a mile out. Didn't need them.
The barn was a torch that lit the sky above the tree line, orange and furious, throwing sparks into the Carolina dark.
Anvil could feel the heat before he could see the flames—a pressure on his face, the crackle of old timber surrendering to something it couldn't fight.
The property opened up as they cleared the pines.
Three trucks at the gate. Men moving between the barn and the outbuildings with jerry cans—not panicked, not rushing.
Methodical. Someone had given them a schedule and a sequence, and they were following it with the mindless discipline of men who'd been told exactly what to burn and in what order.
The barn was fully engulfed. Flames climbed three stories of dry timber, consuming a century of Avery women's work in a column of fire that turned the whole property daylight-bright. Heat rolled off it in waves, distorting the air, making the men with jerry cans shimmer like ghosts.
Two of them were moving toward the still house.
Everything in Anvil's vision narrowed to a single point.
"Breach—trucks. Pathfinder—perimeter." He was off the bike before it fully stopped, boots hitting dirt, momentum carrying him toward the men with the accelerant. "The still house is mine."
He covered the distance at a dead sprint.
The first man heard him coming—turned, jerry can sloshing, mouth opening on a shout that never finished.
Anvil hit him center mass and drove him into the ground with enough force to bounce the jerry can into the dark.
The man's head hit hardpan clay and his eyes rolled back.
The second man was faster. Dropped the can, pulled a knife, squared up with the wild-eyed stance of someone who'd been in fights but never against someone who wanted to kill him. He slashed—a wide arc that caught firelight on the blade.
Anvil stepped inside the arc. Caught the wrist. Twisted until something popped and the knife fell free. The man screamed, and Anvil silenced him with an elbow that dropped him like a felled tree.
The still house door was closed. Untouched. They hadn't reached it yet.
Anvil turned back toward the trucks.
The yard was chaos. Breach had come in from the east, his shotgun booming once, twice—not at people, at tires. Two trucks sagged onto rims, going nowhere. Men scattered from the sound, dropping jerry cans, stumbling away from the Marine who moved through firelight like something biblical.
Pathfinder had the perimeter locked. A man trying to flee toward the tree line went down hard, tackled from a shadow he never saw. Another made it to the third truck and fumbled with keys before Pathfinder's rifle butt shattered the driver's window and the conversation ended.
The barn roared. Timber cracked with sounds like gunshots, the frame twisting as the fire ate through supports that had held for a hundred years. A section of roof collapsed inward, sending a geyser of sparks into the sky, and Anvil felt each one like a punch.
He couldn't save it. The barn was gone the moment they'd lit it, and no amount of rage was going to unburn a century of wood.
But the man who'd ordered it was still here.
Anvil scanned the yard. Firelight threw everything into sharp relief—brothers securing the scattered arsonists, two trucks disabled, men on the ground groaning or unconscious. But the third truck, the one at the gate—
Still running. A figure behind the wheel, lit by the dashboard glow, watching the operation collapse through the windshield.
Curtis Breen.
Anvil walked toward the truck.
The distribution coordinator saw him coming. Even from fifty yards, Anvil could read the calculation happening behind the windshield—the rapid assessment of a man who managed logistics and was now computing his own escape route. Breen's hand moved to the gearshift.
Anvil broke into a run.
Breen threw the truck into reverse, tires spinning on gravel, the back end fishtailing as he tried to swing onto the road. Fast. Calculated. The move of someone who'd planned exit routes the way he planned delivery schedules.
He hadn't planned for Pathfinder.
The Ranger appeared from the tree line like a ghost, stepping into the road behind the reversing truck with the calm certainty of a man who'd blocked more dangerous exits. He didn't try to stop the vehicle. He shot the rear tire.
The truck lurched sideways. Breen overcorrected, the steering fighting him on two good tires and one shredded rim. The truck slewed across the road and slammed sideways into the drainage ditch, the frame groaning as it settled at a forty-five-degree angle.
Anvil reached the truck in four strides.
He ripped the driver's door open. Breen was dazed from the impact, blood from a split forehead running into his eyes, his hands still gripping the wheel like it could save him.
A smaller man than Anvil expected—five-ten, neat even in crisis, the kind of face that belonged in a boardroom, not coordinating arson.
Breen's eyes focused. Found Anvil in the firelight—six-four, covered in dirt and someone else's blood, the barn reflected in his eyes like he'd swallowed the fire and was carrying it behind his teeth.
"This is—" Breen started. Reasonable. Business-like. The opening line of a negotiation. "This is a misunder—"
Anvil dragged him out of the truck by his collar.
Breen hit the road and scrambled, hands up, the corporate composure cracking as he backed toward the ditch. "Wait. Wait. I can give you Embry's whole network. Routes, schedules, drop points—everything. I'm the only one who knows—"
"I know."
"Then you need me alive—"
"I don't need anything from you."
Anvil looked past Breen to the barn. The frame was collapsing now, the last of the structure folding inward with the slow inevitability of something that had outlasted everything except the man who'd finally decided to kill it. A hundred years of Avery women's work, reduced to ember and ash.
Jocelyn's barrels were in there. Six months of aged bourbon, the product she'd been building her reputation on, the proof that four generations of stubbornness could produce something beautiful.
Gone. Because this man had scheduled it.
"You know what was in that barn?" Anvil's voice had gone somewhere below human. "Besides the timber and the hay and the century of history you just torched?"
Breen shook his head. Fast. Frantic.
"Bourbon." Anvil stepped closer. "Six months of aged bourbon that a woman built from nothing. A woman who fought your boss and your enforcers and four months of hell, and kept building anyway. And you drove out here in the middle of the night with a crew and a schedule and burned it."
"Embry ordered—"
"Embry's not here." Anvil's hands closed. "You are."
Breen broke. Turned to run toward the ditch, toward the dark, toward anywhere that wasn't here. A corporate mind making a desperate calculation—survive now, negotiate later, leverage his knowledge into a deal.
He made it three steps.
Anvil caught him from behind. No finesse. No patience. No careful structural understanding of how things came apart. Just fury and strength and the image of Jocelyn's barn collapsing into its own grave while the man who'd scheduled its death tried to run.
Breen went down in the drainage ditch. The sounds were short and final.
Anvil stood over what remained and breathed the night air. It tasted like smoke and gasoline and old wood, the scent of something irreplaceable turning to ash.
His hands were shaking.
Not from fear. Not from effort. From the understanding that he'd failed again—different from Danny, different from the cable, but the same hollow feeling of arriving too late to save what mattered.
"Anvil." Breach appeared beside him, shotgun resting on his shoulder. The Marine looked at the ditch, then at Anvil, and said nothing about what he saw there. "Still house is secure. They didn't touch it."
"The barn."
"Gone." Breach's voice was flat. Honest. "Nothing to save. But the house is standing, the still's intact, and the equipment in the secondary shed is untouched."
Anvil walked back toward the property. The barn had collapsed fully now, a rectangle of glowing embers where three stories of history used to stand. Heat still pulsed from the wreckage, keeping him back, and he stood at the edge of the light and watched a century of Avery women's work turn to ash.
The still house stood twenty yards away. Untouched. The copper gleaming through the window where firelight caught it, Jocelyn's rebuilt coil and her clean connections and the equipment that represented everything she knew how to do.
He'd saved the still. Lost the barn.
Built one thing. Failed to protect another.
Pathfinder came up from the road, rifle slung. "Five secured. Two unconscious, three zip-tied by the trucks. Breen?"
"Handled."
"Embry?"
"Wasn't here." Anvil stared at the embers. "Sent his logistics man to do the dirty work. Three layers of lieutenants between him and any crime."
"Two layers now." Pathfinder stood beside him, both men silhouetted against the dying fire. "Farr's gone. Breen's gone. That leaves Womack and Embry himself."
Two layers. Getting thinner.
But the barn was still gone, and the bourbon was still ash, and somewhere in the compound Jocelyn was sleeping in his bed without knowing that the thing she'd spent her life protecting had just been cut in half.
He'd have to tell her.
The thought was worse than anything Breen had thrown at him.
Anvil pulled his phone. Dialed Cipher. The president answered on the first ring, already awake, already knowing.
"Barn's gone," Anvil said. "Still's intact. Breen's down. Five of his crew secured."
A pause. "Embry?"
"Not here. Sent Breen to run the show." Anvil's voice scraped. "She's going to want to come out here."
"She's going to want to burn Embry's house down."
"Yeah." Anvil looked at the embers one more time. "She might be right."
He hung up and stood in the firelight, watching the last of the barn settle into its grave. Dawn was breaking east of Spring Lake, gray light washing over the destruction, turning the dramatic into the mundane. Just rubble now. Just loss.
But the still house stood. The copper gleamed. And somewhere in the dark, Ray Embry was two lieutenants lighter and running out of men to hide behind.
Anvil's hands had stopped shaking.
He had work to do.