Chapter 13
She smelled the smoke before she saw him.
Jocelyn was awake the moment the compound door opened — not the gradual surfacing of someone pulled from sleep, but the instant, full-body alertness of a woman who'd spent four months sleeping with one eye open.
The bed beside her was cold. Had been cold for hours.
And the air that pushed through the hallway carried woodsmoke and gasoline and something older, the scent of timber that had been standing since before she was born.
She knew.
Before she pulled on clothes, before she walked down the corridor, before she pushed through the main room door into the gray light of early morning — she already knew.
Anvil stood in the yard.
Covered in soot. Ash in his hair, on his neck, ground into the creases of his hands. His jeans were scorched at the knees and his cut was streaked with black, and he stood beside his bike staring at nothing with the hollow expression of a man who'd arrived too late for something that mattered.
Breach and Pathfinder were behind him, moving toward the building, giving Anvil the wide berth of men who recognized the particular silence that meant don't.
Jocelyn walked straight to him.
He saw her coming. His mouth opened — to explain, to soften it, to do whatever men did when they had to deliver news that would gut someone. She watched the words forming and the dread behind them.
She didn't let him speak.
"The barn," she said.
His jaw clenched. The words died.
"My barrels."
A nod. Barely.
"The still house."
"Standing." His voice was raw, scraped by smoke. "Untouched. I got there before—"
"You saved my still."
"I lost your barn."
The grief hit her like a wall. Not slow, not building — all at once, a century of timber and hay and Avery women's work gone in a column of fire she hadn't even been awake to see.
Her grandmother's barn. The barrels she'd filled with her own hands.
Six months of bourbon that would never age, never bottle, never prove that four generations of stubbornness could produce something worth drinking.
Gone.
She looked at Anvil — at the ash on his skin, at the soot in his hair, at the raw scrapes on his knuckles from fighting in the dark while her life burned — and the grief changed shape.
Didn't disappear. Twisted. Became something hotter, something that had teeth and claws and needed out before it ate her from the inside.
She grabbed the front of his cut and pulled.
He stumbled forward — six-four and two-twenty and she moved him because he let her, because the surprise of it short-circuited whatever guilty distance he'd been maintaining. She pulled him through the compound door, down the corridor, past the main room where Breach had the sense to look away.
"Jocelyn—"
"Don't talk."
"I need to tell you what—"
"I said don't talk."
She shoved through the bathroom door — the communal shower, industrial tile and too-bright lights, three stalls with curtains that had seen better decades. She yanked the nearest curtain open, cranked the water to hot, and turned back to him.
He stood in the doorway. Ash and blood and smoke, his scarred hands hanging at his sides, watching her with an expression she'd never seen on him — lost. The man who built things, who always knew which joint came next, who moved through the world with the certainty of someone who understood exactly how everything fit together.
Lost.
She reached for his cut. Pushed it off his shoulders.
It hit the tile floor with the heavy slap of leather and patches, and she saw him flinch — a biker's reflex, the cut was sacred — but he didn't stop her.
Her hands found his shirt next, pulling it up over his chest, over his head, revealing skin that was streaked with sweat and soot and the scars she'd traced with her mouth two nights ago.
"Jocelyn." Her name came out different this time. Not a warning. A surrender.
"I need to feel something that isn't grief." She pulled her own shirt off. Met his eyes. "Give me something else to feel."
His control didn't break this time. It detonated.
His hands hit her waist and lifted her onto him in one motion — nothing careful, nothing measured, just raw need propelling them both under the water.
Hot spray hit her back and his chest, turning soot into gray rivers that ran down their skin.
She wrapped her legs around him and his mouth found her neck, her collarbone, the hollow of her throat, biting and kissing and consuming with a desperation that matched the fire still burning in her chest.
This was nothing like the first time.
The first time had been patient. Deliberate.
A man checking every joint, making sure every connection held.
This was that man stripped of patience, all the careful control incinerated by the same fire that had taken her barn.
His hands gripped her thighs hard enough to bruise, and she didn't care — she wanted the bruises, wanted the proof that something physical and real had happened to her body besides loss.
"Mine." The word came out of him like something torn loose. His mouth against her ear, water running between their bodies, his hands holding her like he was afraid the current would sweep her away. "Mine."
"Prove it."
He pressed her against the tile wall. The cold shock of it against her back, the heat of him against her front, the water pouring over them both — sensation overload that burned the grief back to a manageable distance.
His forehead dropped against hers and his breathing was ragged, shot through, the breathing of a man who'd been running on discipline and adrenaline for hours and had nothing left but want.
She kissed him. Hard. Bit his lower lip and felt the sound it punched out of him — guttural, wrecked, the sound of patience dying. Her hands dragged down his chest, nails raking through the water, and his hips jerked against hers with an urgency that made her spine arch off the tile.
"I couldn't save it." The words fell out of him between breaths. Confession and combat, all tangled together. "I got there and it was already—"
"Stop." She grabbed his face. Made him look at her.
Water ran between her fingers and his jaw, and his eyes were wild — not with violence but with the particular agony of a man who defined himself by what he could build and had just watched something burn.
"You saved my still. You saved my house. You saved me."
"The barn—"
"Is wood. I'm not wood. I'm right here." She kissed him again, slower this time but no less fierce, pouring everything she had into his mouth — the grief and the fury and the desperate gratitude that he'd raced through the dark to fight for something that was hers.
"I'm right here and I'm not burning. Feel me. "
He made a sound she'd never heard from him. Something that came from deep in his chest, below the control and the patience and the careful construction of a man who'd learned to contain everything dangerous about himself. It was the sound of all of that coming apart at once.
What followed was fire of a different kind.
Desperate and consuming. His body moving against hers with an intensity that matched the barn's collapse — structural, total, nothing held back.
She matched him. Met every push with her own, dug her fingers into his shoulders, wrapped herself around him so completely that she couldn't tell where the water ended and the heat began.
He said her name like a prayer and a curse, and she said his — Dominic — and his whole body shuddered like she'd welded something directly to his spine.
He was rougher than the first time. She wanted it rough.
Wanted to feel every fingerprint and every scar and every ounce of strength he'd been leashing since the day they met.
The careful man, the patient builder, the one who checked every joint twice — she wanted him unjointed, unbuilt, reduced to the same raw foundation she was standing on.
He gave her that.
Against the tile, under the water, surrounded by steam and the ghost of smoke, they burned through everything — the adrenaline, the grief, the fury, the four months of terror and the ten days of falling and the barn that was ash and the still that was standing and the fact that they were both alive and whole and here.
The world narrowed to sensation. His hands. Her breath. The rhythm of two people who'd almost lost everything discovering what remained.
Afterward.
The water had gone lukewarm. They'd slid down the tile wall at some point — she couldn't remember when — and sat on the shower floor tangled in each other, legs intertwined, her back against his chest. His arms wrapped around her from behind, scarred hands flat against her stomach, his chin resting on the top of her head.
The grief was still there. It would be there tomorrow and the next day and every day she drove past where the barn used to stand. But the fire had burned a path through the worst of it, and what remained was something she could carry.
"Tell me," she said.
He told her. The fire, the trucks, Breen coordinating from the gate. The fight in the yard. The still house saved, the barn beyond saving. Five of Embry's men secured, Breen handled. The quiet details of violence delivered in a voice hoarse from smoke and exhaustion and what she'd just done to him.
"Breen was his supply chain," Anvil said. "Without him, Embry's operation doesn't move. He's lost his enforcer and his logistics. All he's got left is Womack and whatever soldiers haven't run yet."
"And himself."
"And himself."
Jocelyn was quiet for a moment. The water trickled, cooling. His heartbeat thudded against her shoulder blade, slow and heavy, a rhythm she was learning to read the way she read fermentation — by feel, by instinct, by the subtle changes that told her when something was right.
"I'm going to rebuild the barn," she said.
His arms tightened. "Jocelyn—"
"New design. Better foundation. Fire-resistant where it matters." She put her hands over his. "The barrels are gone. That's six months I can't get back. But I've got grain coming and a still that works and a federal permit that says I can make bourbon on my land. The barn is just a building."
"It was your grandmother's."
"My grandmother held forty acres through the Depression with nothing but a copper pot and stubbornness.
She'd tell me to stop crying and start building.
" Jocelyn turned in his arms, facing him.
Water dripped from his hair to his shoulders, tracing paths through the last of the soot.
"I'm going to rebuild. Every barrel. Every batch. Better than what burned."
He looked at her. Steam curled between them. His eyes held something she recognized now — not the flat assessment, not the patient weighing. Awe. The quiet astonishment of a man watching someone do the thing he'd stopped believing people could do.
Refuse to break.
"I'll build it," he said. "The barn. Better than what was there."
"I know you will."
"Bigger. Proper ventilation for barrel aging. Steel frame so it can't burn."
"Now you're showing off."
His mouth curved. An actual smile — small, barely there, half-hidden by the steam. But real. The first real smile she'd seen on his face since the day he'd walked onto her property with a truck full of lumber and the patient certainty that he could fix what was broken.
"Someone's got to," he said.
She leaned forward and kissed him. Soft this time. Slow. The heat banked back to coals, warming instead of consuming. His hands came to her face the way they had the first time — cradling, gentle, the contrast that undid her every single time.
"Together," she said against his mouth.
"Together."
They sat on the shower floor until the water ran cold, building plans out of steam and stubbornness, two people who'd lost things deciding what came next.