Chapter 14
Anvil woke with Jocelyn's hair in his mouth and her knee jammed against his thigh and the unfamiliar sensation of not wanting to be anywhere else.
Gray light pushed through the small window of his room. Early morning — six, maybe seven. His internal clock never fully shut off, even when the rest of him had been wrung out by smoke and violence and a woman who'd taken him apart on a shower floor and put him back together with her bare hands.
She was curled against him, face pressed into his chest, one arm thrown across his ribs like she was pinning him down.
Her breathing was slow and even, the deep rhythm of someone who'd finally found something solid enough to sleep against. Ash still streaked her hairline where the shower hadn't reached.
His fingernails were black with it — soot ground into the cracks and calluses, the kind of grime that took days to fully scrub out.
He didn't move.
This was new territory. Not the woman in his bed — he'd had women, though fewer than most brothers and none who'd lasted past morning. But lying still afterward, watching light move across someone's face, wanting to memorize the specific way her eyelashes rested against her cheek.
That was new.
He'd spent three years building things that didn't breathe. Gates, fences, compound infrastructure — steel and iron and concrete that held weight without asking for anything in return. Safe things to pour himself into, because steel didn't fall six stories when you failed it.
Jocelyn shifted in her sleep. Her fingers curled against his ribs, tightening, and she murmured something he couldn't make out. Even unconscious, she held on.
For the first time since Danny fell, Anvil let himself think about building something that wasn't infrastructure.
A barn. Her barn, redesigned, steel-framed, built to last another century. The still house expanded with proper ventilation and temperature control. A life on forty acres of stubborn women's land with a woman who'd pointed a shotgun at his chest and told him morning was relative.
A future.
The word sat strange in his mind. He'd stopped thinking in futures after the blacklisting.
The Exiles had given him a present — work, brothers, purpose — but futures required believing you could build something that wouldn't get taken away.
He'd stopped believing that the day every union hall in the Southeast closed its doors because he'd told the truth about a dead kid and a bad cable.
Jocelyn's hand flexed against his ribs. Her eyes opened — not slowly, not gradually. All at once, the way she did everything. Alert, aware, her gaze finding his immediately.
"You're staring at me," she said.
"You're in my bed."
"You put me here."
"You dragged me into a shower. I improvised."
Her mouth curved. Morning-soft, unguarded, the sharp edges of her personality still asleep even if the rest of her wasn't. He wanted to photograph it. Weld it into something permanent.
"What time is it?" she asked.
"Early."
"How early?"
"Early enough that nobody's going to knock on that door for at least an hour."
"Is that an offer?"
"That's a fact."
She stretched against him — a full-body movement that pressed every line of her against every line of him, and he felt his hands tighten on her waist before his brain caught up. Possessive. Automatic. The reflex of a man whose body had decided something his mind was still working through.
She noticed. Of course she noticed. Her eyebrow rose.
"Easy, big man. I haven't even brushed my teeth."
"Don't care."
"That's disgusting."
"That's honest."
She laughed. Low, warm, the sound vibrating through his chest where she was pressed against it. He filed the sound away in the same place he kept the weight of good steel and the resonance of a clean weld — things that told him the work was right.
They lay in the gray light, tangled together, and for a while neither of them spoke.
The compound was waking up around them — boots in the corridor, the distant clatter of the kitchen, someone's bike turning over in the yard.
The sounds of a world that kept moving regardless of what had burned in the night.
"Tell me about the union halls," Jocelyn said.
He'd been expecting it. Not the question itself, but the timing — she waited until the quiet moments, when his hands were still and his guard was down, to ask for the pieces of himself he kept locked away.
Smart woman. She understood that you didn't pry steel open with force. You applied heat and patience.
"After Danny's funeral, I filed the first OSHA complaint." He stared at the ceiling. Her hand rested on his chest, steady and warm. "Had the inspection records, the cable spec, three witnesses who saw the line snap. Open-and-shut case."
"But it wasn't."
"The contractor's name was Merrick. Had thirty years in the business, government contracts, friends at every oversight office in the Southeast." Anvil's jaw worked.
"His lawyers reframed it. Danny hooked in wrong.
Danny didn't check his equipment. Danny was an inexperienced worker who made a fatal error, and the company bore no responsibility. "
"That's a lie."
"That's a lie with a legal team behind it." He turned the words over, old and worn like tools he'd handled too many times. "I pushed anyway. Filed with the state. Filed with OSHA again. Went to every union hall that would let me through the door and told them what Merrick had done."
"And Merrick's people made calls."
"Harrell's a liability. Harrell's a troublemaker.
Harrell files complaints instead of doing his job.
" He felt the old anger stir — duller now, worn smooth by years and purpose, but still there.
"Six months after Danny died, I couldn't get hired on a bridge crew anywhere south of Virginia.
Merrick got a government contract for a highway overpass outside Charlotte. "
Jocelyn was quiet for a moment. Her thumb traced a slow circle on his sternum.
"The overpass," she said. "Did he build it?"
"Standing right now. Carries forty thousand cars a day." The bitter taste of it never fully faded. "And Danny's in a cemetery in Spartanburg with a headstone his parents couldn't afford. I paid for it with the last real paycheck I ever earned."
Her hand pressed flat against his chest. Not stroking now — anchoring. Holding him to the present while the past tried to pull him under.
"You did the right thing," she said.
"The right thing cost me everything."
"The right thing always costs everything." She propped herself up on her elbow, looking down at him. Morning light caught her face, turning the sun streaks in her hair to gold. "That's how you know it was right."
He looked at her. This woman who'd fought a meth empire with a shotgun and a notebook, who'd spent four months alone because asking for help felt like betrayal, who'd watched her barn burn and decided to rebuild before the embers were cold.
"Your grandmother," he said. "What were her last words?"
Jocelyn's expression shifted. The softness didn't leave, but something harder moved behind it — steel under silk, the bedrock that held everything else up.
"She was in the hospital. Lung cancer — tobacco farm, three decades of curing barns.
She'd known for a year and hadn't told anyone because she had things to finish first." Jocelyn's voice was steady, the way it got when she was holding something heavy.
"I was twenty-nine. She'd already deeded the property to me, already set up the trust, already made sure the land was protected from my mother's second husband and anyone else who might try to take it. "
"She planned ahead."
"She planned everything. Except dying." Jocelyn looked at the wall. "Last day. She could barely breathe, barely talk. I was holding her hand, and she squeezed it — hard, harder than a woman with lung cancer should've been able to squeeze — and she said, 'Don't let them take it.'"
The words landed in the room like dropped steel.
"Not 'I love you.' Not 'take care of yourself.' Not anything a normal grandmother says to her granddaughter at the end." Jocelyn's voice cracked. Just a hairline fracture, sealed almost instantly. "She said don't let them take it. Because she knew they'd try. They always try."
"And you promised."
"I promised." She looked back at him. Her eyes were bright but dry — a woman who'd cried those tears years ago and had nothing left but the promise they'd watered.
"Three years later, Ray Embry showed up with a cash offer and a smile.
And I looked at him and heard my grandmother's voice and said no. "
Anvil reached up and cupped her face. One hand, scarred and rough, cradling her jaw the way he'd held her the first time — careful, certain, the touch of a man who understood what it meant to hold something irreplaceable.
"She'd be proud of you," he said.
"She'd tell me I should've shot Embry when he showed up instead of waiting four months to ask bikers for help."
"Smart woman."
"Terrifying woman." Jocelyn leaned into his hand. "She would've liked you, though."
"Why?"
"Because you build things right. She didn't trust people who cut corners." Her eyes held his. "And because you came back. She always said you could tell a man's character by whether he came back when things got hard."
Anvil thought about that. About riding out to her property with a truck full of lumber because a woman he'd met once was fighting a war she couldn't win alone.
About reinforcing her barn door and welding security bars while she fixed copper joints ten feet away, two people working in silence because the work said everything the words couldn't.
About racing through the dark toward a burning barn, knowing he'd be too late and going anyway.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said.
"I know." She turned her face and pressed her lips to his palm. The kiss landed on a forge scar, warm and deliberate. "That's why I dragged you into the shower instead of throwing you out."
"That's your standard for commitment? Not throwing me out?"
"For an Avery woman? That is commitment."
He pulled her down. Not for heat — for closeness. Her head tucked under his chin, her body settling against his, two people folded together in a narrow bed that shouldn't have been comfortable and was.
"I want to build your barn," he said into her hair.
"I know."
"Not for the club. Not for the mission. For you."
She was quiet for a moment. Her fingers traced the scars on his forearm — the forge burns, the old injuries, the map of a life spent making things.
"I want you on my land," she said. "Not as protection. Not as the club's guy watching over a project. I want you there. Building beside me."
The word beside hit him somewhere he hadn't been touched in years. Not for her. Not over her. Beside.
Partners. Building the same thing from different sides.
"When this is over," he said.
"When this is over," she agreed. "And when you build my barn, I'm going to stand there with a clipboard and critique every weld."
"You wouldn't."
"Try me. I've been watching you work for two weeks. Your horizontal beads drift left on long runs."
He pulled back to stare at her. "They do not."
"Quarter-inch. Consistently. I measured with my eyes."
"You measured my welds with your eyes?"
"I'm a distiller. I measure everything." She grinned at him — full, unguarded, the kind of grin that transformed her entire face from stubborn to radiant. "You going to fix it or argue about it?"
"I'm going to—" He stopped. Shook his head. "You're impossible."
"Four generations of impossible. Get used to it."
He kissed her forehead. Held her against him.
Let himself feel the weight of her — not a burden, not a responsibility, not a load-bearing wall he couldn't afford to lose.
A partner. Someone who measured his welds with her eyes and critiqued his technique and pushed back when he tried to carry everything alone.
Someone worth building a future for.
Outside, the compound hummed with its morning rhythm. Inside, two people who'd spent their lives building things that others tried to destroy lay tangled in a narrow bed, making plans that had nothing to do with violence and everything to do with what came after.
For the first time in three years, Anvil's hands were still.
Not because they were tired.
Because they'd found something worth holding.