Chapter 20
The compound hadn't been this loud since the Saturday open house, and that hadn't involved this much bourbon.
Jocelyn stood behind the bar pouring drinks she'd made from scratch and watching a room full of combat veterans celebrate like teenagers who'd won a football game.
Breach had the jukebox cranked to a volume that should've been illegal.
Fathom was arm-wrestling a prospect twice his age and losing on purpose.
Hoist had pulled out a guitar — an actual guitar, which meant someone in this compound had taste — and was playing something country and triumphant while three brothers she didn't know sang along badly.
Her apple brandy was disappearing at a rate that made her proud and slightly alarmed.
"You're going to need a bigger still," Jackie said, sliding behind the bar to grab a bottle. Breach's woman moved through the celebration with the ease of someone who'd tended bar through worse. "At this rate, they'll drain you dry by midnight."
"I've got a second batch aging. They can wait."
"These men don't wait for anything." Jackie poured two shots and handed one to Jocelyn. "Except their women. For their women, they'd wait forever."
They clinked glasses and drank. The brandy burned clean and warm, and Jocelyn felt it settle into the place where fear used to live.
Embry was dead. His operation was ash. Three lieutenants eliminated, a network gutted, and her forty acres sitting untouched under Carolina stars. The war she'd been fighting alone for four months — the war she'd brought to this compound in desperation — was over.
She'd expected relief. What she felt was bigger. A rearrangement of everything she'd believed about herself and what she could carry alone.
"Jocelyn." Rachel appeared at the end of the bar, Shelby beside her. Both women looked like they'd been waiting for the right moment, and apparently this was it. "How are you doing?"
"I'm pouring bourbon for bikers at midnight. Never been better."
"Liar." Rachel's smile was knowing. "You're processing. You just don't do it the way normal people do."
"Normal people don't have their barns burned down by meth cooks."
"Normal people also don't rebuild," Shelby said. Her voice was gentle but certain. "You will."
"I know."
The three women stood together at the bar while the celebration roared around them, and Jocelyn felt something she hadn't expected.
Not belonging — she'd felt whispers of that before.
Sisterhood. The quiet recognition of women who'd each walked through their own fire and come out the other side standing.
Rachel squeezed her arm. "He's going to ask you something tonight. When he does, don't overthink it."
Before Jocelyn could respond, Rachel was gone — melting into the crowd toward Cipher with the practiced navigation of a woman who knew exactly where her man was at all times.
Don't overthink it.
Too late.
Jocelyn poured three more rounds, restocked the brandy, and was wiping down the bar when she saw it happen.
Cipher materialized at Anvil's side near the fire pit.
The president said something too low to carry over the music, and Anvil went still — the particular stillness she'd learned to read, the one that meant something important was being processed.
They talked for maybe two minutes. Cipher gripped Anvil's shoulder once, the weight of it visible even from across the yard, and walked away.
Anvil stood by the fire.
His posture had changed. Not taller — he was already the tallest man at any gathering. Something in the set of his shoulders, the angle of his head. Like a load had shifted. Like something he'd been carrying had been acknowledged, and the acknowledgment changed the weight of it.
He turned and found her through the crowd. Through the bodies and the noise and the celebration, his eyes locked on hers with the same gravity they'd had the first day on her porch — measuring, weighing, deciding.
Only now she knew what the decision was.
He moved through the crowd toward the bar.
Brothers parted without being asked, the way they always did, but tonight there was something different in the parting — not deference but recognition.
Nods. Shoulder claps. Freefall catching his arm for a word that made Anvil's jaw tighten with something that wasn't tension. Respect, maybe. Or pride.
He reached the bar. Leaned on it. Looked at her with those dark eyes that had been the last thing Embry ever saw, and that were now soft in a way she'd earned and he'd never given anyone else.
"Cipher just gave me something," he said.
"I saw. What was it?"
"A title. Officially." He paused. "Head of Construction and Demolition. The club's expanding its legitimate operations — security consulting, custom fabrication, structural work. He wants me to run the build side."
"That's not a small thing."
"No." His hands rested on the bar. She could see the fresh scrapes on his knuckles, almost healed. "It means a permanent role. Not just missions and compound projects. Real work. The kind that pays and builds something."
"The kind you used to do."
"Better. My terms. My standards." Something shifted in his expression. "And a workshop budget. For the compound and for..." He trailed off.
"For?"
"For wherever I'm building."
The words sat between them on the bar, warm and heavy with implication.
Jocelyn picked up a glass, polished it slowly, and waited.
Because she knew this man. Knew that he circled things before he committed, the way he circled a structure before he started work — assessing, measuring, making sure the foundation was solid before he put weight on it.
"Wherever you're building," she repeated.
"Jocelyn."
"I'm right here."
He straightened. Came around the bar — around it, not over it, because even now he moved with deliberate purpose, closing distance without rushing.
He stood in front of her in the space between the bar and the back wall, close enough that the noise of the celebration became background, close enough that the rest of the room stopped mattering.
"I want to build your barn," he said. "Steel frame, insulated for barrel aging, designed to last a century."
"You've mentioned."
"I want to expand your still house. Proper drainage, temperature control, room for a second still."
"Also mentioned."
"I want a workshop on the north side of your property. Twenty by thirty. Welding rig, fabrication bench, storage for steel stock."
"Mentioned."
"And I want to come home to you every night.
" His voice dropped. Rough, certain, the voice he used when he was laying a weld he intended to hold forever.
"Not as club protection. Not as a temporary arrangement.
I want to be on your land, in your house, beside your still, building things that last while you make bourbon that gets better every year. "
"Anvil—"
"I want to build the gate. Your grandfather's gate, with scrollwork that'll make people slow down just to look at it. I want to fix your porch wiring and reinforce your foundation and put a swing on the front of that house because your grandmother's yard deserves one."
"You're rambling."
"I never ramble." His hands found her waist. Pulled her close. "I'm making a list. There's a difference."
She looked up at him. This man. This ridiculous, scarred, obsessive, beautiful man who'd shown up to assess property damage and built himself into every part of her life before she'd noticed it happening.
Who'd fought a war for her land and killed for her legacy and held her in a narrow bed while they planned a future that had felt impossible three weeks ago.
"Yes," she said.
"I haven't finished."
"I don't care. Yes." She grabbed his cut — the same way she'd grabbed it in church, both fists in the leather, pulling him down to her level. "Yes to the barn. Yes to the still house. Yes to the workshop and the gate and the goddamn porch swing. Yes to all of it."
"I was also going to ask about the fence line on the south side—"
"Yes, you impossible man."
She kissed him. Hard. With both hands in his leather and his arms around her waist and three dozen brothers behind them who'd learned last time not to interrupt.
Someone cheered. Multiple someones. Breach's voice cut through the noise: "About goddamn time!"
Anvil pulled back just enough to look at her. His eyes were bright. Not wet — he wasn't that kind of man. But bright in a way she'd never seen, the way steel got bright when you heated it to the point where it could be shaped into anything.
"You said yes before I finished," he said.
"You were going to list every project on my property. We'd have been here till sunrise."
"I have a lot of projects."
"I know you do." She smoothed his cut. Straightened his collar. The small, proprietary gestures of a woman adjusting her man in front of a room full of people who understood exactly what those gestures meant. "You've got the rest of your life to list them."
His forehead dropped to hers. His hands tightened on her waist. Around them, the celebration continued — bourbon flowing, music playing, brothers living the loud, rough, fiercely loyal life they'd chosen.
And in the middle of it, two people stood behind a bar and held on to each other and let the future settle over them like something they'd built together.
"The rest of my life," he repeated.
"Starting tomorrow." She pulled back and grinned at him. "Tonight, you're pouring drinks. I'm almost out of brandy and these animals are getting restless."
"You want me to bartend."
"I want you to make yourself useful while I check on my second batch." She pushed him gently toward the bar. "Consider it your first official duty as a man who lives on my property."
"I just told you I want to build you a century barn and you're putting me to work."
"Welcome to life with an Avery woman." She patted his chest. "Get used to it."
She walked toward the garage — toward her still, her copper, the work that had kept her alive through four months of hell and would keep her building for decades to come.
Behind her, she heard Anvil pick up the bottle she'd left on the bar and start pouring, Breach immediately giving him grief about the size of the pour, Fathom requesting something that wasn't brandy, the rough symphony of a family being itself.
Her family now.
She'd walked into this compound three weeks ago with a duffel bag and a jar of bourbon, a woman out of options asking strangers for help she didn't want to need.
She was walking out of it with a man, a brotherhood, and a promise that forty acres of stubborn women's legacy would never be threatened again.
Jocelyn pushed open the garage door and checked her still.
The copper gleamed.