Chapter Twenty-One
The shop smelled like sawdust and possibility.
Becca stood in the doorway of Sawyer's Blooms with the morning sun at her back and a set of keys she'd been afraid to use for three weeks.
The front window was new — Stockyard's crew had replaced it two days ago, the glass so clean it looked like a hole in the wall.
The door frame was fresh pine, not yet painted, still sticky with sap that caught on her fingers when she pushed it open.
Inside, the destruction was gone.
The bleach stains had been scrubbed from the floor. The broken shelving had been ripped out and hauled away. The coolers — both of them — sat against the back wall, brand new, humming quietly, their glass doors gleaming under the fluorescent lights that Lakeshore had rewired yesterday.
Empty. Clean. Waiting.
"You're staring," Blast said behind her.
"I'm remembering."
He came up beside her in the doorway, close enough that his arm pressed against hers.
His energy was dialed down this morning — not gone, never gone, but running at a frequency that felt more like warmth than electricity.
He'd been like this since the night Frank died.
Quieter. Not still — he'd never be still — but something close.
Something comfortable.
"Last time I walked in here, there was bleach on everything," she said. "Glass on the floor. My grandmother's wire cutters bent in half on the counter."
"And now?"
She looked at the empty space. The clean floors, the humming coolers, the blank walls where her photos used to hang.
"Now it's a start."
They spent the morning rebuilding.
Blast had brought shelving brackets from the compound garage — industrial grade, the kind designed for warehouse use, strong enough to hold three times the weight of her old ones.
"These are meant for engine parts," she said, examining a bracket the size of her forearm. "Not flower vases."
"Engine parts, flower vases — same principle. Heavy things need strong support." He held the bracket against the wall, eyeballing the height. "How's this?"
"Too high."
He lowered it two inches. "This?"
"Too low."
"You're messing with me."
"I'm being precise." She crossed the shop and stood beside him, reaching up to adjust the bracket's position. "The display needs to be at eye level for the average customer. Five-four to five-six. If it's too high, people look past it. Too low, they look over it."
"You've thought about this."
"I've thought about this for four years." She guided his hands to the right spot — the bracket flush against the wall, the mounting holes aligned with the studs Stockyard had marked yesterday. "Right here. Hold it."
He held it. Steady as stone, his scarred hands flat against the metal while she drilled the screws in with a borrowed power drill that she handled with more confidence than he expected.
She could see it in his face — the slight widening of his eyes, the grin that flickered when the first bracket seated clean.
"You've done this before," he said.
"Who do you think built the originals? I couldn't afford a contractor when I opened. YouTube and a hundred-dollar drill kit."
"Sexy."
"Practical."
"Same thing."
They worked their way down the wall — bracket by bracket, shelf by shelf. Blast held while Becca drilled, and somewhere around the fourth bracket they found a rhythm. He'd position, she'd adjust, he'd hold, she'd secure. Their hands brushed on every exchange, and neither of them moved away.
"Higher," she said at the sixth bracket.
"You said eye level."
"This one's for tall arrangements. Lilies, gladiolus, anything with vertical lines." She pushed his hands up three inches. "The eye needs to travel. Short arrangements at the center, tall ones at the edges. It creates a frame."
"You're framing the room with flowers."
"I'm framing the experience." She drove the screw home. "When someone walks through that door, the first thing they see should take their breath away. That's not about individual arrangements — it's about how the whole room works together."
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "That's how I think about demolition."
"Excuse me?"
"When I rig a breach, I'm not thinking about the individual charges.
I'm thinking about how the whole structure responds.
Where the force goes, how the pieces move, what the space looks like after.
" His grin was crooked. "You build rooms that take people's breath away.
I build rooms that take people's walls away. "
"There's a motivational poster in there somewhere."
"I'll have Stockyard print it up."
They finished the shelving by noon. Six brackets, three shelves, the bones of a display wall that would hold everything from single-stem bud vases to the cascading arrangements she built for weddings.
Becca stepped back and looked at the empty shelves the way she used to look at blank canvases in the art classes she'd taken in high school.
So much potential. So much space to fill.
"Delivery's at two," she said.
"I know. I helped you schedule it."
"You called my supplier and pretended to be my business partner."
"I am your business partner. Unofficial. Unpaid. Highly attractive."
"You told Eduardo your name was Blast."
"It is my name."
"He asked if I was being held hostage."
His laugh bounced off the empty walls, filling the space with a sound that Becca realized she wanted to hear in this room every day. Blast in her shop. His energy mixing with her flowers. The noise of him weaving through the quiet of her work.
It shouldn't fit. The demolition man in the flower shop, leather and motor oil against roses and ribbon.
But it did. The way his hands — scarred, missing a finger, built for taking things apart — held brackets steady while she built something new.
The way his energy filled the empty spaces without overwhelming them.
The way he saw the structure underneath her work and respected it, because he understood structures better than anyone she'd ever met.
The delivery truck arrived at two-fifteen.
Blast helped unload. Twelve buckets of fresh flowers — roses in four colors, lilies in white and pink, daisies by the armful, baby's breath and greenery and the fat peony buds she'd splurged on because reopening deserved something extravagant.
They carried the buckets inside together, and the shop transformed.
Color flooded the space like water filling a dry riverbed. Reds and pinks and yellows and whites, the deep green of fern fronds and the delicate spray of baby's breath. The smell hit next — clean and alive and so far removed from bleach and smoke that Becca's lungs ached with the contrast.
"There it is," she whispered.
Blast set the last bucket beside the cooler and turned to look at her. She was standing in the middle of her shop, surrounded by flowers, and the expression on her face made him go still.
Not his usual stillness — the hard-won, three-seconds-at-a-time version she'd been coaxing out of him for weeks. This was involuntary. The stillness of a man seeing something so clearly that motion would ruin it.
"What?" she asked.
"You." He shook his head. "You standing there. In your shop. With your flowers. After everything."
"It's just a delivery."
"It's not just a delivery." He crossed to her, his boots scuffing the clean floor, and cupped her face with both hands. "It's you getting back what someone tried to take. It's your block. Your neighborhood. Your life."
"Our life," she corrected.
His thumbs traced her cheekbones. The burn scars on his palms were rough against her skin, and she leaned into the texture because it meant safety now. It meant him.
"Our life," he agreed.
She kissed him — quick, warm, tasting like the coffee they'd picked up on the drive over — and then pulled away because there was work to do and flowers didn't arrange themselves.
"I need to test the coolers," she said. "Make sure they hold temperature before I load the inventory."
"What do you need?"
"A test arrangement. Something I can leave overnight and check in the morning." She moved to the new counter — butcher block, courtesy of Stockyard, who'd insisted that a proper workspace needed a proper surface. "Hand me those pink roses. And the shears from the toolbox."
He handed her the roses. Watched her strip the thorns and trim the stems with the quick, practiced efficiency of ten thousand arrangements. She selected a vase from the box of replacements she'd ordered — simple glass, nothing like the collection she'd lost, but functional — and started building.
The arrangement came together in five minutes. Roses, baby's breath, a spray of greenery. Nothing complicated. Just color and life and the proof that her hands still knew what to do.
She set it in the cooler and closed the glass door.
The roses glowed under the cooler light. Pink petals, cream edges, the same variety she'd ordered for the Delgado quincea?era a lifetime ago. They looked like the beginning of something.
Blast was leaning against the counter when she turned around, watching her with that focused intensity she'd fallen for in this exact spot — the attention of a man who gave everything his full concentration, whether it was a bomb or a flower or the woman standing in front of him.
"Ceremony's this weekend," he said.
Her heart kicked. "What?"
"At the compound. Alpha approved it this morning." His voice was steady, but his eyes held something electric. "Claiming ceremony. Saturday night."
"You're serious."
"I mentioned a ring. Remember? Before the Dvorak job." He pushed off the counter and moved toward her. "I told you we'd talk about it when I got back."
"You got back three days ago."
"I was waiting for the right moment." He stopped in front of her, close enough to touch. "You. In your shop. Surrounded by flowers. Putting the world back together with your bare hands." His mouth curved. "This is the moment."
Becca looked at him — this man of noise and scars and controlled destruction. Standing in her flower shop like he belonged there. Because he did. Because somehow, impossibly, the man who blew things apart and the woman who put things together had found the place where those two skills met.
"I've been ready since the fourth bouquet of daisies," she said.
His grin broke wide open. "That line's going to follow me forever, isn't it?"
"Absolutely."
He pulled her in and kissed her — deep and slow, his hands in her hair, her back against the counter where her grandmother's wire cutters used to sit. The new ones would go there tomorrow. New tools. New flowers. New beginning.
Same woman. Same man.
Same stubborn refusal to let the fire win.
When they finally broke apart, Blast was vibrating with the particular energy of a man who had plans and couldn't wait to execute them.
"Saturday," he said.
"Saturday."
"Wear something that goes with roses."
"Everything goes with roses."
"Then wear anything." He kissed her forehead. "I don't care what you're wearing. I care that you're there."
She watched him cross the shop — restless again, energy crackling, already pulling out his phone to call someone about something that probably involved motorcycles and an unreasonable amount of noise.
Through the new front window, the Pilsen block stretched in both directions. The laundromat ruins on the left. The bodega shell on the right. Scars on the street, same as the scars on his hands.
But between the ruins, Sawyer's Blooms was filling with color.
One shelf at a time. One bucket at a time. One arrangement glowing in a new cooler, proof that the woman who built this place wasn't done building.
Saturday was coming.
And Becca had flowers to arrange.