Chapter Fifteen
Diane found him on the compound's back fence at sundown.
He was facing out. Of course he was—facing the tree line, the gravel road beyond the wire, the long stretch of Delta dark that gathered at the edges of everything.
His hands rested on the top rail, his shoulders set with the particular stillness of a man who'd spent the day debriefing violence and hadn't yet come down from it.
She'd spent the day building.
Three arrangements sat finished in her flower corner—wildflowers from the fence line, salvaged roses from the last of her supply, baby's breath that Crossroad had sourced without being asked because the brothers had learned that keeping Diane's buckets full was as essential as keeping the armory stocked.
She'd built them without purpose, without orders, without anyone waiting for delivery.
Built them because her hands needed the work and because the alternative was sitting in a room full of chrome and leather thinking about what came next.
What came next was Raymond Hebert, alone and cornered.
What came next was the end of this.
What came next was a question she hadn't let herself ask yet—the one that lived in the space between staying because it's safe and staying because she chose to.
She crossed the gravel lot and stopped beside him at the fence.
The evening was warm, the Delta heat softening into something breathable as the sun dropped behind the tree line.
Cicadas pulsed in the distance. A freight train moaned somewhere south, the sound stretching across flat country like a held note.
"Turn around," she said.
Burial didn't move. "What?"
"Turn around." She put her hand on his arm—not pulling, just there. "You're staring at what's behind us again. And I'm tired of talking to the back of a man I'm in love with."
The words left her mouth before she'd fully decided to say them. But they were true the way her flowers were true—alive and temporary and absolutely worth the saying.
He turned.
His face in the fading light was bruised from Brossett's fist, the scar across his jaw reopened and stitched with the rough efficiency of a man who'd done his own repairs.
His eyes found hers and held, and what she saw in them wasn't the grave-quiet watchfulness she'd learned to read.
It was something rawer. Something that had been building since the night he sat at a fire pit and told her he wanted to face the fire instead of what was behind it.
"Say that again," he said.
"I'm in love with you." No hesitation. No softening.
She said it the way she said everything—practically, with both feet planted.
"I'm in love with a gravedigger who sits at the back of every room and watches the door.
I'm in love with a man who carries death in his hands and holds flowers like they might disappear.
And I'm tired of pretending that's going to change when Raymond Hebert is gone. "
His hand came up to her face. His thumb traced the line of her jaw, slow and deliberate, the calluses catching against her skin in a way that sent heat pooling low in her belly.
"It's not going to change," he said.
"I know."
"I mean—" He stopped. Took a breath. Started again with the careful precision of a man who measured his words the way he measured graves.
"I mean I'm not going to stop being the man who watches the back door.
I'm not going to become someone who faces forward and trusts the world to behave. That's not who I am."
"I didn't ask you to be someone else."
"You asked me to turn around."
"I asked you to look at me." She stepped closer, closing the distance between them until his hand wasn't reaching anymore, until it was just resting against her face like it belonged there. "There's a difference."
Something cracked in his expression. Not breaking—opening. The way soil opens after rain, making room for whatever needs to come through.
"Diane."
"Jonah."
His mouth found hers.
The kiss was slow. Not tentative—they were past tentative, past the careful first exploration and the desperate post-combat collision. This was something else entirely. This was a man who knew her mouth and chose to taste it again. A deliberate thing. A permanent thing.
She fisted her hands in his cut and pulled him closer.
He made a sound against her lips—low, rough, the sound of a man who'd been holding himself in check and had just decided to stop.
His arms wrapped around her waist, lifting her onto the fence rail, and she locked her legs around him because the ground was too far away and she needed him closer than gravity allowed.
"Inside," she murmured against his jaw. "Take me inside."
He carried her.
Not the way he'd carried her from the workbench the night before—sleepy, gentle, a man tending something fragile.
This was different. His hands gripped her thighs, her back, pulling her against him with a possessiveness that had stopped being a question and become a fact.
She was his. He was carrying what was his. The compound could watch.
His room was dim with the last of the daylight. The mason jar on the nightstand held fresh wildflowers—she'd replaced them that morning, the way she replaced them every morning now, because a gravedigger's room needed something alive in it.
He set her down beside the bed and stepped back.
Not far. Just enough to look at her.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Looking at what's in front of me."
The words undid her.
She reached for him, pulling his cut from his shoulders, letting it fall to the floor with a weight that sounded like everything he carried.
His shirt followed—her hands finding the hem, drawing it up over the scars and the muscle and the evidence of a life spent handling what other men wouldn't touch.
She pressed her mouth to the scar on his chest. The one from the viewing room, from Thibodaux, from the night he'd killed a man so she could finish a funeral arrangement. His breath shuddered out, his hand coming up to cradle the back of her head.
"Every scar," she said against his skin. "I want to know every one."
"That'll take a while."
"Good." She kissed the next one—a thin line along his ribs, older, a story she hadn't heard yet. "I'm not going anywhere."
He pulled her up, his mouth finding hers again, and this time there was nothing slow about it.
His hands worked her shirt free, his fingers trailing heat down her spine, unhooking her bra with a familiarity that made her chest tight.
He knew her body now. Knew the sounds she made, the places that turned her liquid, the specific pressure that drew his name from her throat.
But tonight he wasn't rushing toward those places. Tonight he was mapping them again—slowly, deliberately, like a man committing territory to memory because he planned to stay.
"You're shaking," she whispered.
"Not from cold."
"I know." She took his face in her hands, holding him still, making him see her. "I know what it's from."
His eyes were dark, deep, stripped of every wall he'd ever built.
The grave-quiet watchfulness. The rear-guard patience.
The fatalism that had kept him at the back of every room for twelve years.
All of it gone, leaving nothing but the man underneath—the one who buried things because he was afraid to keep them.
"I'm going to reopen the shop," she said.
His hands stilled on her waist. "What?"
"When this is over. When Raymond's gone." She traced the scar on his jaw with her thumb. "I'm going to get a new van. Fix the cooler. Put arrangements back in the window. And I'm going to drive back here every night and walk through those gates and come home to whatever room you're in."
"Diane—"
"I'm not asking permission." She kissed the corner of his mouth. "I'm telling you what happens next. Because someone needs to, and you're too busy watching the back door to plan the future."
His forehead dropped against hers. His breath was ragged, warm, carrying the scent of leather and road dust and the specific green of her flower corner that had worked itself into his skin.
"I don't know how to plan futures," he said. "I plan aftermaths."
"Then let me handle the future." She pulled back to meet his eyes. "You watch the back door. I'll build what's inside the room. That's how this works, Jonah. That's how we work."
He kissed her like a man who'd just been given something he didn't know how to hold.
They fell onto the bed together, tangled and unhurried, and the pace that settled between them was nothing like before.
Not the first time's reverence. Not the second time's desperation.
This was something deeper—the steady, consuming heat of two people who knew exactly what they wanted and had decided, deliberately and without reservation, to take it.
His mouth moved down her body with purpose. Not exploring—claiming. Pressing his lips to the hollow of her throat, the curve of her breast, the soft plane of her stomach, each kiss a declaration that said this is mine with the quiet certainty of a man who'd stopped fighting the word.
She arched into him, her hands in his hair, pulling him closer to the places where his mouth turned her mindless. He responded to every sound she made—adjusting, learning, giving her more of whatever drew his name from her lips.
"Jonah." Breathless. Wrecked. "Please."
"Tell me what you want."
"You. Here. Not leaving."
"I'm not leaving."
"Promise me."
He rose above her, his weight braced on his forearms, his body aligned with hers in a way that made the air between them disappear. His eyes held hers—dark, steady, burning with everything he'd spent twelve years trying to bury.
"I promise," he said. "I'm done putting things in the ground that deserve to grow."
He entered her slowly, and the sound she made filled the room like a held breath finally released.
The rhythm they found was theirs—not borrowed from adrenaline or fear or the aftermath of violence.
Just theirs. Slow and deep and devastating, each movement building on the last, his body speaking the words his soft voice couldn't find.
She wrapped around him, her legs pulling him deeper, her hands tracing the scars on his back like a woman reading the history of the man she'd chosen.
He murmured her name against her neck. She whispered his—the real one, the one that belonged to the man before the patch—and felt him shudder with the weight of being known.
The pleasure built like a tide. Not crashing—rising. Filling every space between them until there was nothing left but sensation and the sound of breathing and two hearts beating close enough to synchronize.
"Stay with me," she gasped.
"Always." His voice broke on the word. "Diane. Always."
She came apart beneath him with a cry that was half his name and half something wordless, her body pulling him over the edge with her.
He buried his face in her hair and followed, the tremor that moved through him deeper than pleasure—the specific release of a man who'd been holding himself back for twelve years and had finally, completely, let go.
They lay together in the darkness, the wildflowers on the nightstand barely visible in the last gray light. His arm was heavy across her waist, his breath warm against the back of her neck, his heart still hammering against her spine.
"I want to stop watching the back door," he said quietly.
She turned in his arms to face him.
"I want to face forward." His voice was rough, stripped down, carrying none of the grave-quiet steadiness she'd come to expect. "I want to look at what I have instead of what might be coming for it. I want to build something with you that isn't an aftermath."
"Then do it."
"It means changing. Not who I am—but where I stand." His hand found hers in the dark. "I'll still ride rear guard. I'll still be the one who watches the back. But when I come home—"
"When you come home, you walk through the front door." She squeezed his hand. "And I'll have flowers waiting."
He was quiet for a long time.
"Mrs. Delacroix's arrangement," he said. "The one you built while I was fighting in the viewing room. White roses and baby's breath and cream ribbon."
"What about it?"
"That was the moment." His voice dropped to barely a whisper. "When I walked out of that room with blood on my hands and you were standing there with flowers in yours. That was the moment I knew."
"Knew what?"
"That I was done burying things that deserved to live."
Diane pressed her lips to his scarred jaw, his closed eyes, the corner of his mouth. She kissed him the way she built arrangements—with care, with intention, with the understanding that every beautiful thing she made was temporary and precious and absolutely worth the making.
"One more fight," she said. "One more, and then it's over. And then we build."
"What do we build?"
"Everything." She smiled against his mouth. "A shop. A home. A life that smells like flowers instead of gunpowder. Whatever we want, Jonah. Whatever we're brave enough to keep."
He pulled her close, his arms wrapping around her with the absolute certainty of a man who'd made his choice.
Outside, the compound hummed with the low-grade tension of a war not yet finished.
Brothers were checking weapons. Plans were being made.
Raymond Hebert was out there somewhere, alone and desperate and running out of time.
But in this room, in the dark, a gravedigger held a florist against his chest and breathed in the scent of wildflowers and thought about front doors.
The rear guard was learning to face forward.