Chapter 6
Dana woke to the smell of coffee and the unfamiliar sensation of feeling safe.
She lay still for a moment, orienting herself in the sparse bedroom—bare walls, single window covered by blackout curtains, a door with a lock she'd used even though Forge was in the next room.
Old habits. The kind you developed when you grew up in neighborhoods where locked doors meant the difference between sleeping and not.
Through the thin walls, she could hear him moving. Measured steps, economical sounds, the kind of deliberate quiet that came from years of watching his back. Even in safety, he moved like a man expecting the next threat.
She'd watched him last night after they'd stopped talking, watched him check windows and doors and sight lines with the methodical patience of someone who'd learned that survival required constant vigilance.
He'd finally settled on the couch with his back to the wall and his eyes on the door, and she'd wondered if he ever really relaxed.
Probably not. Five years in a place like Graterford probably burned the ability to relax right out of you.
Dana pushed herself out of bed and found a clean towel in the bathroom, splashed water on her face, tried to make herself feel human. Her reflection stared back—circles under her eyes, fear still lurking in the set of her jaw, but something else too. Something that almost looked like hope.
She followed the coffee smell to the main room.
Forge stood at the small kitchen counter, pouring two cups from a pot that looked older than either of them.
He'd shed his jacket overnight, and the T-shirt underneath showed arms that were all dense muscle and prison ink—tattoos that told stories she couldn't read but understood instinctively. Each one was a chapter of survival.
"Morning," he said without turning around. Of course he'd heard her coming. "Coffee's not great, but it's hot."
"I'll take anything at this point." She accepted the cup he offered, wrapping her hands around it like a lifeline. "Did you sleep?"
"Enough."
Which meant no, probably. Dana studied his face for signs of exhaustion and found nothing but that same patient stillness—watchful, contained, ready.
"You don't have to stay awake all night," she said. "I'm not going to fall apart."
Something flickered in his expression. "Didn't say you would."
"Then why do you keep looking at me like I might break?"
He was quiet for a moment, sipping his coffee, considering the question with the same gravity he seemed to bring to everything. Finally: "I'm not looking at you like you might break. I'm looking at you like you're the first thing in two months that makes any sense."
Dana's breath caught. The words hit her somewhere deep, somewhere she hadn't let anyone reach in a long time. She set her coffee down because her hands had started shaking.
"That's a hell of a thing to say to a woman you met three days ago."
"Yeah." His mouth curved slightly—almost a smile. "It is."
The silence stretched between them, heavy with things neither of them was ready to name. Dana broke it first, turning to the small window where morning light filtered through the blackout curtains.
"Tell me about the bar fight."
She felt him go still behind her. "What do you want to know?"
"Why you went inside. You said last night that Ray knew stories about you, that he knew what happened to men who tested you. But you didn't test him. You took five years for something else." She turned back to face him. "What happened?"
Forge set his cup down. Crossed his arms over his chest in a gesture that was more shield than swagger. "There was a party. Brother named Pounder—you'll meet him, he handles explosives for the club—got into it with some guys from another crew. Words turned into fists. One of them pulled a knife."
"On Pounder."
"On Pounder." His jaw tightened. "He didn't see it coming. Too busy with the guy in front of him. But I saw it. I saw the blade, saw the angle, saw what was going to happen if I didn't move."
"So you moved."
"I moved." He met her eyes, and she saw the truth of what he was written in his gaze—not regret, exactly, but weight.
The weight of a choice that had cost him everything.
"The guy with the knife didn't walk away from that fight.
Prosecutors called it manslaughter. I called it keeping my brother alive. "
Dana absorbed that, turning it over in her mind like a piece of vintage furniture she was trying to appraise.
The shape of him was becoming clearer—a man who protected what mattered, who paid whatever price that protection demanded, who sat in a cell for five years rather than point fingers at the people he loved.
"Did you ever think about taking a deal?"
His laugh was short, humorless. "Every day. They offered me eighteen months if I'd give them names. Eighteen months instead of five years. All I had to do was betray everyone who'd ever had my back."
"But you didn't."
"I didn't." He unfolded his arms, let them hang loose at his sides. The gesture looked almost like surrender. "The club is family. You don't sell out family, not for reduced sentences, not for comfort, not for anything. Pounder would've done the same for me. Any brother would."
Dana thought about that—about loyalty so deep it cost half a decade of freedom. About a man who could have walked away but chose to stay in hell instead.
"That's why they look at you the way they do," she said softly. "The brothers. That respect that's almost reverence."
"I did what any of them would've done."
"No." She shook her head. "You did what you'd hope anyone would do. There's a difference."
Something shifted in his expression—a crack in the armor, a glimpse of the man behind the stillness. He looked away first, and Dana felt a strange surge of victory.
She'd made him flinch. Good.
The day passed in pieces.
They talked in bursts, filling the silence between them with fragments of history.
Dana told him about growing up poor—about food stamps and free lunch programs and learning to stretch every dollar until it screamed.
About her mother's hands, always busy, always making beauty from scraps.
About discovering thrift stores as a teenager and realizing that other people's trash was her treasure.
"That's why you started Second Chances," Forge said. They were sitting on the couch now, closer than they'd been that morning, the distance between them shrinking with every shared secret. "The philosophy thing. Nothing too broken to salvage."
"It's not just a philosophy." Dana pulled her legs underneath her, getting comfortable in a way she hadn't been able to do around anyone in longer than she could remember.
"It's proof. Every piece I restore, every item I find a new home for—that's proof that throwing things away is a choice, not a necessity. "
"People too?"
The question hung in the air between them. Dana looked at him—at the prison ink and the guarded eyes and the stillness that felt like patience instead of absence.
"People especially," she said.
Forge held her gaze for a long moment. Something passed between them—recognition, maybe, or understanding. The sense of two broken things finding each other in a world that had tried to throw them both away.
"You see value in things other people discard," he said quietly. "What do you see when you look at me?"
Dana's heart hammered in her chest. The honest answer was everything—strength and loyalty and a gentleness he probably didn't know he possessed.
The honest answer was that she'd spent three days watching a man emerge from the shadows to protect her, and something inside her had recognized him like coming home.
But honest answers were dangerous. Honest answers led to vulnerability, and vulnerability led to pain.
"I see someone who's still figuring out who he is outside those walls," she said instead. "Someone who's scared that prison changed him into something he doesn't recognize anymore."
His jaw tightened. "That obvious?"
"Only to someone who's been looking." She reached out before she could stop herself, touched his arm where the tattoos started. His skin was warm under her fingers, the muscle beneath solid and real. "You're not broken, Forge. You're just... mid-restoration."
The sound he made was almost a laugh. "You're going to try to salvage me?"
"I think you're worth salvaging."
His hand came up to cover hers, trapping her fingers against his skin. The touch was gentle but possessive, a claim that wasn't quite ready to speak itself aloud. When he spoke, his voice was rougher than she'd ever heard it.
"Nobody's looked at me like that in a long time. Like I'm something worth fixing instead of something to be afraid of."
"Should I be afraid of you?"
"No." The word was immediate, absolute. "Never you. Never."
Dana believed him. That was the terrifying part—she believed him completely, with a certainty that defied logic and self-preservation and everything she'd learned about trusting men who lived in violent worlds.
"Good," she whispered. "Because I'm not."
The moment stretched between them, heavy with possibility. Dana could feel his pulse under her palm, could see the way his eyes dropped to her mouth and then dragged back up with visible effort.
He wanted to kiss her. She wanted him to kiss her. The wanting was a physical thing, humming in the air between them like electricity before a storm.
His phone shattered the moment.
Forge released her hand and answered in one smooth motion, the transition from almost-tender to combat-ready so fast it gave her whiplash. "Gallows. What've you got?"
Dana watched his face as he listened, watched the softness drain away and the steel slide back into place. Whatever Gallows was telling him, it wasn't good.
"How many? ... Yeah, I figured. ... No, we're secure. For now." A pause. "I'll handle it. Just get the brothers in position."
He ended the call and stood in one fluid motion, moving toward a duffel bag Dana hadn't noticed in the corner.
"What is it?" she asked, already knowing the answer would be bad.
"Ray knows you're with someone who carries Graterford ink.
Word got back to him about last night—someone described me, described my tattoos.
He's not waiting anymore." Forge unzipped the duffel and pulled out a handgun, checking the magazine with economical motions.
"He's sending Mike Tanner tonight. With enough men to prove that prison credentials don't impress him. "
Dana's stomach dropped. "They're coming here?"
"They're coming here." He added a second gun, then a third, laying them out on the table like a carpenter laying out tools. "Brothers are moving into position to back us up, but Ray's crew will hit before they arrive. We're going to have to hold until reinforcements come."
"Hold," Dana repeated. "You mean fight."
"I mean survive." He looked at her then, and his eyes were cold steel—the same eyes she'd seen in her store when he'd faced down Mike Tanner. "You stay in the back bedroom. Lock the door. Don't come out until I tell you it's clear. Whatever you hear, whatever happens, you stay hidden."
"And you?"
"I handle what comes through that door."
Dana stood, moved toward him, stopped just short of touching. "You could die."
"I won't."
"You don't know that."
Forge's hands stilled on the weapons. He looked up at her, and for a moment the steel cracked—just a moment, just enough to show her the man underneath.
"I spent five years surviving men who wanted me dead," he said quietly. "Tonight won't be different. But I need you safe while I do what needs to be done. Can you do that? Can you trust me?"
Dana thought about three days of watching him, three days of learning the shape of a man who'd sacrificed everything for loyalty. Three days of falling for someone she barely knew but understood completely.
"I trust you," she said.
He nodded once, then went back to checking his weapons with the calm of a man who'd survived worse every day for five years.