Chapter Twelve
She woke up alone in his bed and followed the smell of gun oil downstairs.
The armory was hers now too. She'd decided that sometime in the last week—claimed the space the way she claimed everything, by showing up and refusing to leave until the room accepted her.
Levee hadn't argued. Levee never argued about the things that mattered, which was one of the things that made him impossible to fight with and infuriating to love.
Not that she'd said that word yet. Neither of them had. It sat between them like a loaded weapon neither one was ready to pick up.
She found him at the workbench, hands flat on the surface, staring at the wall.
She knew that posture. He sat like that when he was thinking structurally—running equations in his head, assessing what held and what was cracking.
She'd seen it after the welding shop. After the compound assault.
After every moment where the world tried to knock something down and he had to figure out how to build it back.
But this morning, he wasn't thinking about Brandt.
"You're up early," she said from the doorway.
"Didn't sleep."
She crossed the room and hopped up onto the workbench beside him, close enough that her knee pressed against his arm. He didn't move away. Didn't move closer. Just sat there with his scarred hands flat on the wood and that faraway look that told her he was somewhere else entirely.
"Talk to me," she said.
"About what?"
"About whatever's got you sitting in your basement at five AM looking like the river took something."
His jaw tightened. She waited. Patience wasn't her strong suit—she was built for volume and velocity, for filling silence with words until the silence gave up and went home—but she'd learned something about Levee in the past week.
Push him and he went quieter. Wait him out and eventually the words came, slow and heavy, like stones being laid one at a time.
"The contract," he said finally.
She didn't ask which one. She knew.
"Nine years," he said. His thumb traced a grain line in the wood, back and forth, the unconscious rhythm of a man who needed his hands busy when his head was full.
"I started at twenty-two. Green as grass, didn't know a cofferdam from a culvert.
But I learned fast because the work made sense to me.
You put things together right, they hold.
You cut corners, people die. Simple math. "
"Simple math," she echoed.
"I worked my way up to section lead by twenty-six.
Ran a crew of twelve. We maintained forty-seven miles of levee along the Mississippi between Greenville and Vicksburg—the stretch that protects everything south of the bend.
" His voice was even, factual, the way he delivered tactical briefs.
But his hands had gone still on the wood.
"Every spring, flood stage. Every spring, my sections held.
Not because the river was kind—because I built them right. "
"And then?"
The silence lasted long enough that she almost broke it. Almost launched into some sharp-edged comment about patience and stubborn men. But something in his expression stopped her—a rawness she'd only seen once before, in the dark after the compound assault, when he'd admitted he was terrified.
"Budget cuts." The words came out flat. "Federal contract renegotiation.
Some senator needed a line item to sacrifice, and Mississippi levee maintenance was less photogenic than a new highway in his district.
They cut the contract in half and handed the remaining work to a Gulf-coast outfit that had donated to the right campaigns. "
"And your sections?"
"Transferred. Overnight. Nine years of work—every repair, every reinforcement, every section I'd walked in flood conditions to make sure it held—belonged to strangers.
" His scarred hand curled into a fist on the workbench.
"I got a letter. A letter. Thank you for your service, effective immediately, here's your final check.
Didn't even get to walk the sections one last time. "
Megan watched his face and saw the thing underneath the words. Not anger—she'd expected anger. What she saw was grief. The specific, structural grief of a man who'd poured himself into something permanent and had it taken by people who'd never touched it.
"The Gulf-coast outfit," she said quietly. "Were they any good?"
"They were cheap." His mouth twisted. "Two years after the transfer, the section south of Greenville failed during spring flooding.
Breach took out six hundred acres of farmland and displaced forty families.
The repair work I'd done held—my sections didn't fail.
But the new crew's maintenance on the adjacent stretch was substandard, and when the stress transferred... "
"It broke."
"It broke. Because the people maintaining it didn't understand what they were holding.
" He looked at her, and the grief in his eyes was older than Brandt, older than the club, older than whatever was building between them.
"I built those walls, Megan. With my hands.
I knew every sandbag, every concrete pour, every stress point on forty-seven miles of levee.
And they gave it to men who treated it like a line item instead of something that mattered. "
She didn't say anything for a moment. Didn't try to fix it or soften it or make a joke to cut the tension. She just sat beside him on the workbench and let his words fill the space.
Then she said: "My stepdad's name was Roy."
Levee went still.
"He married my mom when I was twelve. She thought he was the answer—steady job at the casino, didn't drink as much as the last one, had a truck that ran.
Delta standards for a good catch." She pulled one knee up to her chest, wrapping her arms around it.
"By thirteen, I knew what his footsteps sounded like after a bad night at the tables.
Heavy. Slow. The kind of walk that meant someone was going to pay for his losses. "
"Megan—"
"I'm not telling you this for sympathy." Her voice was harder than she intended. She softened it, but only a little. "I'm telling you because you showed me yours and I'm showing you mine. That's how this works, right? Two people trading the ugly stuff until the pile's even?"
He was quiet. Listening. The way he listened to everything—completely, with his whole body.
"My mom took the worst of it. I took the rest. Roy wasn't creative—fists, mostly, belt when he was really gone.
But the thing that got me wasn't the hitting.
" She stared at the armory wall, at the neat rows of weapons Levee maintained with such care.
"It was the morning after. Every single time.
Mom would come downstairs and act like nothing happened.
Like the bruises were from bumping into doors.
Like the sounds I heard through the wall at two AM were a bad dream. "
"She pretended it wasn't real."
"She erased it. Every morning—a fresh start, a clean slate, nothing bad ever happened in this house.
" Megan's jaw ached from clenching. "I spent five years living in a place where nothing was permanent.
Not the pain, not the promises, not the 'it won't happen again.
' Everything got wiped clean and rebuilt from scratch, over and over, and none of it held because nobody would admit what was broken. "
She felt Levee's hand cover hers on the workbench. Warm. Steady. The scarred palm with her ink still healing pressed against her fingers.
"I left at seventeen," she said. "Took a bus to Memphis with two hundred dollars I'd stolen from Roy's wallet and a portfolio of drawings I'd been doing since I was fourteen. Found a tattoo shop on Beale Street that would hire an apprentice for minimum wage and a chair to sleep in."
"The Memphis shops where men told you—"
"That I didn't belong. Yeah." She laughed, and it sounded like glass.
"Every day, some new reason I should quit.
Too young. Too female. Too loud. Too much attitude for a girl who should be grateful anyone let her hold a machine.
" Her hand tightened under his. "I stayed for three years.
Learned from a man named Ito who was the best artist I've ever seen and the worst teacher imaginable.
He never told me I was good. Never once.
But he stopped telling me I was bad, and in that shop, that was the same thing. "
"And then Clarksdale."
"And then Clarksdale." She looked down at their joined hands. "Because I needed something with my name on it. Something permanent. Something nobody could erase in the morning and pretend never happened."
The armory was very quiet. Above them, the compound was stirring—boots on floorboards, the distant clatter of the kitchen, the particular rhythm of a clubhouse waking up after a hard night.
But down here, in the basement where Levee kept his weapons and his silence, the world was just the two of them and the ugly things they'd been carrying.
"That's why you don't trust help," he said.
"That's why I don't trust anything." She turned to face him, pulling her hand free so she could look at him straight on.
"Every person I've ever counted on has either hit me, left me, or pretended I didn't exist. My mom.
Roy. Every boyfriend who said the right things until he didn't. The landlords, the suppliers, the clients who promised to come back and didn't." She shook her head.
"I built Black Delta Ink because buildings don't lie.
A shop is either standing or it's not. The sign's either lit or it's dark. There's no morning-after pretending."
"And then Brandt knocked it down."
The words hit her like a fist she hadn't seen coming. She blinked, hard, and the burn behind her eyes was so unfamiliar it took her a moment to recognize it.
"Yeah," she said roughly. "He knocked it down."
Levee stood. He moved in front of her, standing between her knees the way she'd stood between his in the armory that first night, and took her face in his hands.
Those heavy, scarred, meticulous hands. Hands that had held a shearing cable for nine minutes to save twelve hundred strangers.
Hands that had maintained every weapon in a motorcycle club's arsenal with the care of a man who knew that sloppy work killed people.
Hands that had pulled her out of a gas-filled building and carried her down a hallway and touched her in the dark with a precision that made her forget every hand that had ever hurt her.
"I don't trust things I didn't build with my own hands," he said.
"You know that. It's the thing I carry—the reason I keep distance from anything that runs on someone else's rules.
Because the last time I put everything into something bigger than my hands could hold, it was given to strangers who let it break. "
"I know."
"But you—" His thumbs traced her cheekbones. "You built something from nothing. Same as me. Hands and will and too stubborn to stop. And you're the first thing outside this armory that feels structural."
Her breath caught.
"You feel like something I built," he said, and his voice was rougher than she'd ever heard it. "Like something I'd walk in flood conditions to hold together. Like something that matters the way levee walls matter—not because someone signed a contract, but because people need it to stand."
"Levee—"
"I'm not done." His eyes held hers, unwavering. "I want to build something with you. Not for a contract. Not for a system that can take it away. For us. Something that's ours because we made it with our hands, and nobody gets to cut it in half or give it to strangers."
She couldn't speak. The woman who'd never been silent in her life, who'd filled every room with noise since she was old enough to realize that quiet meant danger—she had no words for what was cracking open in her chest.
So she reached for his hand instead.
The left one. The scar. Her ink.
She pressed his palm against her heart, holding it there with both hands, feeling the rough line of healed skin and fresh tattoo against her sternum.
"Everything I build is permanent," she said. "Ink doesn't wash off. It doesn't fade in the morning. It doesn't pretend it wasn't there." She looked up at him, and her eyes were burning but she refused—refused—to let them spill over. "And neither do I."
He kissed her forehead. Her temple. The corner of her eye where the burn was threatening to become something more.
"Neither do I," he said against her skin.
They stayed like that—his hand on her heart, her hands holding it there, the armory silent around them—while the compound woke up overhead and the Delta sun climbed through the windows and Megan Trask let herself believe, for the first time since she was twelve years old, that something permanent didn't have to mean something that hurt.