Chapter Fifteen
She heard the bikes at midnight and didn't go to the lot.
The other old ladies went. Megan could hear them from the hallway—boots on gravel, voices calling out, the sounds of women greeting men who'd ridden back from something dangerous. The relief. The noise. The particular chaos of a compound welcoming its brothers home.
Megan went downstairs.
The armory was dark except for the workbench light—that single yellow bulb that made the space look like a chapel when everything else was shadow.
She'd spent enough time down here to know where every weapon hung, which drawer held which caliber, the exact placement of the cleaning kits and spare parts that Levee maintained with a care most people reserved for living things.
She sat on the workbench and waited.
Ten minutes. Fifteen. Long enough that she could hear the celebration starting overhead—bottles clinking, Hollow's flat voice saying something that made Crossroad laugh, the thud of boots on the old gin-office floor. The club was celebrating Tully's death, and Levee wasn't with them.
He came down the stairs slowly.
She heard it in his steps—not exhaustion, not injury, but the heaviness of a man who'd just removed the last barrier between his club and a fight that would end everything one way or another. He rounded the corner and stopped when he saw her.
She was sitting where she always sat. His workbench. Her legs dangling, her hands resting on the wood, her body framed by the racks of weapons he kept for the brothers who trusted him with their lives.
"You're not upstairs," he said.
"Neither are you."
He crossed the room and stood in front of the bench—in front of her—and put his hands flat on the wood on either side of her thighs. His head dropped forward, chin to chest, and he breathed.
Just breathed.
Megan watched the rise and fall of his shoulders.
The dust on his cut. The faint smell of cordite and concrete that clung to him like a second skin.
He'd just killed a man inside a building he'd turned into a weapon, and the adrenaline was gone, and what was left was this—a man standing in his armory with his hands on a workbench and his woman sitting on it, and the war almost over.
She put her hand on the back of his neck.
He went still. Not tense—the opposite. Something in him released at her touch, a held breath that had nothing to do with lungs and everything to do with the specific weight of being the man who kept everyone else's weapons working and never asked anyone to maintain his.
"Tully's dead," he said to the floor.
"I know."
"Brandt's alone. No security, no operations, no demolition. Just a businessman with money and a development plan nobody's left to execute."
"I know that too."
"We go after him next. Monday. Cottonmouth's already—"
"Levee." She tightened her hand on his neck. "Stop."
He raised his head. In the yellow light, his eyes were stripped bare—no assessment, no calculation, no structural thinking. Just the man underneath all of it, looking at her like she was the only solid ground in a world that kept shifting.
"I didn't come down here for a debrief," she said.
"Then why did you come down here?"
She reached for the front of his cut and pulled him closer, her knees opening to make room for him, his hips settling against the workbench edge between her thighs. Close. Warm. The position that had become theirs—her on the bench, him standing, their faces almost level.
"Because you always come here after," she said. "After the welding shop. After the compound assault. After anything that costs you something. You come down to this basement and you put your hands on this bench and you think about what held and what broke."
"It's how I process."
"I know. And I'm not going to let you process alone anymore." She held his gaze. "So here's what's going to happen. I'm going to tell you three things. And you're going to listen, because for once in your life, someone else is going to do the structural assessment."
Something shifted in his expression—surprise, maybe, or the particular vulnerability of a man who wasn't used to being read this accurately.
"Go ahead," he said.
"One." She held up a finger. "I'm rebuilding the shop."
He started to speak. She pressed the finger to his lips.
"Not eventually. Not when it's safe. Not when Brandt's dead and the block is clear and some imaginary future version of Clarksdale is ready for me.
Now. I've already talked to Grace about the space next to her bakery—temporary location, six-month lease, enough room for my chair and my station.
I'm reopening Black Delta Ink because that shop is mine and no dead combat engineer gets to decide when it exists. "
His lips moved against her finger. She felt the shape of a word—good, maybe, or yes—and kept going.
"Two." Second finger. "I'm tattooing your scar.
The real piece, not the single line I put on your palm.
A full design, here—" She ran her hand down his left forearm, tracing the path from wrist to elbow.
"—that tells the whole story. The cable, the levee, the nine minutes you held on.
Because you've been carrying that scar like it's the end of something, and I'm going to turn it into a beginning. "
His breathing had changed. Deeper. Slower. The rhythm of a man hearing something he needed.
"Three." She dropped her hands to his chest, pressing both palms flat against his heartbeat.
"I'm coming home to this compound. Not as a guest. Not as the tattoo artist who's crashing here until the danger passes.
As yours. Because the man in this armory is the most permanent thing I've ever found, and I'm done pretending I don't know what that means. "
The armory was silent.
Above them, the celebration thumped and roared—brothers toasting a victory, old ladies laughing, the specific joy of a club that had taken apart a threat piece by piece and was one strike away from finishing the job.
Down here, in the basement where the weapons lived, it was just them and the yellow light and the echo of three statements that had just rearranged the architecture of everything.
Levee's hands came up from the workbench.
They found her face the way they always did—cupping her jaw, thumbs at her cheekbones, those heavy scarred hands holding her like she was the most carefully maintained thing in his inventory.
But his grip was different tonight. Not the desperate clutch of the post-assault night, not the careful exploration of their first time.
Something settled. Certain. The grip of a man who'd made a decision and was done second-guessing it.
"I want to build something with you," he said.
His voice was rough. Not wrecked the way it got during sex, not strained the way it got during combat briefs. Rough like raw material—unfinished, honest, the voice of a man saying something he'd never said to anyone.
"Not for a contract," he said. "Not for a system that can hand it to strangers when the budget changes. For us. Something that's ours because we made it. Because we put our hands on it and said this holds and meant it."
"Wyatt—"
"I spent nine years building for other people.
Levees for towns that didn't know my name.
Structures for a government that threw me away when the money ran out.
" His thumbs traced her cheekbones, slow, deliberate.
"Then I came here and I built for the club.
The armory. The fortifications. Everything I know how to do, aimed at keeping brothers alive. "
"That matters."
"It matters. But it's not mine. The armory belongs to the club. The compound belongs to Cottonmouth. Every wall I've reinforced, every weapon I've maintained—it's the brotherhood's, and that's right. That's the patch."
He leaned forward until his forehead touched hers.
"But I've never built anything that was just mine. Never had something I could point to and say I made that for me. That's my name on the wall. Not until you sat on this workbench and looked at me like I was worth designing something permanent for."
Her chest was cracking open. She could feel it—the specific pressure of something too big for the space it was in, pushing outward, demanding room.
"You're my shop," she said, and her voice came out thick. "You're my neon sign and my flash art and my chair. You're the thing I built that has my name on it."
He kissed her.
Not hard. Not desperate. Not with the adrenaline-fueled hunger of the assault aftermath or the tender discovery of their first night. This kiss was a foundation pour—slow, deliberate, the kind of thing you do when you're building something you intend to live in forever.
She pulled him closer with her legs, her heels hooking behind his thighs, and he came willingly—leaning into her, his weight braced on the workbench, his mouth moving over hers with the unhurried certainty of a man who'd stopped measuring what he had to lose.
"Upstairs," she murmured against his lips.
"Here."
The word sent heat through her like a charge. "Here? On the workbench?"
"My armory. My bench." His hands slid from her face to her waist, fingers pressing into the strip of bare skin between her tank top and her jeans. "My woman."
"That's not how this works. You don't just claim the furniture and—"
He lifted her. Turned. Set her on the bench properly—centered, stable, the leather jacket he'd left folded on the shelf appearing under her back before she registered him reaching for it. Even now. Even in this moment. The man made sure the surface was right before he put anything on it.
She laughed. "Did you just pad the workbench for me?"
"Bench is oak. Your back deserves better."
"God, you're impossible."
"You're the one who chose me."
"Best decision I ever made." She pulled his cut off his shoulders, letting it fall over the edge of the bench to the chair below—the only time she'd ever seen him let the leather leave his body without folding it first. "Now take your shirt off before I cut it off."