Chapter Thirteen
The bar was destroyed.
Sadie stood in the doorway of Flynn's, taking in the damage that daylight had hidden but darkness couldn't excuse.
Broken bottles everywhere, their contents pooling into amber rivers across the floor.
The mirror behind the bar shattered, leaving jagged teeth where his father's pride used to hang.
Bullet holes stitched across the wood—the ship timber bar that three generations of Flynns had built, now scarred by violence that should never have touched it.
And Nail, standing behind what remained, his hands flat on the wood like he was holding it together by force of will.
"The cleanup crew offered to handle this," she said quietly. "You don't have to do it yourself."
"Yes, I do."
She'd expected that answer. Had come anyway.
The compound was still buzzing with aftermath—brothers debriefing, prospects being buried, the grim business of survival that didn't stop just because the shooting had.
She'd stayed as long as she could stand it, helping where she was useful, trying not to think about the men she'd dropped in the garage bay.
Then she'd borrowed a prospect's bike and ridden to Fell's Point, because she knew where Nail would be. And she knew he shouldn't be alone.
She picked her way across the glass-strewn floor, her boots crunching with every step. The Nail Boh neon was dark—shattered by a stray round, its familiar glow replaced by the harsh glare of work lights someone had strung up.
"How bad?" she asked.
"Structurally, fine. The bones are solid." His voice was flat, controlled. Too controlled. "The rest is just... cosmetics."
"That mirror was from your father's time."
"Yeah." His jaw tightened. "Yeah, it was."
She stopped beside him, looking at the same damage he was looking at. Feeling the same weight pressing down. They'd survived—both of them, all of them—but survival had costs that didn't show up as body counts.
"I dropped two men today," she said. "With a wrench and a gun I barely know how to use."
"I know."
"I don't feel anything about it. That's wrong, isn't it? I should feel something."
He turned to look at her, and his eyes were dark, hollow. "The feeling comes later. Right now, you're still running on the high. The adrenaline hasn't crashed yet."
"When does it crash?"
"Soon." His hand found hers on the bar. "Usually when you're alone. When it's quiet and there's nothing to fight and your body realizes it should be dead but isn't."
She looked at their joined hands. His knuckles were torn, fresh scabs over old scars. Her own were bruised from the wrench, from the recoil of a gun she'd fired on instinct.
They matched, she realized. Damaged in the same ways.
"I don't want to be alone when it crashes," she said.
"Neither do I."
The words hung between them, heavy with everything unspoken. The battle. The bodies. The desperate fear of losing something they'd only just found.
Sadie moved first.
She didn't think about it—didn't plan or calculate or give herself time to second-guess.
She just grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him toward her, crushing her mouth against his with all the fury and terror and desperate need that had been building since she'd heard the first gunshot that morning.
He made a sound—surprise, relief, hunger—and then he was kissing her back. Not gentle. Not careful. Not the slow exploration of their first night together. This was combat transferred to a different battlefield, and neither of them was holding back.
She pushed him against the back bar, bottles rattling behind him, her hands fisting in his shirt as she pressed her body against his. He tasted like whiskey and smoke and violence, and she wanted more. Wanted to drown in him. Wanted to burn off everything she was feeling before it ate her alive.
"Sadie—" He broke the kiss, breathing hard. "The glass—"
"I don't care about the glass."
"Someone could walk in—"
"Then lock the door."
He stared at her for half a second. Then he was moving, crossing the wreckage of his bar in three long strides, slamming the deadbolt home with enough force to shake the frame.
When he turned back, his eyes had changed. The hollow emptiness was gone, replaced by something fierce and consuming. Something that looked at her like she was the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth.
"You're sure."
"I watched you kill people today." She crossed to meet him, grabbing his face between her hands. "I helped you kill people today. I'm not fragile, and I'm not afraid, and right now I need—" Her voice cracked. "I need you to remind me we're still alive."
He understood.
Of course he understood. He was feeling the same thing—the survival instinct that had nowhere to go now that the fighting was done, the desperate need for proof that they'd made it through.
His hands found her hips and lifted, and she wrapped her legs around him without thinking, letting him carry her behind the bar where the broken glass was thickest and the damage was worst. When her back hit the counter, she didn't care about the bottles that crashed to the floor or the spray of whiskey that soaked her shirt.
She cared about his mouth on her neck, her collarbone, the hollow of her throat. She cared about his hands stripping away her clothes with none of the careful tenderness from before—just need, raw and urgent and impossible to deny.
"Mine," he growled against her skin. Not a question. A declaration. A war cry spoken into the wreckage of everything his family had built. "You're mine, Sadie. Say it."
"Yours." The word tore out of her like a confession. "I'm yours."
He made a sound that wasn't quite human and lifted her onto the bar itself, sweeping aside broken glass with his arm, not caring about the cuts that opened on his skin.
She pulled him between her thighs, her fingers working his belt with hands that shook from adrenaline and want and something fiercer than both.
"I thought—" His voice broke. "When Beltway called about the compound, I thought—"
"I know." She kissed him, hard and desperate. "I thought the same thing about you."
They crashed together like waves against rocks—no gentleness, no patience, just the furious relief of survival channeled into something physical.
She matched his intensity, refusing to be handled, refusing to be protected.
When he tried to slow down, she pulled him harder. When he held back, she pushed forward.
This was battle too. A different kind. And she was going to meet him blow for blow.
The bar was hard beneath her back, the broken edge of a bottle digging into her shoulder blade, but she didn't care. The pain was part of it—proof that she was alive, that her nerves still worked, that her body could still feel something besides the numb shock of violence.
"Look at me," she demanded. "Don't close your eyes. Look at me."
His eyes snapped to hers, and what she saw there stole her breath. No mask. No performance. Just raw, overwhelming emotion—fear and relief and possession and something deeper that neither of them was ready to name.
"Sadie." Her name was a prayer on his lips. "Sadie."
"I'm here." She pulled him closer, deeper, her nails raking down his back. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
They moved together among the wreckage, surrounded by broken glass and spilled whiskey and bullet holes in wood that had stood for generations.
The work lights cast harsh shadows across his face, and she watched every expression that crossed it—the desperation, the relief, the moment when control finally broke and he stopped holding anything back.
When she shattered, it was with his name on her lips—not Nail, but James, the name that belonged only to her, only to moments like this. He followed seconds later, his face buried in her neck, his body shaking against hers with the force of it.
They stayed like that for a long moment, breathing hard, tangled together on a bar that had seen better days. Glass crunched somewhere beneath them. Whiskey dripped from the counter onto the floor. The neon sign flickered once, a last gasp of broken light, then went dark for good.
"We're going to have cuts everywhere," Sadie said finally. Her voice was hoarse, scraped raw.
"Worth it."
"Your bar is destroyed."
"Can be rebuilt."
"We just had sex on broken glass."
His laugh was exhausted, genuine, the most honest sound she'd heard from him all day. "I'll put it on the renovation list."
She turned her head to look at him. He was propped on one elbow beside her, his shirt torn, his arm bleeding from half a dozen cuts, his eyes finally—finally—free of the hollow darkness that had filled them when she'd walked in.
"You were something today," she said quietly. "At the compound. At the bar. I've never seen anyone move like that."
"Survival reflex."
"It was more than that." She reached up to touch his face. "You were... honest. No charm, no performance. Just you, doing what needed to be done."
He caught her hand. Pressed a kiss to her scarred knuckles.
"That's what this life requires," he said. "The mask comes off when the bullets fly. What's underneath is all that matters."
"I like what's underneath."
"Even after today? After what you saw me do?"
"Especially after today." She sat up slowly, wincing at the ache in her muscles and the sting of cuts she'd collected. "You know what I realized, watching you fight? A bar fight is the most honest I've ever seen you."
He stared at her. Then he laughed again—surprised, almost delighted.
"Most people would be running by now," he said. "Most people would see what this life really looks like and decide it wasn't worth the price."
"I'm not most people."
"No." He pulled her against him, heedless of the glass and the blood and the destruction surrounding them. "No, you're definitely not."
They sat together in the wreckage of his father's bar, wrapped around each other, letting the adrenaline finally crash. Tomorrow there would be cleanup, and planning, and the endless work of preparing for whatever Fisk threw at them next.
But tonight, there was this.
Two people who'd survived something terrible, holding on to each other in the dark, finding proof of life in the only way that mattered.
And when Sadie finally spoke again, her voice was steady despite everything.
"A bar fight is the most honest I've ever seen you, James. Remember that."
He pulled her closer, his arms tightening around her like he'd never let go.
"I will."