Chapter Ten
Diesel's growl woke him.
Not the low rumble the dog used for deer or raccoons—this was the deep-chest warning, the one that raised hackles and bared teeth, the sound of an animal who'd learned the difference between wildlife and threat.
Anvil was out of bed before his eyes were fully open.
Two AM. The compound dark outside the window, pine trees black against a sky thick with clouds. No moon. No light except the security floods at the gate, and as he watched, those went out too.
Someone had cut the power.
"Get up." He was already pulling on boots, grabbing the shotgun he'd staged by the door because he staged a weapon by every door he slept behind. "Josie. Now."
She came awake fast—no confusion, no fumbling, just eyes open and body moving. Four days of sleeping next to a man who kept weapons within reach had taught her the difference between normal sounds and trouble.
"How many?" she asked, already dressed, already reaching for her boots.
"Don't know yet." He crossed to the window and looked out through the gap in the curtains. Movement at the tree line. Shadows that didn't belong to trees. "Enough to cut the power first."
His phone buzzed. Tundra: Twelve plus. Coming from the north and east. Coordinated.
Twelve men. Two approach vectors. Power cut to kill the floods and cameras.
This wasn't tweakers getting brave. This was planned.
"Safe room," Anvil said. "Take Diesel, take the backup piece, don't come out until—"
"No."
The word stopped him mid-stride. Josie was standing by the bed, boots laced, hair tied back, the claw hammer from the safehouse in her right hand. She'd kept it. Carried it from the cabin to the compound and put it on the nightstand like other women kept water glasses.
"Josie, this isn't—"
"Last time you put me in a back room, you killed eight men and came back covered in blood." Her voice was steady. Hard. "I'm not sitting in a hole while people die for me."
"They're not dying for you. They're—"
"Don't." She stepped closer, close enough that he could see the fear in her eyes and the refusal to let it win. "You said I matter. You said my knowledge matters. So let me matter."
Gunfire cracked the silence open.
No more time.
"Stay behind me," Anvil said. "You do exactly what I say, when I say it. You don't hesitate, you don't freeze, and if I tell you to run, you run."
"Deal."
He grabbed her arm and they moved.
The compound was already waking up—brothers spilling from rooms with weapons drawn, the particular choreography of men who'd drilled for this.
Anvil heard Permafrost barking orders somewhere in the main building, heard Ironside's Swedish cursing echo down the hallway, heard the steady crack-crack-crack of Whiteout's rifle from somewhere high, which meant the sniper had made it to the roof.
The main entrance was thirty feet ahead.
Anvil positioned Josie behind a concrete support column—the compound's mine-headquarters bones were good for something—and pressed the backup pistol into her free hand.
"Anything comes through that side door that isn't wearing a cut, you put it down."
"Got it."
He didn't have time to be proud of her. Didn't have time to acknowledge that the woman he'd pulled from a burning barn a week ago was standing in a combat zone with a hammer in one hand and a pistol in the other and not a trace of hesitation in her stance.
Later. He'd deal with that later.
The front door exploded inward.
Not breached—literally exploded, the hinges blown by something improvised, wood and metal shrapnel spraying the entrance hall. Two men came through the gap before the debris settled, moving fast, weapons up, the jerky aggression of tweakers running on meth and rage.
Anvil dropped the first one with a shotgun blast that folded him backward through the ruined doorframe. The second got three steps further before Ice appeared from a side corridor and put two rounds in his chest.
"Two down!" Ice called. "They're pushing the east wall too!"
More gunfire. The staccato pop of handguns mixed with the heavier bark of rifles, sounds layering over each other until the compound became a single roaring thing made of noise and muzzle flash and the acrid bite of gunpowder.
Anvil moved to the doorway.
Outside, the compound yard was chaos. Figures sprinting between vehicles, using trucks and bikes as cover, firing at windows and doorways where Savage brothers had taken position.
Whiteout's rifle cracked from the roof at steady intervals—each shot followed by a scream or a thud or the sudden silence of a man who'd stopped being a problem.
But there were too many of them, and they were pushing hard.
A knot of four rushed the main building. Anvil dropped one with buckshot, racked the slide, dropped another. The third made it to the wall and pressed himself flat, trying to get under the angle of fire. The fourth—
The fourth came through the side door.
Josie's pistol barked twice. The man staggered, hit the wall, slid down it leaving a red smear on the concrete. He tried to raise his weapon and she fired again, the round catching him in the shoulder, spinning him sideways.
Anvil finished him with the shotgun before he hit the floor.
Their eyes met across the hallway. Josie's face was white, her hands steady, the pistol still up and level.
"Good," he said.
"More coming."
She was right. Two more had found the side entrance and were trying to force their way in. Anvil swung the shotgun around and—
Empty.
The click of an empty chamber was the loudest sound in the world.
He dropped the shotgun and pulled his sidearm in one motion, putting rounds downrange that drove the two men back through the doorway.
But they'd be back. And there were more behind them—he could hear boots on gravel, shouting, the disorganized fury of an assault that was losing momentum but hadn't quit.
Then a sound cut through everything else.
A voice. Deep. Carrying the particular resonance of a man who'd spent six years learning to project authority in prison yards.
"Tear this place apart! Find the woman! Brogan wants her in pieces!"
Clete Munson.
Anvil had studied the file Tundra compiled.
Prison photos, arrest records, the detailed account of the manslaughter that earned him six years—a bar fight that ended with Clete's hands around a man's throat and a look on his face that witnesses described as satisfied .
Brogan's enforcer. The man who handled problems that required more than intimidation.
The man Brogan had sent because he wouldn't come himself.
Anvil reloaded and moved.
He came through the ruined front door into the yard, reading the fight the way he'd read nightclub crowds for fifteen years—where the pressure was building, where the gaps were forming, where the next eruption of violence would come from.
Three of Brogan's men were down in the gravel.
Two more were pinned behind a truck by fire from Ironside's position near the garage.
Whiteout had gone quiet on the roof, which meant he was repositioning, which meant someone smart enough to track his muzzle flash had forced him to move.
And Clete Munson was twenty feet away, striding through the chaos like he owned it.
The man was everything his file promised—six-two of prison-hardened muscle, a face like scar tissue stretched over bone, hands that had killed and enjoyed the killing. He carried a shotgun in one hand and a machete in the other, and he was heading for the main building.
Heading for Josie.
Anvil stepped into his path.
Clete saw him and smiled. The expression belonged on something that lived in deep water—all teeth, no warmth, the reflexive display of a predator recognizing another predator.
"Sergeant at Arms." Clete's voice was conversational. Relaxed. "Been wanting to meet you."
"Here I am."
Clete raised the shotgun. Anvil was already moving—inside the weapon's effective range before Clete could level it, one hand slamming the barrel aside, the other driving into Clete's jaw with a short hook that would have dropped most men where they stood.
Clete took it.
Rocked back on his heels, spat blood, and swung the machete in a flat arc aimed at Anvil's throat.
Anvil ducked under the blade and drove his shoulder into Clete's midsection, lifting the bigger man off his feet and slamming him into the compound wall hard enough to crack the siding. Clete grunted, dropped the machete, and got both hands around Anvil's neck.
Prison hands. The grip of a man who'd strangled someone to death and learned exactly how much pressure it took.
Anvil's vision started to spot.
He drove his thumbs into Clete's eyes. The grip loosened—not much, but enough. Anvil tore free, gasping, and threw an elbow that connected with Clete's temple and staggered him sideways.
They separated. Circled. Two big men in a yard full of gunfire, measuring each other the way predators do—looking for the weakness, the opening, the moment when defense becomes attack.
Clete charged.
Anvil let him come.
He sidestepped at the last second, grabbed Clete's arm, and used the man's momentum to drive him face-first into the compound's concrete foundation. Clete hit the wall and bounced off it, blood sheeting from a gash above his eye, but he was still standing, still moving, still dangerous.
Tough son of a bitch.
Clete swung wild—a haymaker that would have taken Anvil's head off if it landed. Anvil slipped it, got inside, and delivered three body shots that cracked ribs. Clete doubled over. Anvil grabbed the back of his head and drove his knee into the man's face.
Cartilage crunched.
Clete went to his knees.
And from across the yard, Tundra's flanking team hit Brogan's remaining men from behind.
They came out of the tree line like ghosts—Tundra, two brothers, moving with the coordinated precision of men who'd trained for exactly this. The tweakers, already rattled by losses and Whiteout's rifle, broke. Some ran. Some tried to fight and found themselves outflanked and outmatched.
The assault collapsed in thirty seconds.
But Anvil wasn't watching the retreat.
He was looking down at Clete Munson, who was kneeling in the gravel with a broken nose and shattered ribs, blood dripping from his face, trying to get up. Still trying to reach the building. Still trying to get to Josie.
"She's not yours," Anvil said.
Clete looked up at him through the blood. That smile again—the deep-water thing, all teeth, no surrender.
"Brogan'll send more. You can't watch her forever."
"Watch me."
Anvil's hands found the sides of Clete's head.
The motion was quick. Clinical. The particular application of force he'd learned in Minneapolis doorways and perfected in northern Minnesota—the kind of violence that didn't waste energy on anger because efficiency was its own statement.
Clete Munson's neck broke with a sound like a branch snapping in a quiet forest.
The body dropped.
Anvil stood over it, breathing hard, blood on his hands and face and shirt, the compound yard gone silent around him as the last of Brogan's men disappeared into the darkness they'd come from.
"Clear!" Tundra's voice rang across the yard. "We're clear!"
Brothers emerged from positions—behind vehicles, in doorways, from the roof where Whiteout was already breaking down his rifle. Ironside limped from the garage, blood soaking his left leg above the knee. Coldstart had a gash across his forehead that was bleeding freely.
Two wounded. None dead.
Every Savage standing.
The front door—what was left of it—scraped open, and Josie stepped into the yard.
She still had the pistol in one hand and the hammer in the other. There was gun smoke in her hair and concrete dust on her clothes, and her eyes swept the yard with the focused calm of a woman who'd just fired a weapon at men trying to kill her and discovered she could live with the result.
Her gaze found Clete's body at Anvil's feet.
Then found Anvil.
"How many?" she asked.
"Twelve came. Don't know how many left." He looked at the blood on her hands, the weapon still raised and ready. "You okay?"
"I shot someone."
"I know."
"He was coming through the door. He had a gun."
"I know."
"I'd do it again."
Anvil crossed the yard to her, his boots crunching on gravel and shell casings, and took the pistol from her hand. Her fingers were stiff—locked around the grip with the tendon-deep tension of someone who'd been holding on too hard for too long.
"I know you would," he said.
Permafrost appeared in the ruined doorway, cold eyes surveying the damage—bullet holes in the siding, shattered windows, the bodies scattered across the yard like problems that had solved themselves.
"Casualties?"
"Ironside took one in the leg. Coldstart's cut up. Nothing fatal." Tundra was already triaging, moving between wounded brothers with the efficiency of a man who'd done battlefield medicine in worse conditions. "Their side lost eight, maybe nine. Rest ran."
"Clete?"
"Dead." Anvil didn't elaborate. Didn't need to.
Permafrost nodded slowly. His eyes moved from the body to Anvil, then to Josie standing beside him with a hammer still in her white-knuckled grip.
"She fought?"
"She held the side entrance. Dropped one of them before he could get inside."
Something shifted in the president's expression. Not quite approval—something deeper. Recognition.
"Get her inside. Get cleaned up. Church at dawn." Permafrost turned away, already barking orders about perimeter checks and body disposal. "Brogan just lost his enforcer and half his crew in one night. He's going to feel that."
Anvil put his hand on Josie's back and guided her toward the building, stepping over debris and shell casings.
Behind them, Ironside cursed in Swedish while Linnea cut away his pant leg to get at the wound.
Coldstart sat on the ground holding a rag to his head, arguing with Tessa about whether he needed stitches.
Brothers moved through the yard with the practiced ease of men cleaning up after violence—checking bodies, collecting weapons, beginning the work of making evidence disappear.
Josie walked through all of it without flinching.
At the door, she stopped. Turned back to look at the yard one more time—the bodies, the blood, the brothers who'd fought to keep her alive.
"He wasn't here," she said.
"No."
"Brogan sent his people to die and didn't come himself."
"That's the kind of man he is."
Her jaw tightened. The hammer was still in her hand, knuckles white around the wooden handle, and when she spoke, her voice carried something Anvil hadn't heard from her before.
Not fear. Not gratitude.
Anger.
"When do we go after him?"