Chapter Twelve
She woke up wrapped around a man who was already awake.
Not standing guard. Not checking the window or reaching for a weapon or doing any of the dozen things she'd watched him do every other morning since they'd met.
Just lying there, one arm under her, the other resting on her hip, his eyes open and fixed on the ceiling like he was having a conversation with something she couldn't see.
"Hey," Josie said.
His gaze shifted to her. Something in his expression—softer than she was used to, unguarded in a way that made her chest tight.
"Hey."
"You slept."
"Four hours."
"That might be a record."
"Don't get used to it."
But the corner of his mouth twitched, and Josie decided right then—lying in a narrow bed in a compound with bullet holes in the walls and a dog snoring in the bathroom—that she was done watching this man tear himself apart.
She'd spent a week seeing it. The way he never sat down unless someone else sat first. The way his eyes swept every room before he stepped through the door.
The way he positioned himself between her and everything—not just threats, but windows, hallways, open spaces.
Like his body was a tool built for one purpose and resting it was a betrayal.
Enough.
"Coffee," she said, sitting up. "And food. And you're going to sit at a table like a human being and eat something instead of standing in a doorway with a protein bar."
"I don't—"
"That wasn't a suggestion."
He stared at her for a long beat. Then he laughed—that same rough, startled sound from last night, like his body kept surprising him by remembering how.
"Yes ma'am."
The compound kitchen looked like it had lost a fight.
Bullet holes stitched across one wall. A window had been boarded over with plywood, the glass swept into a pile in the corner.
The overhead light flickered because something in the wiring had taken damage, casting the room in a strobe effect that Coldstart was trying to fix from the top of a ladder with a bandage still wrapped around his head.
"Wiring's fine," he muttered. "Just a loose connection."
"You said that twenty minutes ago," Tessa called from the stove, where she was cooking eggs in a cast-iron skillet big enough to shoe a horse in. "Sit down before you bleed on the scrambled eggs."
"I'm not bleeding."
"You're always bleeding. Sit."
Coldstart sat.
Josie bit her lip to keep from smiling and guided Anvil to the long table.
He went, which surprised her, settling into a chair with the careful movements of a man whose body had taken more punishment than he'd admitted to.
The bruises on his ribs had deepened overnight—she'd felt them under her hands, mapped the damage with her fingers in the dark.
Tessa slid two plates of eggs across the table without being asked and went back to the stove. Josie poured coffee from the industrial pot—black, strong enough to strip paint, exactly what the morning required.
They ate in silence for a few minutes. The compound moved around them—hammering from somewhere outside where brothers were repairing the front entrance, the low rumble of a generator, voices carrying through walls that had been thicker before last night.
"Danny used to do this thing," Anvil said.
Josie looked up from her eggs.
He was staring at his coffee, both hands wrapped around the mug, and his voice had that too-steady quality she recognized from the night he'd first told her about his brother. The polished edges. The practiced cadence of a story told to himself so many times it had worn smooth.
But this was different. This part was new.
"When we were kids. He'd come into my room at night—he was maybe seven, eight—and he'd stand at the foot of my bed and just wait. Wouldn't say anything. Wouldn't touch me. Just stood there until I woke up."
"Why?"
"Bad dreams. Our old man wasn't around, Mom worked nights. Danny didn't want to be alone, but he didn't want to ask for help either." Anvil's mouth curved, but the smile didn't reach his eyes. "Calloway thing. We don't ask. We just show up and hope someone notices."
"What did you do?"
"Moved over. Let him climb in. He'd fall asleep in about thirty seconds and I'd lie there all night making sure nothing got him." He took a drink of coffee. "That was the deal. I was the big brother. I watched. I kept him safe. That was my entire purpose from the time I was ten years old."
"And then the parking lot."
"And then the parking lot." He set the mug down.
"You know what the worst part is? It's not the thirty feet.
It's not that I couldn't get there fast enough.
It's that I was good at the job. Fifteen years, hundreds of nights, thousands of people walking through those doors. I kept every single one of them safe."
"But not Danny."
"But not Danny." His hands tightened on the mug.
"So what was the point? All those years of reading rooms, watching crowds, standing between drunk idiots and the consequences of their stupid decisions—none of it mattered because the one person who actually needed me was dying in a parking lot while I was inside checking IDs. "
"That's not—"
"I know what you're going to say. It wasn't my fault.
I couldn't have known. Danny made his own choices.
" His voice was flat. "I've heard it. Believed some of it, even.
Doesn't change the fact that stillness feels like failure.
Every time I stop moving, stop watching, stop putting myself between someone and something that wants to hurt them—I hear him.
Standing at the foot of my bed. Waiting for me to notice. "
The kitchen had gone quiet. Tessa had stopped cooking. Coldstart had stopped pretending to fix the wiring. Neither of them said anything—just went still the way people do when they recognize someone saying something that costs them.
Josie reached across the table and put her hand over his.
"I had a foster mother once," she said. "Mrs. Dreyer. I was twelve. She was the only placement that ever felt like it might stick."
Anvil's eyes lifted to hers.
"She had this garden. Tomatoes, peppers, herbs.
She'd take me out there after school and teach me how to care for things—how to water without drowning the roots, how to stake a plant so it grew straight, how to tell when something was ready to harvest." Josie's thumb traced the split knuckles on his hand.
"I loved it. First time I'd ever been trusted with something alive. "
"What happened?"
"She got sick. Cancer. I got moved to a group home three months later.
" Josie kept her voice steady, the way you kept your voice steady when you'd told yourself a story enough times that the sharp edges were supposed to be gone.
They weren't. "I was twelve years old and I decided that was the last time I'd let myself need something I couldn't control.
People leave. People get sick. People decide you're too much trouble, or not enough trouble, or just not worth the effort. "
"Josie—"
"So I built a life where I didn't need anyone.
Truck. Tools. Dog. No landlord, no employer, no partner.
If everything went wrong, I could pack up and start over in a new county.
" She held his gaze. "And then Brogan burned it all down, and a man I'd known for six hours told me I was coming to his compound, and I went because for the first time in eighteen years, someone showed up and I believed they'd stay. "
Something cracked in his expression.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said.
"I know. That's what terrifies me." She tightened her grip on his hand. "I've been alone since I was twelve. I know how alone works. I'm good at alone. This—" She gestured between them, at the kitchen, at the compound humming with activity around them. "I don't know how to do this."
"You're doing it right now."
"I'm sitting at a table eating eggs."
"You're sitting at a table eating eggs with a man who just told you things he's never said out loud." His hand turned under hers, catching her fingers, holding on. "That's not nothing."
She looked at their hands on the scarred table—his split and bruised, hers callused and rough, neither of them the kind of hands that belonged in a love story.
Except maybe they were exactly those kinds of hands.
"When this is over," Anvil said, "when Brogan's in the ground and nobody's trying to kill you anymore—I want to rebuild your business."
"You've said that."
"I mean with me. Not the club setting you up, not Coldstart building you a forge out of charity.
Me. I want to be there when you pick out the new truck.
I want to hand you tools while you design a better portable setup.
I want to stand next to you while you shoe your first horse in the new rig.
" He leaned forward, his dark eyes fierce.
"Not because you need protection. Because I want to build something with you. "
The words landed in Josie's chest like a hammer strike on hot metal—clean, bright, reshaping something that had been rigid for eighteen years.
Build something. Not guard it. Not protect it. Build it.
"You want to be my forge assistant?"
"I want to be whatever you'll let me be."
She laughed. It came out wet, which horrified her, and she swiped at her eyes with the back of her free hand because she was not going to cry in a bullet-riddled kitchen over scrambled eggs.
"That's a terrible job. The pay is nonexistent and the boss is mean."
"I've had worse."
"You'll have to learn about horses."
"I'll learn about horses."
"They'll step on your feet."
"I've got big feet."
She laughed again, and this time it was real—clean and bright in a kitchen that still smelled like gun smoke and coffee, surrounded by the evidence of violence and the people who'd survived it.
"Okay," she said. "When this is over. You and me and a forge and a truck."
"And the dog."
"Obviously and the dog."
Diesel, hearing his cue from the hallway where he'd been mooching scraps from Coldstart, trotted in and shoved his head between their legs under the table.
Tessa turned back to the stove. Coldstart climbed back up his ladder. The compound kept moving, kept repairing, kept being the messy, violent, impossibly warm thing it had been since Josie walked through its gates with nothing but borrowed clothes and a mutt.
But something had shifted.
Josie sat at the table, Anvil's hand in hers, Diesel's chin on her knee, and realized she'd stopped being alone somewhere between the fire and this moment. Not because someone had rescued her. Not because a man had decided she was worth protecting.
Because she'd decided to let someone in.
And the man she'd let in was looking at her across a kitchen table like she was the blueprint for every good thing he wanted to build.