Page 100 of The Enforcer

When we separated, his forehead came to rest against mine. The way it had the first night. The first time he'd held me, when the world had still been rearranging itself around the fact of each other.

"You know," he said, quiet and rough, the voice he had when the words were coming from somewhere below the training and the damage and the years of building himself into something else entirely, "I was named for a man who wouldn't let go of things."

"I know," I said.

"You're going to be the thing I don't let go of."

The harbor breathed outside the loading dock. The barrel waited along the east wall. My ring caught the light and did the bourbon thing again—amber, deep, shifting.

I pressed my palm flat against his chest and felt his heartbeat. Steady. Present.

Not gripping. Not crushing. Just there.

Holding on, exactly right.

"Good," I said. "I plan to be very difficult to lose."

His laugh arrived—the short, real one, the kind that had no performance in it, the kind I'd been cataloguing since the bread stall. He gathered me against him and I let myself be gathered, my face against his chest, the ring on my finger warm in the morning air.

Outside, the river moved. The salt air did its patient, accumulative work on everything it touched.

Inside, my first barrel breathed.

And we stood in the beginning of the thing we were building together—slowly, chemically, under the right conditions, with time and pressure and the patience of two people who understood, in their bones, that the best things couldn't be rushed.

They could only be tended.