Chapter 7
Zane
The engine should make sense. That’s the whole fucking problem.
It should sit in front of me, with its wires, belts, hoses, bolts, and worn-down parts, and be the easiest thing in the room to understand.
Engines don’t lie. They don’t perform. They break in ways that have names, in ways you can put your hands on and trace back to a source.
The wrench slips, and my knuckles crack against the alternator housing hard enough to split the skin.
I pull my hand back, stare at the blood welling across two of my knuckles, and feel absolutely nothing. That is probably the most honest thing I can say about where I am right now. I press the back of my hand against my jeans and go back to work.
Cars break. You fix them. Fucking simple. Except nothing is simple anymore.
I stand bent over under the hood, a wrench in one hand and a rag in the other, with no idea what the fuck I am doing. Not with the car but with myself.
The workshop is quiet.
Rainer is in his office, the door half open, going through invoices. He does that when he wants to pretend he isn’t watching me. He’s always had that habit. Quiet as a judge. Sharp as one, too.
I shift the wrench in my hand and stare into the engine bay.
I changed the spark plugs this morning. Checked the hoses.
Looked over the wiring. Cleaned the terminals.
I have done all the things a man does when he needs his hands to appear busy because his head has become unsafe ground.
And yet, I keep ending up right here, staring, lost. The wrench seems heavier than it should.
My phone sits face down on the workbench behind me. I haven’t bothered to look at it for two hours. That doesn’t mean I have forgotten it. Earlier, it buzzed while I was under the hood. One text.
Griff: You’re running out of time, brother.
That was all.
Brother.
That word coming from him makes my skin crawl.
Griff uses brother the way other people use a leash, like it means something.
As if eight months in the same shit foster placement at fifteen gives him a claim on me that never expires.
It doesn’t work that way. It stopped working that way the moment I understood who he actually was and what saying yes to him had already cost me.
I wish I had never run into him again, that I’d been smarter and less desperate, that night I was stupid enough to let him back into my life.
I haven’t replied to that text and I’m not going to. Let him think the number is dead. Let him think it landed nowhere and dissolved into the silence of a phone that no longer exists.
I shove the wrench down onto the workbench harder than I intend to. It clatters loud against the socket set, the sound cracking through the quiet of the workshop like a small, stupid explosion.
I let out a rough breath and lean both hands on the edge of the car, head dropping forward, eyes fixed on the engine I have been staring at for two hours without actually seeing any part of it.
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing anymore,” I say, the words ugly, honest, and uncomfortable as shit. Words that feel smaller as they come out than they did when they were inside you, which somehow makes them worse.
Rainer says nothing at first. That is one thing I have always respected about him. He doesn’t rush to fill silence just because it has teeth. He lets it stand. Lets a man hear what he just said. Lets the truth look around and decide whether it wants to stay.
Sometimes I hate him for it, but today I need it.
He gets up from his desk and exits his office, stopping beside the car.
“What part?” he asks.
“All of it.”
“That narrows it down,” he says. “You got out a few days ago, Zane.”
“I know when I got out.”
“Do you?”
My eyes cut to him.
“You’re walking around as if you should already know how to be out,” he says. “That’s not how it works.”
“You giving prison reintegration advice now?”
“No.” His voice stays level. “You’re not listening.”
“I heard you.”
“No you heard words. That’s different.”
I turn back to the engine because his face is too calm, which makes mine feel too exposed.
“I’m not built for this,” I mutter.
“For what?”
“This.” I gesture around the workshop with the rag.
“Normal shit. Work. Food. Sleep. Talking to people without calculating who could hit first. Walking outside without wondering which corner is hiding something. Standing in front of a car without feeling like my skin is trying to crawl off my bones.”
Rainer stays quiet. So I keep going, because apparently once the crack opens, everything decides it is time to crawl out.
“I used to know who I was here. This place made sense. Cars made sense. You handed me a wrench and told me to stop being a mouthy prick every twenty minutes. I knew the rules.”
“You broke most of them,” Rainer says.
“Yeah.” I drop the rag at the edge of the car. “But I knew them.”
That almost gets a smile out of him. Almost.
I grip the edge of the car again. “Now I’m clueless.”
The admission scrapes through my chest as it leaves. I hate it. I hate how young it sounds, how raw, like something that belongs to the version of me who stood in this exact workshop at eighteen, with his whole life in a backpack and no fucking idea what to do with any of it.
I shouldn’t feel like that kid again. I have been through too much and lost too much to still feel that way. And yet here I am. Gripping the edge of a car in the one place that used to make sense to me, feeling like I am standing at the beginning of something I don’t know how to start.
Rainer lowers his voice. “You’re not locked up anymore, son.”
My jaw tightens. I stare at a crack in the concrete between my boots, running from under the car toward the drain in the center of the floor.
“Just because they opened the gate, it doesn’t mean I’m free,” I say, the words more honest than I meant them to be.
A car rolls past outside, its bass thudding low through the roller door, then fading down the street and dragging the silence back in behind it.
“Griff texted me,” I say.
Rainer goes still beside me. “When?”
“Earlier.”
“What did he say?”
“That I’m running out of time.”
Rainer’s eyes turn cold. Not exactly angry. Just stripped of everything warm. “Did you answer?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“I’m letting him think it’s not my number anymore.”
“Griff isn’t stupid.” Rainer’s voice is flat and certain. “You need to be careful.”
“I’m being careful.”
“You’re ignoring him and hoping he goes away. That’s not the same thing.”
I don’t argue with that because he’s not wrong.
“He wants money,” I say. “Or a fight. Or both.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Nothing.”
Rainer studies me. “That’s your plan?”
“It’s better than my old plans.” The words come out harsher than I intend, with an edge that has nothing to do with Rainer but everything to do with the image that flashes through my head the second I say them.
The one I can’t seem to keep from being dragged out at the worst possible moment.
The girl I thought I could keep safe. The one I told myself I was protecting, even though the truth was I was already pulling her into the current with me without even knowing it.
I wanted to save her, and instead I fucked everything up so thoroughly that saving her eventually meant removing myself entirely.
My shoulders sag before I can catch them.
Rainer sees it. “You don’t owe him.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I glance at him. “I was in prison, Rainer.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
The bastard always knows exactly where to press.
“I’m aware I don’t owe him,” I say. “Doesn’t mean he agrees.”
Rainer looks toward the car I’m working on, then back at me. He is quiet for a moment, working something over. “You talked to anyone?”
“I’m talking to you.”
“I mean someone qualified.”
He waits. He is very good at waiting.
I stare at my boots, at the crack in the concrete. Anywhere but him.
Rainer’s voice softens in that rough, particular way of his. “You came out alive. That matters, but alive isn’t the same as okay.”
“I don’t know how to be okay,” I say.
Rainer’s face changes. A shift around the eyes, something that opens slightly and then settles.
A breath leaves me, slow and uneven.
“She used to sit there,” I say.
Rainer doesn’t ask who. He knows.
I nod toward the old workbench by the side window. “Her boots up on the edge, mouth running, telling me I looked too pleased with myself for a guy fixing a car that had clearly lost the will to live.”
Rainer’s gaze follows mine across the workshop.
The workbench is empty now. Dust, tools, and a half-used roll of electrical tape, and nothing else. No girl with sharp eyes and soft hands, pretending she wasn’t paying attention when she was paying more attention than anyone.
“Have you seen her?” Rainer asks.
“No.”
“Do you want to?”
I laugh, but it comes out wrong. It’s broken at the edges and sounds more like something tearing than laughter. “That’s a stupid question.”
“Most important ones are.”
I rub the back of my neck and avert my gaze to the floor. “I don’t know.”
“That’s a lie.”
I peer up at him.
He looks back, unmoved and unhurried, waiting with that patience of his that has no bottom to it.
“Fine,” I say. “Yes. No. Fuck, I have no idea. I want to see her. Of course I want to see her. I have wanted to see her every goddamn day since I got locked up. Some nights inside, I wanted to hear her voice so badly I thought it would drive me out of my mind.”
The words rip through the air between us and keep going.
“Then I remember what I said to her. I remember her face when I made her believe she meant nothing to me. And I think maybe the only decent thing I have left to offer her is staying the fuck away.”
Rainer says nothing which just pisses me off.
“Ask me what I’d even say,” I mutter, turning back to the car just to have somewhere to look.
“What would you say?”
I lift my head and glare at him. “That wasn’t an invitation.”
His face stays completely blank. “I’m still asking.”
I run a hand through my hair. “I’m not sure. She might have a great life now. A home. Someone who didn’t need a prison sentence to learn not to destroy everything he touches.”
I pause as the words sit in my mouth like something I’ve been chewing on for years without swallowing. “I don’t want to walk back into that and fuck it up because I still love her.”
There it is. The truth. Ugly and bare, standing in the middle of the workshop with grease on its hands and nowhere left to hide.
Rainer’s eyes lift to mine.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“You were aware?”
“I’m old,” he says. “Not blind.”
My laugh breaks. It’s short and hollow. “Are you always this comforting?”
“No.”
“Good. Because you’re terrible at it.”
I pace away from the car, my body unable to hold still with her name loose in the room.
“I had her number typed out the other night,” I say, stopping with my back to him. “I almost sent her a message.”
“What did it say?”
“Sorry. But I deleted it.”
“Why?”
“Because sorry is bullshit.” I turn and look at him. “Sorry doesn’t make up for what I said. What I did. Sending it would have been for me, not for her, and she has had enough of my shit landing in her life without asking for it.”
Rainer nods.
“Sorry is a start,” he says. After a beat, he adds, “She may not want to hear it. She may tell you to go to hell.”
“I know.”
“And that’s her right.”
“I know that too.”
He goes quiet again.
“Cassie told me Skylar has a life,” I say. “That was all she’d give me. Said it like a warning.”
“Cassie’s loyal,” Rainer says. “Always has been.”
He walks to the workbench and picks up the wrench I threw earlier. He turns it once in his hand, considers it, then sets it down with far more care than I gave it.
“You made a choice in prison,” he says.
“Yeah.” My jaw tightens. “A shitty one.”
“Maybe. You were eighteen, scared and locked up, trying to protect someone with the only tools you had.”
“My tools were cruelty and stupidity.”
“Most eighteen-year-old boys only have those two,” he says.
“That supposed to make me feel better?”
“No.” He says it simply, without apology. “It’s supposed to make you stop carrying it like a grown man with clean choices made it.”
“I knew what I was saying,” I say. “When I said it to her. I understood exactly what I was saying.”
“I know.”
“I meant to hurt her.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“She trusted me.” My voice drops low, scraping the bottom of something. “And I broke that.”
“Yes,” Rainer says.
One word.
It’s exactly what the truth sounds like when someone respects you enough not to soften it. That’s Rainer. He will give you shelter but he will not hand you bullshit and call it mercy.
I nod. “Then what the fuck do I do with that?”
Rainer leans back against the workbench and crosses his arms. “You live with it. And if you get the chance, you tell her the truth about why you did it so she can get on with her life.”
“She might not give me the chance.”
“Then you respect that.”
“And if she does?”
He holds my gaze across the workshop, steady and certain. “Then you don’t waste it with excuses. You tell her what you did. You tell her why. You tell her you were wrong.” He pauses. “Then you shut up and let her feel whatever she needs to feel.”
The workshop settles around his words.
I look at the empty workbench, the dust, the tools, and the absence of her. Then I move over to where Rainer stands, pick up the wrench, turn back to the car, and get back to work.