Chapter Nine
Two days in the compound, and Tess was losing her mind.
Not from fear. Not from the constant presence of dangerous men or the knowledge that somewhere out there, Gregor Petrovic was planning his next move. Those things she could handle—had been handling for six weeks before the Wolves showed up.
No, what was driving her crazy was the stillness.
At the shop, there was always something to do. Boats to maintain, inventory to manage, customers to serve, equipment that needed fixing before it failed. Her hands were never idle, her mind never quiet, her body never still.
Here, she had nothing but time and walls and the distant sound of engines that weren't hers.
By the second morning, she couldn't take it anymore.
The compound garage was a disaster. Tools scattered across workbenches without rhyme or reason, wrenches mixed with screwdrivers, sockets thrown in a pile like someone had given up on organization years ago. Tess stood in the doorway and felt her fingers itch.
"You gonna stand there all day, or you gonna come in?"
The voice belonged to a mountain of a man working on a bike in the corner—Stockyard, she remembered from the safehouse. He'd been watching her shop the night everything went sideways.
"That tool wall is a crime against humanity."
He looked up. Looked at the wall. Looked back at her with something that might have been amusement buried deep under his stone face.
"Been that way since before I patched in."
"And nobody's fixed it?"
"Got more important things to do than play interior decorator."
Tess crossed the garage and started pulling tools off the wall. "You spend ten minutes looking for a socket that should take ten seconds to find, you're wasting time. Multiply that by every brother who uses this space, every day, and you've got hours of lost productivity."
"Productivity." Stockyard's voice was flat. "This ain't a corporate office."
"No, it's worse. At least corporate offices have IT support when things break." She found a handful of washers that had been shoved behind a hammer for reasons she couldn't fathom. "This is just chaos."
He watched her work for a long moment. Then he grunted—a sound that could have meant anything—and went back to his bike.
Tess organized the tool wall in two hours.
Wrenches by size, sockets in order, screwdrivers separated by type and head. She found a label maker in a drawer and put names on everything, because if she had to watch one more brother dig through a pile of random metal looking for a Phillips head, she was going to scream.
When she finished, Stockyard stood back and surveyed the result.
"Huh."
"You're welcome."
"Didn't say thank you."
"You were thinking it."
That grunt again. But when she walked past him toward the door, she caught him actually using the system—pulling a socket from its labeled spot without searching, without digging, without wasting a single second.
Small victories.
Word spread.
By afternoon, brothers were finding her with problems. Stockyard's bike had a chain tension issue that had been annoying him for weeks—Tess adjusted it in five minutes while he watched with that unreadable expression.
Scout mentioned the loading dock pulley had been sticking since last winter—she climbed up, found the corroded bearing, and replaced it with a spare from the garage.
"Where'd you learn to do that?" Scout asked, watching her descend the ladder.
"My father's shop. Everything broke constantly, and we couldn't afford to hire people." She wiped her hands on a rag that had seen better days. "You learn to fix things or you drown."
"You're handy."
"I'm bored out of my skull and you people have apparently never heard of preventive maintenance."
Scout laughed—a short, surprised sound like he wasn't used to making it. "Fair enough."
She fixed three more things that afternoon. A loose hinge on the common room door. A backed-up drain in the kitchen that required nothing more than a plunger and determination. A flickering light in the hallway that turned out to be a bad connection, not a bad bulb.
The work kept her hands busy. Kept her mind from spinning. Kept her from thinking about her shop three miles away, sitting empty, her boats slowly rotting without her there to maintain them.
"You're making the prospects nervous."
Tess looked up from the electrical panel she was examining—whoever had wired this building should be ashamed—to find Molly leaning in the hallway, coffee mug in hand.
"Why?"
"Because you've done more work in one day than they do in a week." Molly's smile was sharp. "They're worried Lakeshore's gonna start making comparisons."
"I'm just fixing things."
"Yeah, well. Around here, that's how women end up becoming essential." She pushed off the wall and joined Tess by the panel. "The brothers don't know what to do with a woman who can handle herself. Makes them twitchy."
"Lakeshore doesn't seem twitchy."
"Lakeshore's a special case." Molly studied her for a moment. "You've seen his dark moods?"
Tess thought about the loading dock. About the east-facing window he'd given her. About the way he watched water that wasn't there.
"Yeah."
"They come and go. Some weeks he's fine—quiet, but present. Other weeks..." She shrugged. "He disappears. Not physically, just—inside. The brothers know when to give him space."
"The lake."
"That's his thing. Whatever happened before he patched in, whatever he carries around, the water's the only thing that helps." Molly's sharp eyes softened slightly. "He hasn't been to the lake since you got here. You notice that?"
Tess hadn't. She'd been so busy trying not to drown in her own restlessness that she hadn't tracked Lakeshore's movements.
"He's staying close," Molly continued. "Won't leave the compound for more than an hour at a time. The brothers have noticed."
"That's... significant?"
"For a man who used to disappear for whole days when it got bad? Yeah. It's significant." Molly drained her coffee. "Just thought you should know what you're dealing with."
She walked away before Tess could respond.
Tess found Andrea in the kitchen that evening, prepping food for what looked like an army.
"Can I help?"
Andrea smiled—warm, genuine, the kind of expression that made Tess understand why a man like Fang would fall for a home health aide. "Grab a knife. Onions need chopping."
They worked in comfortable silence for a while, the rhythm of prep work soothing in its familiarity. Tess had spent countless hours in her father's kitchen doing exactly this—chopping, stirring, feeding people who needed feeding.
"I heard you fixed the loading dock pulley," Andrea said eventually.
"It was stuck."
"It's been stuck for six months. Nobody could figure out what was wrong."
"Corroded bearing. Easy fix if you know where to look."
Andrea set down her knife and looked at Tess directly. "You're good at this. Finding problems, solving them. The brothers respect that."
"I'm just trying to stay busy."
"You're trying not to think about your shop." Andrea's voice was gentle but knowing. "About everything you're losing while you're stuck here."
The words hit harder than they should have. Tess blinked against the sudden burn behind her eyes.
"I can't help her from here," she said quietly. "The shop. My boats. Everything my father built. It's all just... sitting there. Waiting for Gregor to finish what he started."
"The club is handling Gregor."
"I know. But it's not—" She stopped, frustrated. "It's not the same. Being here, being protected, it's not the same as doing something. I feel useless."
"You reorganized the garage, fixed Stockyard's bike, repaired a pulley that's been broken for half a year, and you've only been here two days." Andrea's smile had an edge of amusement. "That's not useless. That's making yourself essential."
"It's not enough."
"It's a start." Andrea went back to her chopping. "Give yourself time. The shop will still be there when this is over."
If it's still standing, Tess thought but didn't say.
She looked for Lakeshore after dinner.
He wasn't in the common room, where brothers played pool and drank beer and argued about things that didn't matter.
He wasn't in the garage, where the newly organized tool wall gleamed under fluorescent lights.
He wasn't in the upstairs hallway or the rooftop or any of the other places she'd learned to navigate over the past two days.
She found him on the loading dock.
He sat with his back against the wall, knees drawn up, staring east into the darkness. The city glow obscured whatever stars might have been visible, but Tess knew what he was looking at. The same nothing she looked at through his bedroom window every night.
The direction of the lake.
She didn't say anything. Didn't ask if he was okay, didn't try to pull him out of whatever dark place he'd gone. Her father had been the same way sometimes—staring at the water like it held answers nobody else could see.
Some silences needed company, not conversation.
Tess sat down beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched. The concrete was cold through her jeans, the April night sharp enough to make her wish for a jacket. But Lakeshore didn't move, and she didn't either.
The compound rumbled around them—engines in the distance, voices from inside, the constant low-level noise of a world that never quite went quiet. None of it sounded like water. None of it sounded like home.
But his shoulder was warm against hers, and his breathing was steady, and after a while she felt some of the tension drain out of him.
They sat there until the cold became unbearable, not talking, not touching except where their shoulders pressed together.
Sometimes that was all you could do.