Unbreakable Hearts (Black Heart Security #8)

Chapter One

The socket wrench hit the concrete before Gabe even realized his hand had let it go. The sharp clang cracked through the garage like a rifle shot, ricocheting up his spine.

He jerked, breath locking in his chest.

For one split second he wasn’t in a quiet auto shop after closing. He was back in the sand, back in the place where anything dropped could mean someone didn’t make it home.

He dragged in a breath. Oil, cold metal, the faint sweetness of old grease—none of it grounded him like it normally did.

The garage was still. Too still. Bay three stood empty. The Ford he’d finished tuning sat outside next to his own truck, waiting for pickup tomorrow. Even the radio, turned low to some late-night country ballad, sounded miles away.

All he could do was wait for the tightness to ease. It didn’t.

He braced both hands on the workbench, head ducked, muscles vibrating under his skin. A twelve-hour day should’ve satisfied him. Should’ve left him tired in that good way he’d been chasing for months.

Instead, the agitation pressed at him—relentless.

His T-shirt clung to him. His skin felt wrong. The air felt wrong.

He felt wrong.

He’d been trying so damn hard—holding down this job at his brother-in-law’s garage, showing up for family dinners, learning the rhythm of this new town where everyone called him Gabe-the-mechanic like it was a neat, simple thing.

Like a title could replace the man who used to wear a uniform and sleep with one ear open.

Routine and stability, a new life built from the ground up, was supposed to help. That’s what therapy taught him, anyway.

But none of it fit. Not the apartment his sister helped him find. Not the carefully built schedule. Not the borrowed sense of belonging he’d been trying to talk himself into.

The buzzing under his ribs ratcheted up, sharp enough to make him push away from the bench.

He needed air. Movement. Distance.

He needed out.

Not the memory of sand in his boots and war in his bones.

He stooped and grabbed the wrench. When he set it on the worktop, the small clang of the object finding its place should have soothed him. But the itch didn’t ease.

“Lock up.” His voice was a low echo in the empty garage. Orders, even ones he gave to himself, were easier than feelings, so he shut the bay doors and checked the locks twice. He flipped the deadbolt at the front, then checked it twice.

The small neon OPEN sign he’d switched off bled color across the dark window. He stared at his reflection—shadowed eyes, jaw rough because he forgot to shave. He wasn’t a mess. Far from the man he’d been when he flew back to the States and attempted to fit in with civilian life again.

He was just…not right.

In the quiet, the buzz under his skin only got louder. He turned into a hornet’s nest of thoughts he couldn’t outrun.

He tossed his jacket on, grabbed his keys and hit the parking lot without looking back. Early spring held the kind of cold that bit through denim. The sky was a flat canvas of slate. His breath fogged out before the warmth of the interior of the truck swallowed it.

He didn’t think. He started the engine, listening to the crank and catch of the old engine he’d tuned himself.

His fingers settled on the wheel like they already had a destination in mind. Good thing, because his mind didn’t.

He pulled out, his headlights panning white across the empty street, and aimed for the highway.

He told himself he was just clearing his head with a short drive. He told himself he’d put a few miles under his tires and let the wind scrape some of the static from his head, then loop back before midnight.

He told himself a lot of things he didn’t listen to.

The road unspooled like a dark ribbon with the edges gnawed by frost. The farther he went, the easier he breathed. City lights fell away in the rearview. The radio station turned to fuzz, then new notes trickled out when he found another one.

Semitrucks sped past him, and the world narrowed to the tunnel of his headlights and the thrum of good tires on asphalt.

His phone lit up on the seat. He didn’t have to look to know who it was. Only a handful of people ever called him, let alone this late. And one of them made sure he never slipped through the cracks without a check-in.

He let it ring once. Twice.

He wasn’t avoiding her.

He reached for the phone and thumbed it on. “Hey, Lu.”

“Gabe.” Her voice was warm and bossy, the hug combined with a shove his big sister always gave him. “Please tell me you’re not still at the garage. Jeremy will lose his mind if you keep racking up overtime.”

“I locked up.” His jaw worked, and he made himself unclench it. “Just…driving.”

Silence filled the space on the line, not empty because it was full of her thinking.

He could picture his sister, perched on the edge of her couch in loose pants, one foot tucked under her.

His big sister who could talk a pit bull into giving up a bone, who’d stood in a sterile hallway while he learned to breathe with ribs that felt like broken glass after he fell off a bucking bronco in his rodeo days.

His sister, who’d pressed an apartment key into his palm and said, “Your place. Your pace.”

Her voice came out soft. “You okay?”

He swallowed. The buzz under his skin didn’t leave, but it eased, like it recognized the true meaning of family. “I’m fine.”

“That’s not an answer.”

He choked out a humorless laugh. “I don’t know what to tell you, Lu. I’m trying.”

“I know.”

She did. He’d give her that. She hadn’t missed a single part of his homecoming, from setting up his new apartment with thrifted finds and clean sheets to making sure he had a stock of good coffee. She texted him silly photos of his niece and nephew and a stupid meme at least once a day.

She’d introduced him to her friends at church and dragged him to a cookout with her husband and kids where he’d stood too stiff and smiled too little. She was trying to make this feel like home to him. She was trying so hard.

He changed lanes just for something to do. The miles ticked by. “It’s like I’m…crawling out of my skin. The more I tell myself this is normal, the less it fits. Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s wrong. I know I don’t make any sense.”

“You do.”

He waited for her sigh or a scolding. But she did neither, which was one of her special gifts he appreciated more than he could ever voice.

“You’ve been through hell, Gabe. The world doesn’t make sense after that because you’re measuring it against things most people can’t imagine.”

Things the therapists told him. Things he’d come to terms with back when he was in the veterans program on the Black Heart Ranch. Back before they deemed him fit to return to the real world.

“Yeah,” he said just to reassure her he was still there. He tightened his grip on the wheel, then made himself loosen it a fraction. The road cut past fields gone brown. Fences flashed into view and were gone. “And you’re doing everything right. It’s not you, Lu.”

“I know.” A beat of silence. “I also know when you’re halfway to nowhere.”

His mouth tugged. “You’re psychic now?”

“Don’t need to be.” The affection in her voice went straight to the place in his chest that hurt. “You get quiet in a certain way when you’re about to bolt. I felt it when I brought you dinner. You were smiling, but your eyes were somewhere else.”

He hadn’t realized it showed. He hadn’t meant for it to. “I didn’t mean to ruin it.”

“You didn’t.” She let that sit with him. Then in a gentle voice said, “Tell me where you are.”

He glanced at the next mile marker, the one that told him he’d shot past the line where he could return by midnight. He could lie, could name a town and say he was getting gas.

But she’d hear the lie in his voice. She always did.

“On 17. West.”

Her inhale was sharp. “West…like west-west.”

He knew what she meant. He could hear the map unrolling in her head—the farm roads, the long stretches with nothing but cattle and dark sky.

He rubbed the heel of his hand under his jaw. The scruff rasped his palm. “Yeah.”

“Gabe.” His name was a whole sentence.

“I’m just driving. I needed wind. Needed the hum of the road to drown out the…the noise.”

“You don’t have to explain it to me.” Somehow, he still heard a command in her voice.

Tell me anyway. Because she wanted to help him.

“You want me to stay on the phone?” she asked.

He did and he didn’t. He could hear her puttering around the kitchen, water running, a cabinet shutting.

She was fixing tea she wouldn’t finish before it went cold.

He wanted to spare her the worry. He also wanted to borrow her steadiness for the next few miles until he figured out what the hell he was really doing. If he ever could.

“Stay.”

So she did, without filling the air with chatter. He told her about the carburetor that had been gummed up and the eight-year-old kid who’d watched him work like he was a magician, then about the older man who’d told him about a grandson graduating from basic training.

She told him about the lady next door whose cat got stuck in a dryer vent and how they’d bribed it out with tuna. Small things, the kind of things he never realized he’d miss until he was choking on sand in that desert battlefield.

Eventually, she circled back, soft as an arm around his shoulders. “You know you don’t have to make this town work if it doesn’t fit, right? I won’t take it personal. Jeremy and the kids won’t mind. I just want you…somewhere you can breathe.”

He stared into the haze of light, at the miles ahead that felt like a string pulled taut but could never be loosened. “I want that too.”

“Home isn’t always the first place that offers you a couch, you know? Sometimes it’s the place that was there when you didn’t have anything to give back.”

An ache bloomed under his breastbone, deep and familiar. Home. What was that?

Dust and cattle and the sound of boots on porch planks. Laughter that didn’t expect him to join in and people who didn’t hide when it got ugly.