Chapter 3
The garage looked like every other three-bay shop in Bridgeport—brick walls, hand-painted sign, lifts that had seen better decades.
But Lakeshore had sworn the owner was solid, and Lakeshore didn't vouch for people lightly.
Union rolled the club bike into the lot and killed the engine, studying the building with the same cold assessment he brought to everything.
KOWALSKI'S AUTO REPAIR in faded letters above the bays.
Two cars on lifts inside. A black sedan parked across the street with two men who thought they were being subtle.
They weren't.
He filed that detail away and walked the bike toward the open bay, where a dark-haired woman in coveralls was elbow-deep in a Chevy's engine compartment.
"Help you?" She didn't look up.
"Transmission's slipping. Third gear mostly."
Now she looked up, wiping her hands on a rag as her eyes swept over him—the cut, the scars on his knuckles, the bike. Her expression didn't change. No fear, no deference, just the flat assessment of someone who'd been sizing up men her whole life.
"Pull it into bay two."
Union walked the bike in and stepped back as she approached.
She was maybe five-seven, dark hair pulled back tight, grease permanently worked into the creases of her hands.
No-nonsense in a way that reminded him of the women who'd run union kitchens during strikes—the ones who'd feed a thousand men and still have energy to tell off anyone who complained.
She crouched beside the bike without ceremony, her hands moving over the engine with quick, confident strokes.
"Start it."
He did.
She listened, head tilted, fingers resting on the transmission housing like she was taking a pulse. After thirty seconds, she held up a hand and he killed the engine.
"Clutch cable's stretched. That's your slip." She stood, wiping her hands again. "Also, your oil's about a thousand miles past due and someone's been riding the rear brake."
Union raised an eyebrow. "All that in thirty seconds?"
"Didn't need thirty." She met his eyes without flinching. "Cable's a two-hour job, oil change while I'm in there. Three hundred even."
"Done."
"Pick it up tomorrow after four."
She turned back toward the Chevy, and Union found himself watching the way she moved—economical, purposeful, no wasted motion. The way a person moved when they'd been doing the same work their whole life.
He noticed other things too.
The way her remaining mechanic—older guy, Luis on his coveralls—kept glancing toward the street. The way Diane herself tracked the sedan's position every few minutes, her body angling to keep it in her peripheral vision.
The way she walked the entire perimeter of a customer's Honda before it pulled out, checking underneath with a flashlight despite having just finished the repair.
Something was wrong here. Something that had the whole shop running scared.
Union left without comment, but the image of those men in the sedan stayed with him all the way back to the compound.
Three days later, he came back.
The bike he brought this time didn't need work—just a tune-up that could've waited another month. But he'd spent three days thinking about the woman who'd diagnosed a transmission problem in under a minute and the sedan full of men watching her shop like vultures waiting for something to die.
He needed to know more.
Diane was alone in the office when he walked in, paperwork spread across a desk that looked older than she was. She glanced up, and something flickered in her eyes—recognition, wariness, something else he couldn't name.
"Bike's not due for service for another six thousand miles."
"Wanted a once-over anyway."
"Uh-huh." She leaned back in her chair, arms crossed. "You checking up on my work?"
"Checking up on you."
The words came out more direct than he'd intended. But Union had never been good at dancing around things—say what you mean, mean what you say, let the chips fall.
Diane's expression hardened. "I don't need checking up on."
"Then why are you inspecting every car that leaves this shop like you're expecting to find a bomb?"
Silence.
Union stepped into the office and closed the door behind him. The space was small—filing cabinets, a desk, a photo on the wall of a man standing in front of this same shop. Her father, he guessed, based on the resemblance.
"I watched you three days ago," he said. "You walked around that Honda three times before you let the customer take it. Yesterday—yeah, I drove by—you were under a Buick with a flashlight at six in the morning."
"You been surveilling my shop?"
"I been noticing things." He met her eyes. "Like the sedan across the street. Like your mechanic jumping every time the door opens. Like the way you check brake lines on cars you just finished servicing."
Diane's jaw tightened, but she didn't look away. Backbone. He'd expected that.
"Why do you care?"
"Because I know what it looks like when honest workers get squeezed." Union pulled up his sleeve, showing the faded solidarity tattoo on his forearm. "Seen it happen to union shops, family businesses, anyone who won't bend to bigger money."
She stared at the tattoo for a long moment. Something shifted in her expression—not softening exactly, but opening. Like a door cracking after being locked too long.
"You're with that motorcycle club. The Wolves."
"Yeah."
"Why bring your bike here?"
"Brother said your father ran an honest shop. Closed mouths, fair prices, work done right." Union shrugged. "Those things matter to men like us."
"My father's been dead five years."
"And you've been running it since. Same reputation."
Diane was quiet for a moment, studying him the way she'd studied his bike—looking for the thing that was about to break.
"Eddie Bartosz," she finally said.
The name hit Union like a punch. Bartosz. He knew that name—chop shop king of the South Side, eighteen years of stolen cars and absorbed businesses. A bully with muscle and money who'd never met resistance he couldn't crush.
"He wants your shop."
"He wants my customer base. My location. My father's reputation for legitimate work." Diane's voice was flat, controlled, but Union could hear the anger underneath. "He made me an offer six months ago. Partnership. His cars, my bays, sixty-forty split."
"You said no."
"I told him to go to hell."
Union felt something warm spread through his chest. This woman, alone against a man who'd been swallowing shops for two decades, and she'd told him to go to hell.
"And now he's making you pay for it."
"Sabotage. Brake lines cut, fuel lines loosened, lug nuts backed off." She gestured toward the street. "His men watch the shop every day, remind me I'm operating on borrowed time. Three weeks ago, two of them cornered me after closing and explained what happens to women who don't know their place."
Union's hands curled into fists. "They touch you?"
"Nothing that showed."
The rage that flooded through him was immediate and absolute. Old rage—the kind he'd felt watching his father's union get broken, watching honest workers get crushed by money and muscle.
New rage too. Rage that had nothing to do with unions or solidarity and everything to do with the woman sitting in front of him with grease under her nails and steel in her spine.
"How many men does Bartosz have?"
"Twenty, maybe more. Plus the mechanics who process his stolen cars." Diane shook her head. "I know what you're thinking. One shop owner isn't worth a war with Eddie Bartosz."
"That's not what I'm thinking."
"Then what?"
Union looked at her—this stubborn, fierce woman who'd rather die than sell her father's name. Who showed up every day knowing the cars might be sabotaged and the men across the street were waiting for her to break.
"I'm thinking," he said slowly, "that a man who runs a chop shop network in Wolf territory has been operating without our permission for way too long."
Diane stared at him. "You're serious."
"The Wolves don't tolerate thieves working our streets. Bartosz has been stealing cars and destroying honest businesses for eighteen years." Union leaned forward, holding her gaze. "That ends."
"Why? Why help me?"
Because you've got grease under your nails and you won't back down. Because you remind me of every worker who ever held a picket line against impossible odds. Because something about you makes me want to break every man who's ever threatened you.
He didn't say any of that.
"Because that's what we do," he said instead. "We protect our territory. And as of right now, your shop is under Wolf protection."
Diane's eyes searched his face, looking for the lie, the angle, the thing that would make this make sense. She wouldn't find one.
"I don't need protection."
"Yeah, you do." Union stood. "You just haven't admitted it yet."
He walked out before she could argue, but he felt her eyes on his back all the way to his bike. The sedan across the street tracked his departure, and Union memorized both faces before he pulled away.
Eddie Bartosz had been running his operation for eighteen years without consequences.
That was about to change.