Chapter 2 #2
Briggs was one of the best hires I'd ever made.
She'd come in two years ago with a resume that was longer on experience than credentials, which was exactly what I looked for.
She worked with the kind of quiet precision that made a shop run better and louder diagnosticians look careless by comparison.
I'd given her every advancement I could and I was going to have to figure out a title for her soon because I was running out of ways to communicate what she was worth.
I liked building people up.
That was the part nobody talked about when they talked about running a business.
They talked about revenue and schedules and client management, all of which mattered.
But the thing that actually drove me — the thing that had made me choose this particular life — was that a shop was its own kind of pack.
You built it from nothing. You decided the culture of it, what mattered and what didn't, how people treated each other and how they treated the work.
You could get that right or you could get it wrong, and I had spent six years getting it right, one hire and one standard and one conversation at a time.
Nobody had told me how to do it. Nobody had done it for me.
That was the point.
My phone buzzed on the workbench at around two in the afternoon.
Unknown number. Montana area code.
I almost let it go to voicemail, but I had a rule about unknown Montana numbers: they were usually either pack business or new customers, and I answered both.
"Ironridge Auto," I said.
"Ms. Okonkwo?" The voice was smooth. Male.
Professional in the way that people are professional when they've practiced it.
"My name is Damien Park. I'm the managing director of Meridian Racing Circuit.
I'm calling because your shop came very highly recommended to us by several associates in the region, and I'd love to discuss an opportunity. "
I moved to the front office and sat down.
"What kind of opportunity?" I asked.
"We're expanding our performance division," he said.
"Custom fabrication, primarily — we have a stable of bikes we want built from scratch to spec, and we need a fabricator with a serious reputation.
We've seen your work on the Hawkins build and the custom chopper you did for the Reaper charity auction last year. "
I was quiet for a moment. He'd done his homework.
"What kind of timeline are you looking at?" I asked.
"Flexible. We'd want to discuss specifics in person — I'll be in Ironridge next week to meet with a few businesses. I'd appreciate thirty minutes of your time if you're willing."
It was the right ask. Not pushing for a decision, not assuming access. Thirty minutes and in person — the standard opener of someone who knew how to make a professional approach.
"Send me the preliminary specs in writing first," I said. "If the scope looks viable, I'll take the meeting."
"Of course. I'll have something to you by end of week."
We ended the call.
I set my phone down and sat with it for a moment.
A racing circuit contract would change things.
Not the work itself — I knew how to build performance machines, had been doing it for years at the margins of my regular shop work.
But the scale of it, the visibility, the jump in revenue that would let me expand the bay capacity I'd been planning for three years and hadn't yet had the capital to execute.
I was already thinking about what the fabrication timeline would look like.
My wolf was quiet, which was unusual. It usually had something to say about everything. The silence had a shape to it, like it was watching, waiting to see what I'd do with this information.
I did not think about what Apex would say about it.
I thought about it the way I thought about everything: as a business decision, on its own terms, requiring no approval from any alpha in any MC.
I went back to work.
The afternoon passed the way good afternoons passed in the garage — in forward motion, in the satisfaction of problems diagnosed and resolved, in the particular quiet of focused work.
I kept half my attention on each bay and the other half on the paperwork accumulating in the front office, the estimate requests I'd let stack up during the morning.
By five, my guys had gone home and I was alone in the back with a street bike that had been dropped off for cosmetic damage repair and a persistent problem in the electrical system that the owner couldn't describe better than "it just acts weird sometimes."
I liked the weird ones.
Weird meant there was something to find that hadn't been found yet, a problem with a solution that required actual thought.
Most jobs were pattern recognition — I'd seen this before, I know what it is, here's how you fix it.
Those were satisfying in the way of efficiency.
But the weird ones required something more, a kind of patience with the unknown that I'd had to develop deliberately because my natural instinct was to move fast.
I moved fast when I had a direction.
When I didn't, I'd learned to go slow.
I found the fault in the bike's wiring harness at six-fifteen: a section of insulation compromised by heat proximity to the exhaust, intermittently grounding against the frame.
Intermittent enough that it only showed up under specific conditions.
The kind of thing that could drive a mechanic insane if they went looking in the wrong places.
I fixed it and straightened up and stood in the empty garage.
The bay doors were still up. The October air had gotten cold, proper cold, and the garage lights cast yellow pools across the concrete floor. It smelled like work and the end of the day and the particular version of quiet that comes after a lot of noise.
I climbed the stairs to the apartment above the shop.
It was small, deliberate, everything I'd chosen. I'd furnished it the same way I built everything — practically first, aesthetically second, with the understanding that form followed function and everything I owned had to earn its space.
I showered. Made food. Sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and went through the estimate queue and thought about what Damien Park's preliminary specs were going to look like.
My wolf was restless.
It had been restless since Apex left, which was its default state after he came and went — the bond stretched taut, reaching in the direction of his cabin like a compass pointing at something it couldn't turn away from.
I closed my laptop.
Went to the window.
The town was quiet at this hour, most lights out, the ridge behind the northern edge of the commercial strip dark against the darker sky. I couldn't see anything up there. I never could.
But on nights when the wind came down from the north, I caught his scent.
Pine and leather, something warm beneath it. The particular signature of his wolf, distinct and unambiguous, the scent my wolf catalogued obsessively the way other people catalogued music or food. Something it returned to, sought out, used to calibrate itself when everything else felt uncertain.
I stood at the window for too long.
Then I went to bed and told my wolf to sleep.
It did not sleep easily.
It never did, after he'd been here.
That was the other thing I couldn't explain to anyone who hadn't lived inside a bond they'd refused to close — the way it pulled at the edges of sleep, the way his name surfaced in the almost-gone space between consciousness and dreams, the way my wolf ran toward something in the dark that I couldn't follow it to.
I'd tried, in the early years, to reason myself out of it.
I'd catalogued his faults — there were real ones: possessiveness, the alpha default of assuming his instinct was reliable, the particular way he occupied space that made it harder to pretend I didn't want him nearby.
I'd taken inventory. Tried to make the sum of the inventory add up to a reason to close the door.
The inventory didn't cooperate.
The faults were there. And he knew they were faults.
That was the thing I hadn't anticipated in year two, year three — that he'd become aware of them and choose to work on them rather than defend them.
That he'd watch me throw someone out of my garage for pressuring my mechanics, and the next week he'd step back from a situation where his instinct was clearly to press forward, and say nothing.
Just adjust. Just demonstrate that the wolf could be directed.
I didn't know what to do with a man who could learn.
My father had been incapable of it. The pack taught the males that learning was compliance, that adjustment was weakness. Apex had apparently received different instructions from somewhere, or had the kind of rare self-awareness that made him capable of it anyway.
It didn't mean I was ready.
Rhett.
Even in my own head I didn't say it often. It felt like too much, too close, too specific. Like if I said it too many times I'd stop being able to pretend that he was just a customer who came in too often.
He wasn't just a customer.
He'd never been just a customer.
He was the thing I'd spent six years building every wall in my life against, and every morning he walked into my garage, those walls held.
And every night, alone in the apartment above the shop I'd built from nothing, I lay awake and listened to my wolf pace and wondered what it would feel like to stop holding.
I never let myself wonder for very long.
But I wondered.
That was the part I never admitted to anyone.
Not even to myself, mostly.
I wondered what choosing would feel like.
If I was brave enough to find out — not the way my mother had been brave, not the blind submission of a bond accepted without terms — but on my own terms, with my own conditions, equal in the claiming.
I didn't know if that was possible.
I didn't know if Apex would accept anything less than everything.
I didn't know, and not knowing was the thing that kept me still, night after night, while the bond pulled and my wolf paced and the ridge above my garage stayed dark and silent.
As far as I knew.
I rolled over and closed my eyes and refused to think about it anymore.
My wolf whined, low and soft, once.
Then it went quiet.
For a while.