46. Dominic
Dominic
The Bonneville is almost ready to ride, and I’ve never been less happy about finishing anything in my life.
Ten days of insomnia will do that. Carburetor rebuilt.
Wiring harness rerun. Oxblood tank cut, buffed, and mounted—four years of stalling undone in under two weeks, because it turns out a man who can’t sleep, can’t drink, and can’t chase his wife to Queens will eventually fix the last thing he still can.
She’s beautiful. She’s nearly done. And when she’s done, I’ll have run out of things to fix, and then God only knows.
The stairs creak behind me.
I don’t turn around. There’s only one person left who overrides my gate code without calling first, and he’s been doing welfare laps all week with the subtlety of a drone program.
“I’m fine, Logan,” I say, torquing the last engine mount. “Not drinking myself into a stupor. Not liquidating my life. You can log the visit and tell Audrey the patient is stable.”
“Good,” says the last voice I expected to hear. “Because we need to talk, and both of those things would make it harder for you to listen.”
The wrench stops. Everything stops—my hands, my lungs, the whole rebuilt engine of me, seized in one clean beat.
I turn around.
Jenna is standing at the bottom of my workshop stairs in jeans and a gray hoodie—mine, the one she liked to put on after a shower, the one I packed and shipped to Queens with tissue paper like an idiot with hope.
Her hair is up in the usual bun, her chin at boardroom altitude, and that manila folder in her hands. She looks exhausted.
She also looks like a hallucination. My brain’s final, cruel trick before the sleep deprivation fully shuts down my organs.
I wipe my grease-stained hands on a shop rag, moving deliberately so I don’t spook her. Or maybe so I don’t shatter the illusion.
“You’re in Chicago,” I state, brilliantly. My voice is gravel, rough from disuse.
“I am,” Jenna says, her tone clipped, holding the folder like a Kevlar shield. “My flight landed an hour ago. I came straight from the airfield.”
She doesn’t step further into the garage. I drop the rag onto the workbench and fold my arms.
“You’re wearing my hoodie,” I point out. I can’t help it. The sight of my worn gray fleece swallowing her frame is doing dangerous things to my heart rate. It softens her edges, making her look entirely too domestic, entirely too mine.
Jenna’s fingers tighten on the folder. A faint flush rises on her neck, visible even in the dim, fluorescent light of the shop. “It was . . . pragmatic. One of the few things I had left that was clean.”
“Right. Pragmatic.” I lean against the freshly buffed tank of the Bonneville to keep from crossing the room and pulling her into me. “And those rings on your fingers? Did you pragmatically put those on too?”
“I’m not here to discuss my fashion choices, Dominic.” Her hazel eyes narrow, the familiar combative edge cutting through her visible exhaustion. It’s the first time I’ve heard my name from her lips in weeks, and the syllables hit me squarely in the chest.
“Then what are you here to discuss, Jenna? Is there something wrong with the paperwork? You only have about two weeks left to file the annulment papers before the ninety-day window closes.”
“I’m aware.”
“Then why the in-person visit?” I ask, keeping my voice dangerously level. “FedEx works wonders, Jenna. You could have saved yourself a flight and a trip through Chicago traffic.”
She finally takes that last step off the stairs, her white sneakers silent against the concrete floor. The fluorescent light catches the gold of her wedding band again, and it feels like a punch in the center of my chest.
“I prefer to handle important matters face-to-face,” she says. “You know that.”
“I know you prefer to handle business face-to-face. Which is what this is, right?” I gesture with my chin toward the folder. “The final nail. Hand-delivered by the executioner in my favorite fleece.”
Jenna’s jaw tightens. She bridges the gap between us, stopping just outside my immediate orbit.
The scent of her—bergamot and that underlying, purely Jenna scent—cuts straight through the heavy grease and exhaust fumes of the garage.
It hijacks my nervous system, flooding the engine of my brain with a spark I’m too exhausted to manage.
“Stop managing me, Dominic,” she snaps, the pristine corporate veneer cracking just enough for the real, infuriated woman to peek through. “Stop trying to anticipate my moves so you can have a snappy comeback ready.”
“I’m running on fumes, sweetheart. My snappy comebacks are operating at forty percent capacity.
” I push off the Bonneville, unable to maintain my casual lean.
I take one step toward her, my heavy boots scraping the floor.
I want to grab her hips, pull her against me, and bury my face in her neck, but my hands are coated in a layer of grime and I don’t have that right anymore.
“Tell me what’s in the damn folder so I can figure out if I need to go back to rebuilding carburetors. ”
She looks up at me, searching. I watch her eyes track the dark circles under mine, the harsh hollows of my cheeks, the erratic pulse beating a frantic rhythm at my jawline. Her fingers twitch against the folder, a subtle tell she’d hate that I noticed.
“You look terrible,” she whispers. The clipped professionalism is gone, replaced by something entirely too soft.
“You look fucking stunning,” I reply automatically. It’s the absolute truth. Even exhausted, even practically drowning in my hoodie, she’s the only thing in this room that makes any sense.
With a sudden, jerky movement, Jenna tosses the folder onto my rolling tool chest. It lands with a heavy, unceremonious slap.
“I didn’t sign them,” she says.
The silence becomes absolute. Even the phantom ringing in my ears from a week of power tools abruptly cuts out.
“Say that again.”
“I didn’t sign the annulment papers,” she repeats, her voice steadying, though the flush on her neck is definitely spreading to her cheeks. “I couldn’t bring myself to file them.”
I stare at her, my sleep-deprived brain struggling to understand. I grip the edge of the workbench to ground myself. “Why?”
“Why did you try to sell your company?”
The betrayal of my inner circle is absolute. I’m going to murder Bennett, and then I’m going to systematically dismantle Caleb’s life. But looking at the fierce, furious woman standing in my garage, I know exactly who deployed the tactical strike to Queens.
“Serena,” I mutter, grabbing the shop rag and rubbing at a spot of grease on my thumb. “Or Audrey. God, I hope it wasn’t Audrey. She probably brought flowcharts to my execution.”
“They all came,” Jenna says, refusing to let me pivot. Her chin tips up, eyes pinned to mine with laser focus. “And they told me you tried to burn down Cruz Financial, hand your entire book to Bennett, and exile yourself from the city. I asked you a question, Dominic. Why?”
I drag a hand through my hair and sigh. “Because I broke your life, Jenna. You loved this city. You loved your job. And you packed it all into two suitcases and fled to Queens because my presence made Chicago uninhabitable for you.” I let out a harsh, jagged breath, the exhaustion settling deep into my bones.
“If removing myself from the board was the only way to get you back where you belong, it was the easiest transaction I’ve ever structured. ”
She stares at me, her eyes bright and furious. “That is exactly what I mean. You are impossible. You think you can just orchestrate the universe behind my back, manipulate the variables, and hand me a perfectly wrapped solution.”
“I was trying to give you space!”
“That doesn’t mean you erase yourself!” she yells, the echo bouncing off the concrete walls and ringing through the rafters.
She takes another step closer, entirely invading my orbit now.
She tips her head back to glare up at me, her chest heaving.
“I wanted you to stop treating me like a project or a piece on your game board. I wanted to be your partner, Dominic. And then I go home, and I find out you secretly visited my mother? You sat in that kitchen and helped her get sober? And you didn’t even tell me? ”
I freeze. My pulse hammers a frantic, bruising rhythm against my ribs. “Your mother has a big mouth.”
“And you have a martyr complex.” A tear spills over her lower lash line, and she doesn’t even bother to wipe it away.
“I need you to understand something, and I need it to go all the way in,” she says.
“I am not an asset, Dominic. I am not a deal you structure or a room you read or a problem you solve while I’m out of the building.
Everyone else in your life lets you do it—Logan lets you rebuild his trusts in the dark, Bennett lets you seed his ventures, David lets you furnish his firm, and they love you for it, and it works for them.
It doesn’t work for me.” Her jaw is tight.
“You went to my mother behind my back. You sat in her kitchen and took her cruelty and rebuilt my whole childhood’s plumbing without ever once asking me if you could.
And I know”—her voice cracks, and she pushes through it the way she pushes through everything—“I know it came from love. She’s thirty days sober, Dominic.
What you did might be the single kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.
But you still should have asked. Do you understand that both of those things are true? ”
“Yes.” It comes out raw.