Chapter 3
Zane
Sleep refused to come last night.
I laid in that bed longer than I want to admit, staring at the ceiling, listening to the building settle around me.
The room felt wrong. Too wide. The ceiling too far away, the walls too far back, the mattress too soft beneath me. My body kept waiting for the clang that never came. You get used to the cage and the open space starts to feel dangerous.
So I climbed onto the roof.
Hauled myself up through the hatch, the night air hitting me in the face the second I cleared the opening. I lay down on the tin with one arm behind my head, let the cold seep through my shirt, and told myself it was because I wanted to finally see the stars after all this time.
I tell myself a lot of shit.
But in all honesty, the roof called to me because Skylar once sat beside me up there.
I laid there with the town humming below me and the stars scattered across the black above, and for one brief, fucked-up second I was eighteen again. Angry and stupid and reckless. And she was beside me.
I could see her.
Knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, hair loose around her face in the breeze.
That mouth set the way it always was, ready to cut me open if I got too comfortable.
She used to stare at those stars as if she hated them for being free.
And then she’d glance at me, quickly, and look away again before I could catch what that look meant. But I always caught it.
That was the problem with us. We were too good at seeing each other, better at it than either of us wanted to be.
Last night, I watched those stars until my eyes burned and the cold had seeped into my bones, and for the first time in a long while, the walls in my head moved back a little.
Not gone. They never go. Prison doesn’t leave when the gate opens.
It follows you out, settles into your shoulders, crawls behind your eyes, and teaches your body to brace for impact before your mind has even registered the threat.
You don’t unlearn that in a night. You don’t unlearn it in a year.
But on that roof, beneath that sky, something loosened. Enough to let the air in.
Just enough to remember what it felt like to breathe without measuring the space between walls. And then her ghost rolled onto its side beside me on the tin, hair loose, eyes on the stars, and ruined the whole fucking thing.
Now it’s morning, and I am under the hood of my old car, pretending that engines are still the one thing in this world that makes sense.
They used to. That was before my hands learned to shake.
The garage is quiet except for the occasional hiss from the air compressor and the sound of Rainer moving somewhere near the office.
Sunlight spills through the open roller door. My car sits with its hood up, exposing everything I never got to finish. The engine is half stripped, with parts lined up along the workbench.
The smell of oil should calm me. It tries. God knows it tries. This place smells exactly the same as it did before everything went to shit. My body remembers it. It reaches for it the way you reach for something in the dark that was always there.
Once, my body knew exactly what to do in here.
Every bolt, every sound, every vibration.
I could listen to an engine cough once and tell you whether it needed spark, fuel, or air. I could work for hours without thinking, hands moving by memory, mind going quiet in a way it never did anywhere else.
Now I stand here with my shoulders locked up around my ears, jaw set, and every nerve in my body waiting for something to go wrong.
The wrench slips.
It hits the concrete with a sharp clang, and my whole body reacts before thought can catch up.
I jerk back hard, heart slamming into my ribs, lungs seizing, fists coming up halfway before I even realize I’ve moved.
The sound ricochets off the walls, and for one ugly, lurching second the garage disappears entirely.
Concrete walls. Steel bunk. A door swinging shut with that particular weight. Men shouting from somewhere down the block. Someone laughing before the sound shifted into something else entirely.
I blink.
Once.
Twice.
The workshop snaps back into place around me.
The car.
The bench.
The dust still drifting through the light like nothing happened.
Fuck. I bend and pick up the wrench. Force the air out slowly through my teeth, then drag it back in the way I taught myself, back when breathing was the only thing I had full control over.
In.
Out.
Again.
I close my eyes. Let the smell of the place find me. Oil and something beneath it all that is just this garage, the closest thing to safe I have ever known.
I stay there until my hands stop shaking and my pulse drops back to something that doesn’t feel like a threat.
When I open my eyes, Rainer is standing a few feet away.
He says nothing. Just stands there with a rag in one hand, eyes studying my face. He doesn’t miss much. It used to irritate the hell out of me when I was young. Now I just breathe through it and turn back to the engine.
I find the bolt I was working on and start again.
The rhythm finds me in pieces. Slow at first, my hands second-guess movements they used to make without thinking.
But it comes. Muscle memory is stubborn that way.
The body holds onto what the mind tries to bury.
A quarter turn. Check the tension. Move to the next.
I’m bent over the engine again when the front door opens. The bell above it gives a tired little jingle.
My spine locks up and I don’t move. My ears are doing the thing they’ve been doing since I got out—cataloging sounds before my brain catches up.
“Morning,” Rainer says.
A woman’s voice carries through the garage and hits me somewhere behind the sternum.
“Morning, Rainer.”
I know that voice.
My hand stills on the socket.
Cassie.
Rainer doesn’t miss a beat. “He’s over there, under the hood.”
I straighten and for one wild, humiliating second my heart does the thing it should have learned better than to do by now.
It leaps. Slams forward as if it has somewhere to be.
Not because of Cassie. But because if Cassie is here, maybe Skylar is as well.
Maybe there are two sets of footsteps and I just didn’t hear the second one.
I wipe my hands on the rag as my pulse pounds loud enough to piss me off.
Cassie comes around the front of the car and into my line of sight. She’s alone and something in my chest drops. I lock it down before it becomes anything I have to deal with.
I simply observe her.
Cassie is not the girl I remember. The bones are there, the same sharp jaw, the same dark eyes that have always moved a little too fast and seen a little too much.
But the girl who used to lean against chain-link fences with a lollipop jammed in her mouth and eyeliner smeared like war paint is gone.
The woman standing in front of me still wears black jeans and boots, and a cropped jacket over a faded Broken Oasis band shirt—the kind that’s been washed so many times the print is cracking at the edges.
Some obsessions apparently survive into adulthood.
Her hair is shorter now. The eyeliner is still there, sharper, intentional rather than defiant. She isn’t a foster kid hiding behind sarcasm anymore. She’s a woman.
That thought lands, dragging another with it, cruel and uninvited. If Cassie has changed this much, how has Skylar changed? Is she even more beautiful than before? Does she still wear fury like armor? Does she still tilt her chin half a second before she lies?
Cassie’s eyes drag over me with a kind of shameless, methodical assessment. My shoulders. My arms. My chest. She takes her time and makes no apology for it.
“Well, shit,” she says at last. “They fed you protein and rage in there, huh?”
Something loosens in my chest. I lean back against the fender and study her for a moment. “You look different.”
“Yeah.” She tilts her head, her mouth tugging at the corners. “It’s called not being seventeen and furious at vending machines anymore.”
A rough laugh slips out of me. It feels strange, as if my chest has forgotten how to do it.
Cassie hears it and her face shifts for half a second, something soft flickering beneath all the eyeliner and the bite.
I glance toward the office door. Rainer stands there, arms loose at his sides, watching us.
“Cassie, you want a soda?” he says.
My gaze lingers on him for half a second longer than I need to. He holds my gaze just long enough to make his point.
“Yeah,” Cassie says, already stepping forward.
Then Rainer turns and moves toward the far side of the workshop, unhurried, already spotting something that needs his attention over there.
Subtle as a brick.
I toss the rag onto the workbench and head into the office. The small bar fridge under Rainer’s desk hums. I pull it open, grab two cans from the bottom shelf, and straighten up.
I hold one out to her.
“I’m so sorry, Zane,” she says, causing me to freeze.
Cassie presses her lips together, but it doesn’t stop the tears. They gather quickly, shining in her eyes like furious little things she clearly hates for showing up without permission. She stares at the can in my hand.
“Fuck,” she mutters, wiping at one tear before it falls.
“I wasn’t planning on doing this. I had a whole speech.
It had sarcasm and structure. Very moving.
Probably award-worthy.” She pauses and just looks at me.
“If I hadn’t called you, Zane.” Her voice breaks around the words, and she stops.
Breathes. Tries again. “If I hadn’t called you, you wouldn’t have gone to prison. ”
“Cass—”
“I called you because I was scared,” she says. “I didn’t know what else to do. When I saw them coming at Sky, I panicked and called the one person I knew would come for her without asking any questions first.”
“I did come.”
“And you lost seven years for it.”
“But if you hadn’t called me, who knows what those bastards would have done to her?”