Chapter 4
KENDRA
Three hours into my shift and the blizzard’s turned every delivery into a fight. The roads are hiding ice under fresh powder, and my windshield wipers can barely keep the glass clear enough to read street signs. My fuel gauge has been dropping all night.
Six deliveries, forty-three dollars in tips, and a tank that’s about to run dry. At this rate, half my earnings will disappear into the gas pump.
The Marathon sign cuts through the white at McNichols and Hamilton.
My fingers tighten on the wheel because this is not where I want to stop.
This part of Detroit changes when the sun goes down, a shift you feel in your body before your brain catches up, and women alone at gas stations after midnight are an invitation that writes itself.
But my fuel light’s been blinking since three miles back, and the next station is farther than my tank can carry me.
The lot is busier than usual for this time of night. Three cars sit at the pumps, a few more near the entrance, people grinding through the night or stocking up before the storm buries us all. I’m not the only fool out here, and that should make me feel safer, but it doesn’t.
I pull up to pump four and kill the engine.
My purse is on the passenger seat, and I dig through receipts and gum wrappers until I find the bills.
Forty-three dollars in tips that took me all night to earn, plus whatever Uber deposits if they deposit tomorrow.
I peel off a twenty for gas and stuff the rest under my seat.
Not the smartest hiding spot, but better than carrying it all on me.
My pepper spray goes into my coat pocket, the hard canister settling against my palm as I wrap my fingers around it.
The cold hits the second I step out, finding every gap in my coat. My breath fogs and vanishes.
Two men stand near the air pump. They’re not filling tires.
One nudges the other as I cross the lot, and they both laugh, the sound carrying over the wind loud enough to lift the hair on my neck.
I keep my head down, shoulders pulled in, and walk toward the store.
Their attention follows me, and I pick up my pace without looking back.
“Aye, big money!”
I don’t turn. I push through the store entrance and head straight for the register. A man in a faded Lions hoodie stands behind the counter scrolling his phone. He barely looks up when I slap the twenty down.
“Pump four.”
He takes the bill, punches some buttons, goes back to his phone. No small talk. Just the transaction, and that’s fine by me. I want gas and gone.
When I step back outside, my heart drops into my stomach. The two men have moved. They’re standing next to my car now, and the bigger one has his hand on my door handle like it belongs to him.
“Hey!” The word comes out before I can think about whether yelling is smart.
They both turn. The big one grins at me, all teeth and nothing behind them.
He’s tall and wide through the shoulders, wearing an open parka that shows the pistol sitting on his hip.
Not hiding it. His partner is shorter but solid, coat zipped to his chin, fists in his pockets where I can’t see what he’s holding.
I hit the lock button on my key fob and my Lexus chirps twice.
“Damn, ma.” The big one holds up his hands like I’m the one out of line. “We was just looking. Nice whip you got.”
“Thanks.” I circle around to the pump, keeping the car between us. “I need to get my gas.”
“You need some help with that? Cold as hell out here.”
“I got it. And I got a boyfriend, so.”
The shorter one snorts. “Bullshit.”
My hand tightens on the pepper spray. I grab the pump handle and start the gas flowing, watching the numbers climb on the screen.
I track both of them from the corner of my eye, the big one drifting toward the back of my car while his partner moves to the front.
They’ve put themselves on opposite sides of me, and now I’m boxed between the pump and the Lexus with nowhere to go.
“Come on, ma,” the big one says, close enough now that cigarettes and weed roll off his breath. “What up doe. We just trying to be friendly.”
“I said I got it.”
“Yeah, I heard you.” Another step closer. “But see, my boy and me, we thinking maybe you can help us out. Nice car like this, you gotta have some cash on you.”
The lot is emptying around me. Other drivers pull away with their eyes locked forward, pretending they don’t see a damn thing. When I look toward the store, the clerk is walking to the door. He flips the lock and turns his back. That’s my answer. Nobody’s coming.
“Come on, y’all.” My voice cracks, and I hate it, but I push through. “Life’s been fucking me over left and right. Please. Just let me go. I’ll take my simple ass home and stay there.”
“Shut the fuck up and run me them keys.”
His hand rests on the pistol now. Not drawing it. Just letting me see.
“No.”
The word slips out before my brain can stop my mouth, stupid and reckless, but the electric bill is sitting on my counter at home with a three-day shut-off notice, and if they take my car I lose the only way I make money, which means I lose the apartment, which means I lose everything.
The last thread snaps and there’s nothing left to hold together.
The short one steps toward me and my body moves before my brain gives permission. The pepper spray comes out and I hit him square in the face. He screams, palms clapping over his eyes, stumbling backward into the pump.
“Fucking bitch!”
I spin to spray the big one but he’s already ahead of me, the pistol clearing the holster before I can aim. I freeze with the canister still raised, my finger still pressing the trigger even though it doesn’t matter anymore.
“Put that shit down.”
My arm drops. He shakes his head, almost disappointed.
“You dumb bitch. You got insurance. Just give up the car and walk away.”
“Please.” I look at my Lexus, then at the barrel pointed at my chest. “You take my car and I’m gonna end up homeless. This is all I got.”
“Bitch, I don’t give a shit about none of that. Give me the fucking keys or I’m gonna blow your fucking head off.”
I should hand them over. A car is not worth dying for. But I am so tired of being broke, of scraping and grinding and watching every single thing I build fall apart on me. The word comes out flat, hollow, emptied of everything except the truth of it.
“No.”
He racks the slide. The sound punches through the wind, metal on metal, close enough that I can feel the vibration.
“No? Bitch, are you stupid or something?”
“No.” I meet his eyes and find nothing in them. “I’m desperate.”
He starts toward me. I back up, keeping the gas pump between us, but he knocks it aside with one hand and it clatters across the concrete, fuel trickling out in a dark line.
I step over his partner, moaning and clawing at his face, and put my palm on the car, feeling for the passenger door without breaking eye contact with the gun.
“Give me the fucking keys.” He’s close now.”Don’t make me do this.”
I raise the pepper spray one more time. One last bluff that we both know is empty.
“Fuck it.” He lifts the pistol and points it at my head. “I tried. You’re just too stupid to want to live.”
I close my eyes. The shot doesn’t come. I’m standing, breathing, bracing for a bullet that never arrives.
When I open my eyes, the gun is on the pavement and the man is in the air. His feet kick at nothing, his hands claw at whatever has him by the back of his neck. Someone is holding him up with one arm like he’s made of paper.
I bend down and grab the pistol. I’ve never held a gun before and have no idea if the safety is on, but I’m not leaving it on the ground. My gaze follows the arm up to bare feet, human feet planted in the snow on concrete that would give a normal person frostbite in minutes.
Then I hear it. Low at first, building from somewhere deep, a sound that rattles my teeth and hums through my ribcage like bass from a speaker turned past what the housing can handle.
A cackle. Not human, not anything close to human.
It reminds me of the hyenas on those National Geographic documentaries I watch when sleep won’t come, except louder and deeper and wrong enough to lock every muscle in my body before I can tell it to run.
The man in the air goes rigid. His mouth opens and nothing comes out. His body jerks once and then goes limp, and the stranger drops him. He hits the ground still breathing but frozen, blank eyes aimed at the sky.
His partner is the same. Flat on his back, mouth slack, motionless. I nudge him with my boot and get nothing. No blink, no flinch. Whatever that sound was, it shut both of them down like a switch got flipped.
I look up at the man who did it, and the sight of him stops me where I stand.
He’s massive. Six-five, maybe six-six, with shoulders that block out the streetlight behind him.
He’s wearing a sleeveless shirt in the middle of a blizzard, gray fabric stretched across a chest and arms covered in tattoos and heavy muscle.
Snow lands on his dark skin and melts on contact, steam curling off him into the night air like his body runs on a furnace the weather can’t touch.
His eyes are glowing. Amber, bright enough to throw light on the snowflakes falling. He’s locked on me, and I can’t make myself look away.
My brain is telling me to scream, to run, that this man is more dangerous than the two laid out on the pavement by a factor I can’t calculate. But my feet won’t move away from him. My body wants to step closer, and I don’t have a single explanation for why.
He walks toward me and steps over the man he dropped. I hear a croak as his weight presses into the guy’s chest. I should be backing away. But I can’t bring myself to move.
Heat rolls off him in waves that I can feel from three feet away, pushing back the cold, warming my numb fingers without him laying a hand on me.
“You are so warm,” I hear myself say, and I have no idea where the words came from.
He stares at me. Not at my body. At my face, into my eyes, past them, searching for something I can’t name with an intensity that makes me forget there are two paralyzed men at our feet and a gun in my hand.
“It is my Bouda,” he says. His voice is deep, carrying an accent I can’t place. “We do not like the cold.”
“Huh?”
“Are you hurt?” He asks me.
Before I can answer, the store door slams open. The clerk is standing there with a rifle pointed at the stranger.
“You disgusting fucking shifter!” He charges the weapon. “You’re not ruining my store!”
The stranger goes still. His gaze moves from me to the rifle, and his whole face changes.
“Poachers,” he says.
“Poachers?” That doesn’t make sense. The store owner isn’t a poacher.
He’s some ignorant radical with a gun and too much hate in his mouth.
But he called the stranger a shifter, which means he is one.
After what I just saw, that tracks. Normal people don’t cackle and shut down two grown men with sound.
Normal people don’t stand barefoot in a blizzard with steam pouring off their skin.
The owner raises the rifle. The stranger moves.
He’s around me before I can blink, crouching low, and his hands close around the undercarriage of my Lexus.
“Oh no, wait!” I grab for his arm but I’m too late. “What the hell are you doing?”
He lifts my car off the ground like it’s nothing. The muscles in his arms flex hard, veins standing out against the tattoos, and he straightens up with my entire vehicle over his head. Then he throws it.
I scream as my Lexus sails through the air.
The owner fires but the shot goes wide, and the car slams into him and keeps going, crashing through the glass storefront in an explosion of metal and brick and fluorescent light.
I stand there with my mouth open. My car is gone, half buried in the gas station.
I turn to the stranger. He’s looking at me with a face I can’t read, almost innocent, genuinely confused about why I’m upset.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“He was going to hurt you.” He says it like that explains everything, like throwing a car through a building is a perfectly reasonable response to a man with a rifle. “You are my new queen.”
Then he drops to one knee in the snow and bows his head.
I stare at the top of his head, at the steam rising off his shoulders, at the two frozen men on the ground, at the wreckage of my car sticking out of the gas station like a battering ram punched through the front wall.
“Fuck this.”
I turn and run. My boots slip on the ice but I keep going, arms pumping, putting as much distance between me and this man as the night will give me.
I should’ve kept my Black ass at home tonight. Should’ve stayed in bed, let the power get cut off, eaten cold spaghetti in the dark. Anything would have been better than this. I am so done with all of it.