Chapter 2
Three days since Hollow had sat at her counter and asked what was wrong.
Three days of pretending the answer was nothing while her brother's phone went straight to voicemail and the bruise on her own wrist—where Jimmy had grabbed her too hard, desperate, begging her not to call anyone—faded from purple to green.
She pushed off the glass and started closing down. Grill off, fryer drained, coffee dumped. The routine was muscle memory, her body moving through steps her mother had taught her twenty years ago while her mind chewed on the same problem it had been chewing on for weeks.
Jimmy was in trouble. Real trouble. The kind that didn't get fixed with a lecture and a hug.
She was wiping down the counter when the back door banged open.
Debbie grabbed the nearest heavy object—a ceramic coffee mug, not exactly a weapon but better than nothing—and spun toward the kitchen.
Jimmy came through the doorway like something had thrown him, stumbling, one hand on the wall to keep himself upright.
His left eye was swollen shut, fresh and angry, blood smeared across his mouth and down the front of his shirt.
He was shaking so hard his teeth chattered.
"Jimmy—"
"Don't call anyone." He could barely get the words out. "Deb, please, don't call anyone."
She dropped the mug and caught him before he hit the floor, guiding him onto the stool behind the register where she usually sat during slow stretches.
He weighed nothing—twenty-four years old and skinny as a rail, all nervous energy and bad decisions, the kid she'd been trying to keep alive since their dad died.
"What happened?" She was already wetting a clean rag, pressing it to his eye with hands that wanted to shake but didn't. Not yet. "Jimmy, what happened to your face?"
"I tried to quit." He said it like a confession. "I told Sykes I was done, I didn't want to boost cars anymore, I just wanted out."
The name landed in her stomach like a stone. Terrence Sykes. She'd heard it three times in the last month, each time from Jimmy's mouth, each time with more fear behind it.
"He had Ray hold me down." Jimmy's voice cracked. "Ray hit me until I stopped talking, and then Sykes leaned in real close and said if I ran again, he wouldn't come after me."
Debbie's hand stilled on the rag. "What does that mean?"
Jimmy looked at her with his one good eye, and what she saw there made her blood go cold.
"It means he'd come after you, Deb."
The diner was quiet. The hum of the walk-in cooler in the back, the tick of the clock above the register, the buzz of the neon OPEN sign she'd forgotten to kill.
Sounds she'd been hearing her whole life, the soundtrack of the place her parents had built from nothing, and right now they sounded like they were coming from very far away.
"Tell me everything," she said.
He told her. Six months ago, Jimmy had started running with guys from the neighborhood—nothing serious, or so he'd said.
Turns out nothing serious meant boosting cars for a chop shop operation run out of the Mon Valley.
Sykes recruited young guys with easy money and big promises, and by the time Jimmy realized what he'd gotten into, he was in too deep.
Debt he couldn't pay. Jobs he couldn't refuse.
And now a trap he couldn't escape, because the man holding the leash had made it clear—the price of leaving was Debbie.
She listened to all of it with the rag pressed to his eye and her jaw locked tight enough to ache.
Every word was a new weight on a back that had been carrying too much for too long.
Their dad gone when she was twenty-two. Their mom's medical bills eating through the diner's savings.
Jimmy bouncing between jobs, between apartments, between bad choices, and Debbie always there to catch him because that's what you did.
You caught them. You held on. You figured it out.
But this wasn't a bounced check or a lost apartment. This was a man who hurt her brother and threatened to hurt her, and she had no idea how to fix it.
"Okay." She pulled the rag away, examined his eye. Swollen but not split—he'd heal. The blood on his shirt was from a cut lip, already clotting. "Okay. You're staying here tonight."
"Deb, you can't—"
"Back office. There's a couch. You're staying here, and we're going to figure this out in the morning."
"There's nothing to figure out." Jimmy's voice was small. Beaten down in more ways than the bruises showed. "I can't leave. If I leave, he hurts you. If I stay, I keep stealing until I get caught or killed. There's no way out."
"There's always a way out."
"Not from this."
She took his face in her hands, careful around the swelling, and made him look at her. "I have been pulling you out of trouble since you were twelve years old, James Nowak. You think I'm going to stop now because some grease monkey with a chop shop thinks he's scary?"
Something shifted in his expression—not hope, not quite, but the memory of what hope felt like. She held onto that and steered him toward the back office, settling him on the couch with a blanket and a bag of frozen peas for his eye.
"Sleep," she told him. "I'll be out front."
"You're not going to call the cops?"
"And tell them what? My brother got beat up by the criminals he was committing crimes with?
" She softened her voice, because the look on his face was the same one he'd worn at their father's funeral—lost, scared, looking to her for answers she didn't have.
"No cops. We'll figure something else out. "
He was asleep within minutes, the exhaustion and the fear pulling him under like a current. She stood in the office doorway and watched his chest rise and fall, the frozen peas sliding off his face, and felt the first crack in the wall she'd been holding up for three days.
Her hands started shaking.
She went back out front and poured coffee she didn't want into a mug she'd have to wash again.
The clock said 2:30. The diner was supposed to stay open—twenty-four hours, that was the deal, had been since her parents hung the sign—but she'd locked the door and couldn't make herself unlock it. Not tonight.
She sat on the stool behind the register and wrapped both hands around the mug and let herself feel it.
The fear. Not for herself—she'd been handling hard men since she was sixteen, drunks who grabbed and assholes who threatened and every other variety of tough guy who thought a diner waitress was an easy target. She'd handled them all.
But Sykes wasn't a drunk with wandering hands. Sykes was a man who'd beaten her brother bloody and promised to do worse to her, and she had no leverage, no protection, and no plan.
She thought about Hollow.
The thought came uninvited, the way he always did—pushing through the door with that grin, dropping onto his stool like he'd bought and paid for it, calling her meatloaf a sin while his eyes tracked every corner of the room.
She'd known what he was from the first time he walked in wearing that patch.
Dangerous. The kind of man who settled arguments with his fists and didn't lose sleep over it.
But he'd also left a forty on a twelve-dollar tab and told her I'm here, you know that, and his eyes had been soft when he said it. Soft in a way that didn't match the scars on his neck or the size of his hands.
She couldn't call him. Couldn't drag a motorcycle club into her mess, couldn't owe that kind of debt, couldn't put Jimmy deeper into a world of men who solved problems with violence. That was how Jimmy had gotten into this in the first place—falling in with hard men who used him up.
But the thought stayed, stubborn as the man himself.
A car pulled into the parking lot, headlights sweeping across the front windows, and Debbie's whole body went rigid.
She watched the car idle for ten seconds, twenty, the lights cutting through the diner's dark interior, illuminating empty booths and the pie case and her white knuckles on the coffee mug.
Then the car pulled away, and she let out a breath that hurt coming out.
She sat there until four AM, watching the parking lot, listening to her brother breathe in the back office, and trying to figure out how to fight a war she couldn't win.
The coffee went cold in her hands. She didn't notice.