Chapter 4
Nicole had the Chevy's transmission spread across bay one like an autopsy when the front door opened.
Not the customer entrance—the bay door, the big one she'd left cracked for airflow because the shop's ventilation had died three summers ago and Earl had never gotten around to fixing it.
She heard the rattle of the chain she'd threaded through the tracks, the one she'd bought in a panic two nights ago, snapping like it was made of paper.
She looked up.
Dominic Walsh stood in the bay opening with four men behind him, and his broken smile was gone. Whatever patience Anthony Morello had been extending, it had expired ahead of schedule.
"Friday's not for two more days," Nicole said, and she hated that her voice came out steady because it meant the fear had nowhere to go.
"Mr. Morello revised the timeline." Dominic walked in, and the four men spread behind him—two angling left toward the office, two moving right toward the back door, cutting off the exits with the practiced ease of men who'd done this before.
"Seems somebody's been talking to motorcycle clubs about our business. "
Her stomach dropped.
"Yeah." Dominic read her face. "We know about your new friend. The quiet one with the knife collection. Mr. Morello doesn't appreciate third parties getting involved in private negotiations."
"This isn't a negotiation. You're threatening to kill me."
"Tomato, tomahto." He cracked his knuckles.
"Here's how tonight goes, Nicole. You sign the papers I brought, and we all go home happy.
You don't sign, and my boys wreck every piece of equipment in this shop.
Then we wreck you. Then we take the shop anyway.
" He pulled a folded document from inside his jacket and set it on the parts counter. "Simple math."
Nicole's hand drifted toward the bat.
"Don't," Dominic said, almost gentle. "That didn't work out for you last time."
She was calculating—distance to the back door, whether she could clear the sedan on the lift, whether the fire extinguisher mounted on the wall between bays two and three could buy her thirty seconds.
All of it was useless. Five men, one exit they hadn't covered, and her with a Louisville Slugger and a fire extinguisher against a crew that had been doing this since before she was born.
Then the side door opened.
Not burst. Not kicked. Just opened—the knob turning without a sound, the hinges moving like they'd been oiled that afternoon, a gap appearing in the wall that Nicole hadn't even been looking at because nobody used the side door.
It opened onto a narrow alley between her building and the abandoned laundromat next door, and she kept it padlocked from the inside.
The padlock was gone.
Shiv came through first, and the word that would stay with her afterward was smoke.
He didn't enter a room—he materialized in it, already inside before the movement registered, already past the threshold while her brain was still processing the door being open.
Two men followed him, both wearing Outlaws cuts, both big enough to fill the alley they'd come from, and they moved with the quiet urgency of men who'd been waiting for exactly this moment.
The closest of Morello's men—the one who'd been angling toward the back door—turned at a sound he shouldn't have been able to hear. He had time to open his mouth. That was all.
Shiv hit him low and silent, the blade flashing once in the fluorescent light, and the man folded without a word.
The second one reached for his waistband and one of the brothers caught his arm, twisted, and drove him into the concrete floor with a sound like a sack of tools hitting the deck.
The third pulled a gun and Shiv was already there—inside the man's reach before the barrel came up, close enough that the fight was over before it was a fight, the gun clattering across the floor and the man following it down.
It took eight seconds. Maybe less. Nicole stood frozen with the bat in her hand and watched three men dismantle four with the kind of speed that turned violence into something almost abstract—not the ugly, personal thing Dominic had done to her two nights ago, but something precise and intentional and finished before the fear could fully arrive.
Dominic ran.
He was smarter than his men, or at least faster to read the odds, and he was through the bay door and sprinting for the street before the last of his crew hit the ground. One of the brothers started after him, but Shiv held up a hand—a single gesture, unhurried, that stopped the pursuit dead.
"Not yet," Shiv said quietly.
He turned to Nicole.
In the fluorescent glare of her own shop, with three men on the floor and the smell of blood cutting through the grease and motor oil, he looked exactly the way he had that morning in the folding chair—still, patient, eyes tracking her face with an attention that made everything else in the room disappear.
The blade was gone. She hadn't seen him put it away.
His hands hung at his sides, empty, and there wasn't a mark on him.
"You okay?" Low. Almost soft.
She realized she was shaking. Not her hands—her whole body, a tremor that started in her knees and radiated upward, the adrenaline dump hitting all at once now that the danger had passed. She gripped the bat tighter to keep it from showing.
"I'm fine."
"You're not."
"Then stop asking and tell me what happens now."
Something moved behind his eyes—not a smile, but the recognition of something he hadn't expected. The brothers were already working behind him, zip-tying wrists, checking pulses, hauling bodies out of the bay with the efficiency of men who'd cleaned up worse.
"You come with me," Shiv said.
"I'm not leaving my shop."
"They'll be back. Morello knows you've got club protection now. That means he escalates. Next time it won't be five men—it'll be ten, and they won't bother talking first."
She looked around the shop—Earl's shop, her shop, the three bays and the cracked concrete and the hand-painted sign.
The sedan on the lift with its transmission in pieces.
The coffee going cold on her desk for the third time today.
Everything she'd fought to keep, and all of it worthless if she was dead.
"Where?" she asked.
"Somewhere they won't find you."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got right now."
She should argue. Every stubborn instinct she'd inherited from Earl and sharpened on her own told her to dig in, hold her ground, refuse to be run out of the place she'd bled for.
But she'd watched what Shiv did to three men in eight seconds, and the calculus was simple: the man with the blade was offering to stand between her and the people who wanted her dead. The alternative was the baseball bat.
Nicole set the bat on the workbench. "I need five minutes."
"You've got three."
She took four, because she wasn't going to let him think she followed orders.
Upstairs to the apartment for a duffel bag—clothes, phone charger, the framed photo of Earl standing in front of the shop on opening day, 1993, grinning like he'd just won something nobody could take from him.
Toiletries. The lockbox with six hundred dollars in emergency cash that she kept under the bathroom sink because Earl had never trusted banks.
When she came back down, the shop was clean.
No bodies, no blood, nothing but the faint copper smell mixing with motor oil to suggest that anything had happened at all.
The two brothers were gone. Shiv stood by the bay door, and his bike was already idling at the curb—a low, steady rumble that she felt in her chest.
"What about the sedan?" she asked, because it mattered, because Mrs. Horvath needed her car back by Thursday and Nicole had never missed a deadline.
"It'll keep."
"My customers—"
"Nicole." Her name in his mouth was something she hadn't expected—quiet, deliberate, like he'd thought about the shape of it before he said it. "The shop will be here tomorrow. You need to not be in it tonight."
She slung the duffel over her shoulder and followed him to the bike.
He took the bag from her without asking—just lifted it off her shoulder and strapped it to the sissy bar with a bungee cord that appeared from somewhere inside his cut.
His fingers brushed her arm in the process, brief and warm, and the touch sent something through her that had nothing to do with fear.
"You ever ridden?" he asked.
"Once. In college. A guy with a Yamaha who thought owning a motorcycle made him interesting."
"Did it?"
"He dropped it in a parking lot and cried."
The corner of Shiv's mouth twitched. He swung onto the bike and held out his hand—not commanding, not demanding, just there, palm up, an offer she could take or leave.
She took it.
His hand closed around hers and he pulled her on behind him, and the bike dipped with her weight and settled. He was warm through his cut and the T-shirt beneath it, and when he spoke she felt the words in his back more than she heard them.
"Hold on. Don't lean into turns—lean with me."
"I know how physics works."
"Then you'll be fine."
She wrapped her arms around his waist because there was nowhere else to put them, and the contact was immediate and total—her chest against his back, her thighs bracketing his, her hands flat against a stomach that felt like body armor wrapped in cotton.
He smelled like leather and steel and something underneath both that she couldn't name, and her pulse was doing things that had nothing to do with the men who'd been in her shop five minutes ago.
The bike surged forward, and the Mon Valley fell away behind them.
Nicole pressed her face against his back and held on, watching the streetlights strobe past, feeling the engine's vibration climb through her bones.
She didn't know where they were going. Didn't know this man beyond a road name and a set of hands that could take a life without making a sound.
Didn't know what she'd traded her baseball bat and her stubborn independence for.
But his body was solid against hers, and the night air was cold on her bare arms, and somewhere between the fear and the adrenaline and the warmth radiating through his leather, Nicole realized she wasn't shaking anymore.