Chapter 21
The garage was ugly. Nicole loved it immediately.
It sat on a corner lot three blocks east of where Brandt's Auto & Mechanical had stood for thirty-one years—a squat cinder-block building with four roll-up bay doors, a flat roof that probably leaked, and a parking lot full of weeds pushing through cracked asphalt.
The hand-lettered sign above the office door read KOVAC'S TRANSMISSION, but Kovac had retired to Myrtle Beach two months ago and left the building to a nephew who'd listed it at a price that was either optimistic or delusional, depending on your perspective.
Nicole walked the bays while Shiv stood in the parking lot doing whatever Shiv did when he went quiet, which was most of the time.
She was measuring bay two's floor drain when Shiv appeared in the doorway.
"The office window faces the street," he said. "You can see the parking lot from the counter."
"Okay."
"Back door opens onto the alley. The alley runs east to the cross street—one way out, sixty feet, no obstructions."
"You're doing it again."
"Doing what?"
"The sightlines thing." She stood and wiped her hands on her jeans, smiling at him. "I'm looking at drain placement and lift capacity. You're planning escape routes."
His expression didn't change, but something in his posture shifted—the faintest suggestion of self-awareness, a man caught doing the thing he couldn't stop doing. "The back door should lock from inside. Deadbolt, not just the knob lock."
"Agreed."
"And the bay doors need interior releases that can't be forced from outside."
"Also agreed."
"And the office should have—"
"A panic button that calls you directly?"
He looked at her. "I was going to say a reinforced door frame."
"That too." She crossed the bay and stopped in front of him, close enough to see the flecks of gray in his eyes that only showed in direct light. "You're planning my security before I've even made an offer."
"Someone should."
"Someone is. That's not a complaint. It's an observation." She put her hand on his chest. "You know what I see when I look at this place?"
"Four bays, decent electrical, bad drainage in bay three."
"I see Earl. I see him walking through here and checking the ceiling height and testing the floor with his boot and saying, 'This'll do, Nicky. This'll do just fine.'" She paused. "He called me Nicky. Nobody else ever has."
Shiv covered her hand with his. The scarred palm against her knuckles, warm and steady.
"It'll do," he said.
She made the call to the nephew from the parking lot, standing next to Shiv's bike in the mid-morning sun, negotiating a price that was fifteen percent below asking because the nephew wanted Myrtle Beach money and Nicole wanted a fair deal and she was better at negotiating than he was.
They agreed on a number. She'd have the paperwork by Friday.
When she hung up, Shiv was already on the bike.
"Where to?" she asked.
"Hungry?"
"Starving."
"I know a place."
He took her to the Strip District, riding across the Birmingham Bridge and through the South Side and up along the river, the route winding through neighborhoods she was starting to know from the back of his bike.
The Strip was loud and bright in the late morning—vendors selling produce from truck beds, the fish market's smell cutting through the exhaust, tourists wandering between the shops and the locals moving through them with the efficient purpose of people who had actual groceries to buy.
Shiv parked on a side street and walked her to a cheesesteak place wedged between a spice shop and a storefront church.
The counter was barely four feet wide. The menu was written on a whiteboard in handwriting that suggested the cook had better things to do than make letters pretty.
Two stools, no table, a window overlooking the street.
"How'd you find this place?" Nicole asked, settling onto a stool while Shiv ordered for both of them—cheesesteaks with peppers, no onions, because he'd learned she hated onions the way he'd learned everything about her, through quiet observation and a memory that missed nothing.
"Parkway," he said. "Knows every block in the city."
"And you trust his taste in food?"
"I trust his taste in roads. The food is a bonus."
The cheesesteaks arrived in wax paper, and they were exactly as good as the nothing-special exterior suggested—hot, greasy, the meat thin-sliced and the cheese the kind that came from a can and didn't apologize for it.
Nicole ate hers in four minutes. Shiv ate his at his usual unhurried pace, which meant she finished first and spent the remaining time stealing his peppers.
"Those are mine," he said.
"Everything in this relationship is shared. You told me that."
"I told you the club shares resources. I didn't say anything about peppers."
She stole another one. He let her, which was its own kind of declaration.
They sat at the counter with the window open and the Strip's noise drifting in—the fish market guy arguing with a customer, a delivery truck backing up with its warning beeping, someone playing a saxophone badly on the corner.
Normal sounds. City sounds. The soundtrack of a place that kept running regardless of what happened in its shadows.
"I used to come here with Earl," Nicole said.
"Not this place specifically, but the Strip.
Every Saturday morning. He'd buy produce and I'd eat samples from the olive oil place until they kicked me out.
" She smiled at the window. "He'd carry four bags of groceries and never once let me help, even when I got big enough to carry two of them myself. "
"Sounds stubborn."
"Family trait."
Shiv finished his cheesesteak, balled up the wax paper, and dropped it in the trash with a precision that would have been funny if she hadn't learned that precision was just how he moved through the world. Everything intentional. Everything placed.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Take the long way."
He took the long way.
They rode south through the city, crossing the river on the Tenth Street Bridge and winding through the back streets of the South Side before dropping into the Valley on routes Nicole knew by heart.
Past her old block, where the rubble of Brandt's Auto & Mechanical had been cleared by a demolition crew and the lot sat empty, raw dirt and a chain-link fence and nothing where everything used to be.
She didn't ask him to stop. She looked as they passed, and the grief was there—it would always be there, the way a scar is always there after the wound heals—but it didn't knock the wind out of her the way it had the night of the fire. The lot was empty. She was not.
They rode past the shell of Ferrante's. The restaurant had been shuttered, the windows boarded, yellow police tape sagging across the entrance.
Someone had spray-painted REST IN PISS on the plywood, which Nicole figured was the Valley's version of a eulogy.
The neighboring businesses looked different in the daylight—doors open, lights on, people moving on sidewalks they'd been avoiding for years.
The laundromat on Third Avenue was closed for real this time—no midnight cars, no phantom customers, just a dark storefront with a FOR LEASE sign in the window.
The bodega on Walnut had a new owner already, a woman in an apron sweeping the sidewalk, who waved at them as they passed like bikers rolling through her neighborhood was the most normal thing in the world.
The Valley was breathing again. Nicole could feel it—the subtle shift in a neighborhood's energy when the thing that was choking it lets go. People on porches. Kids on bikes. A woman walking a dog on a street she wouldn't have walked alone a month ago.
They circled back toward Pittsburgh, and the ride was easy—no tail to shake, no threats to watch for, just the road and the engine and Shiv's back solid against her chest and the wind pulling at her hair.
She rested her chin on his shoulder and watched the city pass and felt something she hadn't felt since before Earl died.
Home. Not a place—a direction. Wherever this man was going, that's where home was.
They pulled into the compound at dusk. Shiv parked and she climbed off, and they walked through the courtyard side by side, his hand finding her hip without thought, the possessive touch so natural now that its absence would have felt stranger than its presence.
In the garage bay, he pulled a folding chair next to her workbench and sat while she organized her tools—the borrowed set she'd been using, supplemented by wrenches and sockets the brothers had contributed from their own collections, the beginning of a new toolkit to replace the one she'd lost.
"The new place," Shiv said. "The approaches from the east are exposed. I'd want cameras on the alley and the cross street."
"Okay."
"Bay doors should have interior deadbolts. Not the standard latch—the kind that can't be pried."
"You mentioned that."
"And I'd want to check the roof access. If there's a hatch, it needs a lock."
Nicole set down a socket wrench and looked at him.
He sat in the folding chair with his arms crossed and his face serious and his eyes already mapping a building she hadn't signed papers on yet, planning how to keep her safe in a garage she hadn't opened, making her world secure without being asked because that was his language.
Other men brought flowers. Other men made speeches.
Shiv brought deadbolts and camera angles and the quiet promise that nothing would ever reach her without going through him first.
"You're ridiculous," she said.
"I'm thorough."
"You're planning security for a building I don't own yet because you can't help it, and that's the most romantic thing anyone's ever done for me, and I need you to understand how strange that is."
His mouth twitched. "Strange how?"
She leaned down and kissed him—quick, firm, a punctuation mark on something she didn't need more words for.
"Come help me sort these wrenches," she said. "And tell me more about the cameras."