CHAPTER 1
Selene
The heater in my car died somewhere around Kessler Street, which means I've been driving through freezing rain for the last four blocks with my knuckles white on the wheel and my breath fogging up the windshield faster than the defroster can clear it.
Mia's asleep in the back, or she was, until the engine gave a wet, rattling cough and the dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree of things I can't afford to fix.
"Mama?" Her voice is thick with sleep, muffled by the hood of her puffer coat. "Are we home?"
"Almost, baby." I'm not sure that's true. I'm not sure of anything except that my hands are shaking and it isn't only from the cold.
Six years of waitressing has taught me to read a room in under three seconds — who's about to complain, who's about to stiff the tip, who's had one too many and needs to be steered gently toward the door before it becomes a problem.
It hasn't taught me anything about reading engines.
The car gives one more shudder, a sound like something deep in its chest giving up, and then it just — stops.
Rolls to a dead, gliding halt in the middle of Main Street, rain drumming on the roof like a thousand small fists.
"Mama, it's dark."
"I know, sweetheart. Give me one second."
I twist the key. Nothing. Not even the click-click-click of a battery trying and failing — just silence, and the tick of rain, and my own pulse loud in my ears. Behind me, headlights swing wide around my car, a horn blares, and I flinch so hard my shoulder cracks against the door.
Get it together, Selene.
I've survived worse than a dead battery on a Tuesday night. I remind myself of that fact the way I remind myself of it most days — like a mantra, like scripture. I survived worse. I can survive a broken-down sedan four blocks from the only home I've built in two years.
I twist around in my seat to check on Mia, and that's when I see the harness.
The plastic buckle on her car seat — the cheap one I bought secondhand from a yard sale in Spokane because it was thirty dollars and thirty dollars was what I had — has cracked clean through.
A jagged white line running the length of the clasp, right where the two halves used to lock together.
It must have happened when I hit that pothole outside the diner. I didn't even feel it.
My stomach drops somewhere down around my frozen feet.
"Mia, honey, don't move, okay? Stay real still for Mama."
"Why?"
"Because your buckle broke and I need to fix it before you can get out."
She goes quiet in the way she does when she's decided to be brave for me instead of the other way around, which breaks something in my chest every single time.
Four years old and she already knows how to read a crisis.
She shouldn't know how to do that. That's on me, and I hate it, and there's no time to sit with the hating right now because rain is coming down harder and the temperature gauge on my phone says twenty-eight degrees and dropping.
I climb out into the storm. My sneakers — the good ones, the ones without the hole yet — hit a puddle instantly and soak through to my socks.
I'm still in my diner uniform, the polyester dress that never quite keeps the cold out, my apron shoved into my bag along with eleven dollars in tips and the smell of fry grease baked into my hair.
I round the car, wrench open the back door, and crouch down to look at the harness up close.
It's not fixable. Not with what I have — no tools, no tape, nothing but a hair elastic and a granola bar wrapper in my coat pocket.
I could carry her, I think. Just unclip what's left of the buckle and carry her the four blocks home, rain be damned.
But the thought no sooner forms than dies, because the street around us is dark — most of the shops closed for the night, streetlights spaced too far apart, the kind of empty that used to be background noise to me back when I lived in a gated community with an alarm system and a husband who insisted on cameras at every door.
He said it was for my safety.
I don't let myself finish that thought. Not here, not now, not with my daughter strapped into a broken car seat in the middle of a storm.
Then I see it — light, warm and yellow, spilling out from a garage a half a block down.
A neon sign buzzes over the open bay door: IRON VIPERS CUSTOM GARAGE, the V styled like a coiled snake.
I've passed it a hundred times on my walk to work, always crossed to the other side of the street when I did.
Everyone in Oakhaven knows what that sign means.
Motorcycle club. Men in leather cuts who fix engines during the day and do God-knows-what after dark.
Not the kind of place a woman traveling alone walks into voluntarily.
But the alternative is standing on a dead street with a broken car seat and a four-year-old, and pride has never once kept my daughter warm.
"Okay," I say, mostly to myself. "Okay, we're going to go get help."
I unclip the harness as gently as I can, holding the two cracked halves together with my thumb, and lift Mia out into my arms. She's getting too big for this — four going on five, all long legs and stubborn opinions — but tonight she folds into me like she's much smaller, face tucked against my neck, and I hold her weight like it's the only thing keeping me upright.
The half-block to the garage feels like a mile.
Rain needles the back of my neck. My arms burn.
By the time I reach the open bay, I'm breathing hard, and the warmth that rolls out to meet me is almost dizzying after the cold — thick with the smell of motor oil and rubber and hot metal, undercut by the bitter dark note of coffee left too long on a burner.
The garage is bigger than it looks from the street.
Two vehicles up on lifts, a wall of tools organized with more precision than I expected, string lights crossing the ceiling like something out of a dive bar.
Classic rock plays low from a speaker somewhere.
And beneath the nearest car, only a pair of boots and denim-clad legs visible, someone's working.
"Hello?" My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "I'm sorry to bother you — my car died out front, and my daughter's car seat is broken, and I —"
The creeper board rolls out from under the car.
He sits up in one smooth motion, and every rehearsed sentence I had dies in my throat.
He's bigger than I remember. Broader through the shoulders, arms roped with muscle under a gray Henley pushed up to the elbow, forearms streaked with grease and ink — a viper coiled around his left wrist, other pieces I don't recognize climbing higher.
His jaw is shadowed with a few days' stubble, sharper now than it used to be, like the boy I knew got sanded down to something harder.
There's a scar through one dark eyebrow that wasn't there twelve years ago.
His eyes are the same, though. That's the part that guts me.
Same near-black brown, same unhurried way of looking at a person like he's already decided everything about you and is simply waiting for you to catch up.
Damon Sterling.
I haven't said that name out loud in over a decade.
I haven't let myself think it in almost as long, not really, not past the two-in-the-morning moments I can't fully control.
And here he is, sitting on a mechanic's creeper in a garage that reeks of oil and leather, looking at me like I'm the ghost and not the other way around.
"Selene." My name in his mouth lands like a hand pressed flat against my sternum.
Low. Rough. Unhurried, same as his eyes.
He gets to his feet — and God, he's tall , taller than he was at eighteen, filled out in a way that makes the small garage feel smaller — and wipes his hands down a shop rag hanging from his back pocket, slow, deliberate, never once looking away from me. "You're a long way from home."
I don't know what I expected. Some part of me — the part that spent months after he vanished writing him letters I never sent, rehearsing what I'd say if I ever saw him again — thought maybe I'd have the upper hand.
Thought I'd be cool, unbothered, a woman who built a life without him and didn't need him to see the wreckage it took to build it.
Instead I'm standing in a puddle of rainwater with a soaked child in my arms and my heart slamming so hard against my ribs I'm sure he can hear it.
"Damon." His name feels foreign and familiar at once, like a language I used to speak fluently and haven't touched in years. "I didn't — I didn't know you were back."
Something moves behind his eyes, quick and unreadable, gone before I can name it.
"Never left the county." His gaze drops to Mia, who's lifted her head off my shoulder to study him with the frank, fearless curiosity only very small children and very old dogs seem to possess, and something in his expression shifts again — softens, just slightly, at the edges, like a man setting down something heavy. "This your girl?"
"This is Mia." I hold her a little tighter, an instinct I don't examine too closely.
"My daughter. Damon, I'm sorry to just walk in here, I know this is — I wouldn't have, but my car's dead in the middle of Main and her car seat buckle snapped and it's twenty-eight degrees out there and I didn't know where else —"
"Selene." He says my name again, quieter this time, cutting through my rambling like he used to, back when I was seventeen and spiraling about a test grade and he'd just say my name once, flat and certain, and somehow the whole world would slow down enough for me to breathe. "Where's the car."
"Out front. It just — it died. No warning."