Chapter 7 No Pity
Shane POV
The tie rod was bent before Liza touched it.
She came down from the mountain with the look people get after a good shift, tired and awake at the same time. I caught her in the lodge yard when she parked the truck and brought her over to the garage because I’d promised her coffee that morning.
“Tour’s canceled,” I said when she reached the bay doors. “Wind’s too high above the tree line, and I’ve got two machines down with steering problems. Come see where the real work happens.”
She looked past me into the garage. Fluorescent light, oil-stained concrete, six snowmobiles in various states of disassembly, and a handful of West Valley wolves finishing their day.
The space smelled like two-stroke exhaust and wet wool and the coffee I kept going on a hot plate in the back office.
Gloves hung from bungee cords strung across the ceiling, dripping snowmelt onto newspaper spread on the floor.
“This is where you run tours from?” she asked.
“This is where I fix the machines that run tours. The tours happen on the mountain.”
She almost smiled. I was counting.
Inside, I introduced her the way I’d planned. “This is Liza.” That was it. No story, no context, no mention of East Valley or the rejected mate bond.
The others looked up from what they were doing.
Abe Hessler, who handled fleet maintenance, nodded from behind a carburetor he was rebuilding.
Two younger wolves glanced at her patrol gear and went back to the track tensioner they were fighting with.
Trish, who ran the rental desk at the base lodge and often stopped by to argue with Abe about fuel mixtures, said hi.
It was ordinary, exactly what Liza needed and would never ask for.
Then Abe, because Abe had a good heart and no sense of timing, set down his wrench and said, “Heard you came over from East Valley. That’s rough, what happened over there. If you need anything—”
Liza’s shoulders tightened only a little. I caught it.
“Hey, Mallory,” I said, loud enough to cut across the garage. “Can you tell a bent tie rod from a bad bearing?”
She turned to me. The tension in her jaw eased by a fraction. “Depends on the machine.”
“Patrol sled. Pulls left under load, and the guys keep telling me it’s the track alignment, but I think the steering’s fucked.”
She crossed the garage floor like she belonged there, which was the whole point. Abe took the hint and went back to his carburetor. The room settled around work again. I was glad the diversion had landed.
? ? ?
Liza knew engines.
She hadn’t learned by memorizing manuals and torque specs. She had the practical knowledge of a patroller who’d fixed things in the cold, with frozen fingers, bad light, and someone on the radio asking how much longer.
We pulled the front cowling off the patrol sled and she found the problem before I did. The right tie rod was bent inward, a clean deformation about three inches from the ball joint, and every time the suspension compressed, it toed the right ski in and dragged the sled left.
“There,” she said, pointing. “See where it’s bowed? That’s not wear. Someone hit something.”
I leaned in. She was right. “Goddamn it. That’s the sled Rick took out last week. He said he clipped a stump.”
“He clipped more than a stump.” She ran her thumb along the bend. “You’ve got play in the ball joint too. The whole assembly needs to come out.”
“Can you help me pull it?”
“Hand me a socket set and get out of my way.”
I grinned. I couldn’t help it. She said it the way someone says pass the salt, and there was something in the matter-of-fact competence of it that made me want to keep her talking.
We worked side by side for a while, pulling the damaged assembly and laying out the parts on a shop rag.
She asked about the tour operation, and I told her the truth, which was that early season was more maintenance than money.
The snow had come fast but fallen unevenly, and the trails above the valley needed another week of accumulation before I could take paying customers above the tree line without worrying about exposed rock.
“So what do you do when there are no tours?” she asked.
“Fix machines. Check trail conditions. Annoy Dominic.”
“That last one seems like a full-time job.”
“It is. I’m very dedicated.”
She laughed, short and surprised, then studied the parts we’d spread across the rag.
“I heard you were reckless,” she said.
“Selectively.”
“Meaning?”
“Tourists pay more when they think their guide is dangerous. Some of the stories get improved.”
She glanced around the crowded garage. “And the rest of this?”
“I take care of the machines.”
Her mouth tipped up. “So only some of the stories are exaggerated.”
I deserved that. My reputation in the valley was roughly fifty percent earned and fifty percent embellished for the benefit of tourists who wanted their snowmobile guide to seem dangerous enough to justify the price.
The truth was that I’d done some genuinely stupid things on machines over the years, but I’d also never lost a customer and I’d never wrecked a sled badly enough to put someone in the hospital.
The line between reckless and calculated was thinner than people thought, and I walked it the same way Liza walked a loaded slope, by reading the conditions and adjusting on the fly.
“How was the first regular shift?” I asked.
“Nobody broke a leg today.”
“High standards.”
“I met them.”
I brought over a replacement tie rod and ball joint. “Zeller knew what he was doing when he hired you.”
She fitted the new ball joint into the steering arm and started threading the castle nut.
Her hands were steady and quick, and I watched them work and thought about the fact that Everett Pryce had looked at this woman, at her competence and her nerve, and decided she wasn’t good enough to stand next to him.
What a spectacular idiot.
? ? ?
The snow picked up around five, a steady, heavy fall that blurred the mountain roads.
Trish checked her phone, swore, and announced that traffic on the lodge road was crawling.
Abe said he wasn’t going anywhere until he finished the carburetor.
The two younger wolves had already drifted to the office, where one of them was heating canned soup in a battered saucepan on the hot plate.
“Dinner?” I asked Liza.
“Are you offering, or is that a threat?” She nodded toward the soup.
“There’s better food in the office. I keep a stash.”
The office was a small room off the main garage bay, cluttered with parts catalogs, tour schedules taped to the walls, and a battered couch that had been in the building longer than I had. I pulled out bread, cold cuts, cheese, and mustard.
We made sandwiches. Abe came in and took the chair by the space heater.
Trish commandeered the other end of the couch.
The younger wolves hovered near the soup pot.
The snow kept falling outside the windows, and the garage settled into the kind of easy evening that happens when the weather takes the choice away and everybody just stays where they are.
Liza sat on the arm of the couch and ate her sandwich and listened to Trish argue with Abe about whether synthetic oil was worth the price difference in two-stroke engines.
She offered a comment about cold-start viscosity that made Abe stop mid-sentence and stare at her, and then he said, “Huh,” and went back to arguing from a slightly different position.
Nobody looked at her scar.
I watched her relax by degrees. Her shoulders dropped.
Her voice lost the edge of careful control she carried when she was deciding whether a room was safe.
She started telling Trish about a ski binding that had frozen open during a rescue, and Trish leaned forward, and the two of them fell into a conversation about cold-weather gear failures that left the rest of us behind.
I was attracted to her. There was no fated jolt behind it. I’d noticed that she was funny, capable, and beautiful, and I wanted to know how often I could make her laugh.
But Liza had crossed the river three nights ago with a pack on her shoulder and a rejected mate bond that had to feel like an open wound.
She’d confirmed a second fated bond with my Alpha the next morning, and she was still figuring out what that meant.
She needed a friend who handed her a wrench and didn’t expect anything in return.
So I kept my attraction to myself.
? ? ?
Dominic came through the garage bay door around seven, stamping snow off his boots and bringing the cold in with him.
He’d been on the boundary, checking the river fencing after the day’s weather, and his coat was crusted white across the shoulders.
His dark eyes swept the room the way they always did, accounting for everything and everyone, and then they found Liza.
She was laughing at something Trish had said, turned sideways on the couch arm, one hand wrapped around a mug of coffee, her black hair loose over the collar of her blue jacket. The scar caught the fluorescent light and the laugh transformed her face from careful to alive.
I watched Dominic watch her. He stood in the doorway long enough that snow melted off his beard and dripped onto the concrete. His expression barely changed, but his eyes warmed.
Then his gaze moved to me. I was standing close to Liza amid sandwich wrappings and shared coffee. He didn’t say anything, just came inside and closed the door.
“Boundary’s holding,” he said. “The storm track’s pushing south. We’ll get accumulation overnight but nothing that’ll close the resort.”
“Good,” I said. “I’ve got two machines ready for trail checks tomorrow.”
He nodded. His eyes went back to Liza, who’d noticed him and gone quiet. She watched him with the focus she kept for him alone. She stayed where she was and held his gaze.
The charge between them sharpened.
I saw it in the way Dominic kept his hands at his sides even as he leaned toward her, and in the way Liza’s expression softened. Everyone else left them to it. Abe found something to look at on his phone, and Trish became interested in the label on her coffee mug.
And I saw something else I hadn’t expected. The three of us might fit. The thought was too new to examine.
“There’s sandwiches,” I told Dominic. “If you want.”
Abe, for once, read the room and vacated his seat. Dominic took it, and soon the three of us were gathered around the small table in the corner of the office while the snow fell harder and the rest of the garage crew drifted toward the door.
Liza told Dominic about the tie rod. She described the damage and the repair. His attention stayed on her hands as she demonstrated the bend in the old part, though his face remained neutral.
He was jealous of the ease between us, of the hours I’d spent with her here while he was out in the cold checking fence line. She’d laughed with me and Trish and Abe, and he’d missed it.
Dominic would never say that. He’d cut off his own hand before admitting he wanted more of someone’s time. But I’d been his Beta long enough to read the tells, the way his jaw set when Liza mentioned the sandwich I’d made her, the extra second his gaze held on me before returning to her.
I let it pass. There were some things even I left alone.
Dominic looked at Liza. “I’ll walk you back to the lodge.”
“I can manage,” she said.
“The yard’s slick and visibility is getting worse.”
“I’ve walked farther in worse.”
“I know you have.” His voice dropped lower, meant only for her despite my presence. “Let me walk you anyway.”
She considered him for a moment.
“Okay,” she said.
They left together. I stood in the garage doorway and watched them cross the yard toward the lodge, two dark shapes in the falling snow. At the lodge steps she turned to say something to him, and the light over the door caught Liza’s face.
She was smiling. The careful, controlled expression she’d worn since I first saw her at the gate, soaked and angry and holding herself together with nothing but stubbornness, was gone. This smile reached her eyes and softened the set of her mouth.
I closed the bay door against the cold and stood in my garage surrounded by half-repaired machines, dripping gloves, and the smell of coffee and exhaust. My chest tightened.
I washed the mugs, killed the hot plate, and climbed the stairs to my apartment above the garage.