It hits the concrete with a sharp clang, and my whole body reacts before thought can catch up. I jerk back hard, heart slamming into my ribs, lungs seizing, fists coming up halfway before I even realize I’ve moved. The sound ricochets off the walls, and for one ugly, lurching second the garage disappears entirely.
Concrete walls. Steel bunk. A door swinging shut with that particular weight. Men shouting from somewhere down the block. Someone laughing before the sound shifted into something else entirely.
I blink.
Once.
Twice.
The workshop snaps back into place around me.
The car.
The bench.
The dust still drifting through the light like nothing happened.
Fuck. I bend and pick up the wrench. Force the air out slowly through my teeth, then drag it back in the way I taught myself, back when breathing was the only thing I had full control over.
In.
Out.
Again.
I close my eyes. Let the smell of the place find me. Oil and something beneath it all that is just this garage, the closest thing to safe I have ever known.
I stay there until my hands stop shaking and my pulse drops back to something that doesn’t feel like a threat.
When I open my eyes, Rainer is standing a few feet away.
He says nothing. Just stands there with a rag in one hand, eyes studying my face. He doesn’t miss much. It used to irritate the hell out of me when I was young. Now I just breathe through it and turn back to the engine.
I find the bolt I was working on and start again. The rhythm finds me in pieces. Slow at first, my hands second-guess movements they used to make without thinking. But it comes. Muscle memory is stubborn that way. The body holds onto what the mind tries to bury. A quarter turn. Check the tension. Move to the next.
I’m bent over the engine again when the front door opens. The bell above it gives a tired little jingle.
My spine locks up and I don’t move. My ears are doing the thing they’ve been doing since I got out—cataloging sounds before my brain catches up.
“Morning,” Rainer says.
A woman’s voice carries through the garage and hits me somewhere behind the sternum.
“Morning, Rainer.”
I know that voice.
My hand stills on the socket.
Cassie.
Rainer doesn’t miss a beat. “He’s over there, under the hood.”
I straighten and for one wild, humiliating second my heart does the thing it should have learned better than to do by now. It leaps. Slams forward as if it has somewhere to be. Not because of Cassie. But because if Cassie is here, maybe Skylar is as well. Maybe there are two sets of footsteps and I just didn’t hear the second one.
I wipe my hands on the rag as my pulse pounds loud enough to piss me off.
Cassie comes around the front of the car and into my line of sight. She’s alone and something in my chest drops. I lock it down before it becomes anything I have to deal with.
