Jace:
By late afternoon, Vance Performance barely looked like the crime scene we'd walked into that morning. The broken glass was gone. The graffiti was covered. The front windows that could be salvaged had been repaired, and the ones that couldn't were temporarily boarded up until the replacements came in. Tools were back where they belonged. Cars were back on lifts. The radio was playing again. And somehow, against all odds, the garage felt alive.
Riverside had shown up. Not because somebody asked them to. Because somebody had threatened one of their own. I stood outside with a rag in my hand, wiping grease from my knuckles while Big Drew and Mason wrestled the last sheet of plywood into place. Calla was inside arguing with Julio about whether the paint color we'd used actually matched
