Chapter Two
1121 Words
Nadia walked into bay three to find a Sportster elevated on the center lift, its back wheel stripped and the primary cover already off. Someone had started the tear-down and simply walked away.
She dropped her bag on the scarred workbench and took the measure of the room. Two lifts, both holding weight—the second occupied by a Road King missing its entire front end. A wall-mounted tool chest sat secured with a heavy padlock. The parts bins were obsessively organized by someone who understood exactly how a teardown functioned, and the concrete floor was swept cleaner than the pristine commercial bays she was used to.
She was pulling the thick rubber of her gloves over her knuckles when the word hit the heavy air.
"No."
It came from the deep shadows of the back corner. Nadia turned.
He was massive. Where River’s sheer size manifested as a heavy, immovable stillness, this man’s presence was entirely different—a violent, kinetic energy that seemed to consume the oxygen in the room. He had close-cropped dark hair and thick forearms smeared with black grease to the elbow. He stared at her with the specific, heavy exhaustion of a man who had been warned a problem was coming and had genuinely hoped it wouldn't show up.
"Kayne?" she asked.
"Put your bag back in your car," he ordered.
Nadia turned her back on him and faced the workbench.
"The Sportster," she said, her voice perfectly even. "What's the issue?"
"I said—"
"I heard you." She yanked the heavy brass zipper of her tool bag open. "Primary cover's already off. Are we looking at a clutch problem or an oil leak?"
Silence stretched across the bay, thick and abrasive.
"Clutch slips under load," he finally answered.
She pulled her clutch spring tool from the bag by touch. "Plates or springs first?"
Kayne moved, his boots heavy on the concrete, crossing the bay to position himself directly opposite her on the other side of the lift. He crossed his thick arms. Watching.
"Springs," he said.
Nadia went to work.
The basket came apart in exactly the right sequence. She kept her eyes locked on the metal, working without looking up at him, which took far more discipline than it should have. River had been quiet in the way deep water was quiet; Kayne’s sheer physical presence generated a grating friction even when he was standing completely still. She felt his focus exactly the way she felt an engine running dangerously rough—a constant, irregular texture that demanded to be accounted for.
"Where'd you apprentice," he demanded, skipping the inflection of a question entirely.
"Harker's, in Dalton," she answered, running her thumb over the friction plates to check their thickness before setting them aside. "Then two years at a Harley dealer in Raleigh."
A beat of silence.
"Competition builds," he prompted.
"One year private." She rotated the springs under the harsh overhead light. Two were definitively under spec. Setting the tool down, she reached blindly into her open bag for the replacements, relying entirely on the muscle memory in her fingertips. Three sets. Three distinct gauges. She pulled the correct set without a fraction of hesitation. "Flat Track circuit. Mostly motor work."
He offered absolutely nothing to that.
Nadia pressed the new springs into their housings, seated the pressure plate, and began torquing the bolts in a strict cross-pattern. One-third increments. It was the exact, unyielding sequence her uncle had drilled into her at fourteen, and she had never once broken the order. When the final bolt hit spec, the mechanical resistance shifted with a subtle click—a vibration felt deep in the bones of the wrist before the brain ever registered the torque. You either knew the feel of it, or you didn't.
She set the wrench down with a metallic clatter.
Kayne uncrossed his arms.
He walked slowly around the lift, stopping entirely too close. He wasn't looking at the reassembled clutch. His eyes were locked on her face, and the initial, heavy skepticism in his expression had warped into something sharp, assessing, and unreadable.
"Harker's in Dalton," he repeated.
"Yes."
"Old man Harker retired four years ago. Shop's been closed two years," he stated.
Nadia's hands froze on the rim of the workbench.
"I said I apprenticed there," she kept her voice perfectly level. "I didn't say when."
Kayne stared down at her for a long, agonizing moment.
The cold spread through Nadia's chest again. Not the sharp spike of adrenaline from the front office, but a slow, suffocating drop, like heavy silt settling at the bottom of a lake.
She did not take a step back. She didn't move a muscle, because the list of actions she absolutely could not take in this steel cage of a room was infinitely longer than the list of things she could. Standing her ground and refusing to break eye contact was the only remaining option that didn't immediately cost her.
It was fear, pure and dense.
"River cleared you," Kayne finally said.
"He did."
"Then you're on the floor." He took a single step back, breaking the invisible tether between them. He picked up the old parts she had stripped from the primary assembly, turned them over in his large hands without a word, and tossed them into the correct scrap bin. Not just randomly thrown—the exact right bin. He knew every inch of this floor.
"But you already knew you'd be cleared," he continued, turning his back on her. "Before you drove in."
"I knew the debt and I knew the terms," she replied defensively.
"That's not what I mean." He stepped toward the gutted Road King waiting on the second lift, never glancing back at her. "We were told someone was coming before you walked through the door. Before River talked to you." He let the silence drag for a brutal second. "Someone called ahead."
The distorted radio in the outer shop bled through the cinderblock walls.
Nadia pressed her bare palms flat against the cold steel of the workbench.
She had told absolutely no one she was making this drive. She had finalized the decision four days ago, sitting entirely alone in a cracked asphalt parking lot in Raleigh, staring at a final notice of debt on her passenger seat. There was no one left in her life to call with the news.
But someone had called ahead.
"Finish the Sportster," Kayne ordered, his broad back still to her. "Wheel needs balancing after you reinstall."
He leaned over the Road King and didn't speak another word.
Nadia stared at the gutted Sportster. Then, she picked up the heavy rear wheel, and went back to work.
- Writer
