Chapter 2 - The Woman on the Creeper
The garage smelled of motor oil, hot iron, ozone from a welding rig, and fresh cedar sawdust.
A radio on a high workbench played a low blues station, the sound competing with the steady, rhythmic hiss of an industrial air compressor in the back corner. In the center of Bay One, propped four feet off the concrete on heavy six-ton hydraulic jack stands, sat a 1968 Ford Bronco.
Lily trotted through the side door, her sneakers squeaking on the smooth painted floor.
"Mom! I found a man on the county road with a hole in his radiator!"
A mechanic’s rolling creeper slid out from beneath the front axle of the Bronco with a sharp, metallic rattle.
A woman sat up in a single, fluid motion, wiping a smudge of dark chassis grease from her forehead with the back of a gloved hand.
She wore heavy canvas work trousers, steel-toed leather boots, and a fitted navy-blue tank top damp at the collar from the afternoon heat. Her auburn hair was pinned up with a pair of needle-nose pliers thrust through the bun; her posture was lean, athletic, and guarded.
When her hazel eyes lifted and met Adrian’s across the bay, the breath locked in her throat.
The wrench in her left hand clattered against the concrete floorboards.
"Adrian...?" she whispered.
Adrian stood in the doorway, the hot summer air pressing against his back, his slate-gray eyes widening as seven years of silence, grief, and buried memories collapsed into a single, concussive second.
"Clara," Adrian choked out.
Clara Vance.
The daughter of Thomas Vance—the legendary chief surveyor of the Port of New York who had died in a suspicious rail explosion seven years ago.
Clara had been Adrian’s personal mechanical engineer, his confidante, and the woman who had vanished from his life forty-eight hours after her father's funeral, leaving behind an empty apartment in Brooklyn and a note telling him that the Moretti syndicate would swallow them both if she stayed.
Clara scrambled to her feet, her hands instinctively moving to pull six-year-old Lily behind her legs, her body tense as a coiled spring.
"How did you find this road, Adrian?" Clara demanded, her voice shaking with fierce, protective fury. "I signed the non-disclosure waivers. I took none of your father's money. Marcus Vale swore you would never track us up here."
Adrian’s eyes narrowed into cold, dangerous slits.
"Marcus Vale told me you drowned in the Hudson River seven years ago, Clara," Adrian said softly. "He gave me a forged police recovery report and a sealed urn."
Clara went dead still.
"What?" she whispered.
"My car didn't break down by chance today, Clara," Adrian revealed, stepping into the bay, his voice dropping into an octave of subterranean iron. "Someone drilled a bleed hole into my cooling core before I left Manhattan, knowing this road has no cell reception and only one access bridge."
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Before Clara could answer, the deep, throaty rumble of a modified V8 engine echoed from the county road.
A black Cadillac Escalade with blacked-out windows turned slowly into the mouth of the gravel driveway.
