Next bar. Last leg of the shift. The remaining hours between now and sleep and the quiet of my apartment where the mop is propped against the wall and eleven books are waiting on a shelf and the business card from a hospitality investor is sitting in my apron pocket.
I pull out of the alley.
Surely the rest of the shift is fight-free.
Hopefully….
CHAPTER 14
Roadside Luck
~MILA~
The car stops.
Not in the way cars stop when you tell them to. In the way they stop when they've made a unilateral decision and are no longer accepting input.
The engine simply—ceases. No dramatic sound, no warning sputter, no final wheeze of mechanical protest. One moment it's running and the next the dashboard lights are out and the rain is louder without the engine to compete with and I'm sitting in the dark on a road fifteen minutes from my apartment, staring at the steering wheel with the particular expression of someone who has exhausted their allotted quantity of patience for a single calendar day.
Am I even surprised?
Of course the car decides tonight is its night.
Not on a Tuesday afternoon. Not in a parking lot ten feet from a mechanic. On a St. Patrick's Day at four in the morning in the middle of an escalating rainstorm, when I am fifteen minutes from home and Danny just called half an hour ago tosay things have quieted, go home early, rest for once in your life, Mila—and I thought that was the universe finally showing some goodwill.
I turn the key again.
Nothing.
Again.
Nothing, more definitively.
Outside, the rain is doing the thing it's been threatening all evening—the full commitment of a storm that's been building since the clouds came in that afternoon and has finally decided to stop holding anything back. It drums on the roof in a continuous, unambiguous declaration. Through the windscreen the road is blurred, the streetlamp fifty feet ahead reduced to a smear of amber light through the water running down the glass. If I open the door right now I'll be drenched before I'm standing upright.
I put my forehead on the steering wheel.
Options.
Danny is still working. He's done enough for one night—triple pay, the early release, two years of showing up with a mug set out before I arrive—and calling him at four AM to say my ancient car has finally given up in a rainstorm is not a thing I'm doing to him tonight.
Elvin.
Elvin watched a man go to his knees on a bar floor for my number tonight and absorbed that information with the expression of someone whose understanding of his own situation has been significantly revised.
Calling Elvin right now, after that, would be unkind.
Not because he would use it—Elvin is genuinely not like that. But because he's been working up to something for months in the specific, hesitant way of a person who isn't confident their interest is welcome, and having him show up in the rain at 4AM to help me after watching someone more certain claim the field would just be?—
No. Not tonight.
Elowen.
Elowen would be in the car before I finished the sentence and I'd hear about this until Easter.
Also she has a castle to explain and I refuse to have that conversation in a rainstorm.
I take three slow breaths in the dark. The rain on the roof. My own scent in the enclosed space—honey and vanilla, muted now, the lime zest absent, the specific flatness of exhaustion. The bar shift smell on my jacket: spirits and crowd and the lingering bourbon-citrus ghost that I'm choosing not to think about.
