Plus, more time from Gabe’s apartment meant the fervor to find me was starting to quiet. At least publicly. Dom was still certain that Zeus and Spyre were adding more and more resources to their hunt.
“God, it feels good to be home,” Leo stretched her arms as she headed back to the lockers.
But Spencer looked around the shop with a bit more arrogance. “It’s a wonder you were able to keep this place running without us.”
“I’ve got other employees, you know.” Dom crossed her arms.
“None as good as us,” Spencer corrected as she started toward the office in the back.
I never thought I’d miss hanging out in this shop — especially since one of my formative memories here was unwittingly cleaning up a murder vehicle — but much like Dom’s mansion, this place had started to feel like home in some strange way.
Most days, I’d love to sit around while my lovers worked and pretend to listen as they told me about the car parts and the tools and the repairs they were doing.
But someone needed to keep Lady company while they fixed up luxury rides. Plus, it had been a hot minute since I’d gotten to draw anything outside of the house. So today, I was parked on one of the small couches that made up our waiting area, sketching the three of them as they worked.
Spencer was doing an engine replacement on a vintage Mercedes, her muscles tensed and covered in grease as she got to work under the hood. A bit closer to me, Leo was doing some routine maintenance on Spencer and Dom’s bikes, along with some basic repairs on the motorcycles left by other Violence.
And just a few feet from my couch, Dom was completing one of the most intense detail jobs I’d ever seen on a shimmering black Jaguar. As I sketched her, I tried to capture the tension inher shoulders, the set of her jaw, and the focused furrow of her brow.
But she moved too much to be a good reference.
She’d probably hate that I was drawing her, too.
So instead, I turned my attention to the Lucky Strike cap Spencer had given me all those months back — the one Dom still made me wear each time I left the house without a wig.
I got to work copying over the logo, trying to nail the exact angles of the L and the S, when suddenly, a realization hit me.
“Lucky Strike…” I muttered, loud enough for only Dom to hear me.
“What about it?” She tilted her head, standing straighter as she turned to face me.
“Dad used to talk about it all the time. His retirement plan… he wanted to sell his shares and start a car shop. He was just waiting on his lucky strike before he clocked out.”
My heart warmed at the thought of my dad. He never did it of course and now I was starting to understand why. Just like Dom, he couldn’t walk away from Zeus until Isaac’s evil was extracted from the core of the company they built together.
My father just didn’t live long enough to see it happen.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who’d remembered his stories.
“Yeah well. It only felt fitting to give it a name that reminded me of him. He’s the first person who taught me anything about cars. Didn’t want scummy mechanics taking advantage of one of ‘his girls.’ But I also thought he’d appreciate the irony.”
“The irony?” I tilted my head.
“Well… no one who ends up at an autobody is all that lucky.”
The joke made me roll my eyes, but the laugh that bubbled from my chest was genuine. “Oh my god, that’s so corny. He would have loved it.”
And as Dom smirked back at me, I was overwhelmed with a feeling more clear than any I’d had in the past few months. Deep down to my core, I wanted to forgive Dom. To really forgive her.
So much of what had happened was out of her control. When we’d parted ways, she was just a kid trying to do her best. We both had been, and it wasn’t fair to hold our parents’ sins against her.
Even now, even as she sat in the belly of the beast day after day, all she was trying to do was fix her father’s mistakes while keeping her promise to mine. And I wasn’t sure that I could hate her for it.
It might be a while before I was able to fully move on from it, but I knew now with certainty that I wanted to try.
If nothing else, Dom had loved my father. And no matter how scary the world around us grew, at least that was something we would always share.
Looking into her eyes, I saw not glaciers, but clear blue skies. There was so much more that I wanted to say, so much I wanted to ask her about my father. But before I got the chance, a ping from her phone drew her attention.
