For seven months, I lived as a grease-stained mechanic in a notorious Chicago chop shop, terrified that a single mistake would drag me back to Marcus Bellamy.

Tony Mercer leaned over the radiator support, squinting through the ambient shop glare as his thick, calloused index finger nudged the rubber hose Eli was holding.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Tony muttered under his breath, his eyes tracing the microscopic fissure that had eluded forty hours of diagnostic labor. “That little bastard was expanding only when the engine drew heavy manifold vacuum at load. Leaning out the fuel mix before the secondaries could dump.”

Eli didn't waste breath on an explanation.

Reaching into the front pocket of his coveralls, he pulled out a four-inch section of reinforced braided silicone vacuum hose he had pre-cut from a bulk spool on the back wall twenty minutes earlier. His fingers, though stained with black graphite grease and oil along the cuticles, moved with a fluid, terrifying dexterity that belonged in a high-end Swiss watchmaker's atelier rather than a Chicago chop-and-tune outfit.

Eli slid the brass clamp into position. With a smooth, downward snap of his wrist, he firmly seated the replacement hose onto the intake manifold’s barbed vacuum fitting.

Click.

The hose seated with a dull, airtight seal. Eli slid the spring clamp over the barb, inspected the clearance against the throttle linkage, and slowly withdrew both hands from the dark cavern of the engine bay.

He took two steps back, wiping his palms against the stained red shop rag clutched at his waist.

“Light it up,” Tony ordered, not taking his eyes off the carburetor linkage.

Eli leaned through the driver’s side window of the Fastback. His boot pressed the heavy clutch pedal to the floorboards, feeling the crisp, mechanical engagement of the twin-disc plate. His slender hand reached for the chrome ignition cylinder on the dash.

He turned the key.

The starter motor didn't even whine for a full revolution. The big-block 390 V8 erupted into life with a concussive, visceral bark that rattled the tools on the nearby red metal cart.

The engine surged to two thousand RPM, clearing its throat with a crisp, dry crack from the dual three-inch exhaust pipes, before settling down into an idle so terrifyingly smooth, so utterly balanced, that the surface of the black paint didn't even vibrate. It wasn't the ragged, hunting lope of an engine fighting for air; it was the deep, rhythmic, predatory thrum of pure, unadulterated American displacement firing on every single cylinder.

Tony stared down into the open engine bay. The throttle plates sat dead-level, the vacuum gauge reading a rock-solid twenty inches of mercury.

The shop manager slowly lifted his head, his black work cap pushed back on his brow, his weathered face breaking into a look of sheer, unadulterated disbelief. He looked from the purring engine over to the small, grease-smudged kid standing beside the fender.

“Well,” Tony breathed, shaking his head with a slow, appreciative whistle that got lost in the burble of the exhaust. “I’ll be damned.”

For one fleeting, unguarded microsecond, the heavy armor around Eli Ross fractured.

The tense, defensive slouch he maintained to hide his feminine frame relaxed. A bright, dazzling smile broke across his face—a smile so genuinely radiant, so pure in its raw love for the machine, that the harsh industrial lighting seemed to catch the porcelain curve of cheekbones beneath the dirt. For three seconds, he wasn't a runaway running for her life; she was just Elena, the girl who had spent her childhood hiding beneath her grandfather’s grease pits, finding peace only in the iron logic of engines that never lied.