Chapter 2: Glass & Goodbyes
He sat in the Charger until the sky shifted from black to a bruised, watercolor gray. The engine’s heat had long since bled away, leaving the interior chilled. When his phone buzzed for the third time—Brian, probably, or Mia—he finally turned the key. The engine rumbled to life, a sound that usually felt like coming home. Now it just sounded like an empty room.
He drove back to the house slow, like a man returning from a funeral. The garage door was still half-open, a dark mouth. He pulled in beside the Chevelle. The space where Catalina’s red Charger usually sat was a gaping void. It hit him like a physical blow, the absence so loud it screamed.
Then he saw it. A square of white paper, folded in half, wedged under the windshield wiper of her car. Except her car was gone. It was on his windshield, the one he’d just parked. He didn’t move for a full minute. He just stared at it through the glass, a pale flag against the dawn.He got out. The morning air was cool and carried the scent of damp asphalt from a distant sprinkler. He pulled the note free. Her handwriting was familiar, the loops sharp and angry, the letters slanting downhill like they were trying to escape the page.
Dominic,
The Vegas deal is clean. Brian double-checked. The buyer's legit, just paranoid. Meet's at the Blue Moon Diner on East Charleston, noon Friday. Get the money up front.
I took the southern route. Need the miles.
Be happy, hermano. Without me. I will always love you.
- Cat
He read it twice. The business part was pure Catalina—efficient, direct, leaving the crew covered. The rest was a demolition. Be happy.Without me. The words didn’t fit in his head. They were a foreign language.
His fist hit the driver’s side window of his own car. The glass webbed, a spider’s galaxy of fractures erupting from the point of impact. A sharp, bright pain shot up his arm. He didn’t feel it. He yanked the car door open and got in.
Her scent hit him first. Not the ghost of it, but the fresh, lingering cloud of it. Jasmine and vanilla and the specific, warm smell of her skin. The passenger seat leather was creased differently. He put a hand on it. It was cool, but it held the faint impression of a body. She’d slept here. In his car. After last night.
He looked at the rearview. A smudge of dark red lipstick marked the edge of the glass. Not an accident. A brand. And on the floor of the passenger side, curled like two fallen leaves, were her racing gloves. The thin, well-worn leather ones she never drove without.Shed skin.
A sound escaped him, something between a choke and a growl. He crushed the note in his fist. Need the miles. She was running. Not from a rival, not from the law. From him.From them. And she’d told him to be happy about it.
The side door slammed open. Mia stood there, wrapped in a hoodie, her eyes puffy with sleep and worry. She took in the shattered window, him sitting frozen in the driver’s seat, the gloves on the floor. Her face crumpled.
“Where is she, Dom?”
He didn’t answer. He held out the crumpled ball of paper. Mia strode over, snatched it, smoothed it on her thigh. Her eyes scanned the lines. Her lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line.
“You idiot,” she whispered, but the venom was gone, replaced by a hollow grief. “You massive, stubborn idiot. She left you the job. She made sure the family was taken care of. And then she left.”
“She slept in the car,” Dom said, his voice rough as gravel.
Mia looked at the passenger seat, then closed her eyes. “God.” She leaned against the door frame. “What did you do?”
“She heard.” That was all he could manage.
“Yeah. She heard.” Mia’s voice was flat. “And instead of… I don’t know, Dom, talking to her? Groveling? Anything? You went for a drive and left her to put herself back together. So she did. And this is what it looks like.”
He finally looked at her, his eyes raw. “Where would she go?”
“You’re her twin. You tell me.”
He searched the static in his head. Their childhood map. Places that were theirs. A canyon road up north where they’d learned to drift. A defunct drive-in theater where they’d shared their first beer. A hundred spots, but all of them were memories, not hiding places. She needed distance. She needed to move.
“The southern route,” he said, echoing her note. “Interstate 10. Towards the desert.”
“Then go,” Mia said, pushing off the frame. “Get in that ridiculous car and go find her. Bring her home.”
“She doesn’t want to be found.”
“Since when do you give a damn about what she wants?” Mia shot back, her voice rising. “This isn’t about what she wants right now, Dom! It’s about what she needs. And she needs to know that this… this thing you two are drowning in… it’s not worth destroying her. She thinks she’s the problem. That if she disappears, you get a clean life. Go prove her wrong.”
The logic was a jolt. A course to steer. Action.
He bent down, picked up the discarded gloves. The leather was soft, shaped perfectly to her hands. He tucked them into the inside pocket of his jacket, against his chest. He grabbed the keys.
Brian’s Supra pulled into the driveway, blocking the exit. Brian got out, his expression shifting from casual to alert as he took in the scene: the shattered window, Mia’s tear-streaked face, Dom’s haunted eyes.
“What happened?” Brian asked, walking quickly into the garage. “I’ve been calling. Vegas is set, but we need to—”
“Cat’s gone,” Mia said bluntly.
Brian’s eyes went to the empty space. His face tightened. “Gone? What does that mean? Did someone—”
“She left,” Dom interrupted, his voice firmer now, charged with purpose. “On her own. I’m going after her.”
Brian processed this. He looked from Dom to Mia, sensing the chasm of unsaid things. The tension from the garage, the devastation he’d glimpsed. This was the rupture. “Where?”
“South. I-10.”
“You want me to come?”
“No.” Dom started his car. The engine’s roar filled the garage, shaking tools on the walls. “You handle Vegas.With Leon. Get the money. Keep the family running.”
“Dom, man, if she left… maybe she needs space.”
Dominic looked at him, and for the first time, Brian saw past the stoic leader to the sheer, terrifying need beneath. It was primal. It was absolute. “She can have space.
“She can have space. But she needs to hear something from me first.” Dom’s grip tightened on the steering wheel, his knuckles bone-white against the worn leather. “I just need to find her.” He met Brian’s gaze. “You got the family. Hold it down.” It wasn’t a request. It was a will. Brian nodded, a sharp, understanding jerk of his chin. He stepped back.
Mia rushed to the driver’s side window, leaning past the shattered glass. Her hand grabbed his forearm. “You bring her back, Dom. You tell her… tell her the truth. All of it.” She swallowed hard. “Even the ugly parts. Especially those.”
He revved the engine, a violent answer. He backed the Charger out with a shriek of tires, swung it around Brian’s Supra, and launched it into the pale morning street. The rear end fishtailed, catching for a heartbeat before the tires bit asphalt and propelled him forward. He didn’t look back. The house, the garage, Mia’s worried face—they blurred into a smear of color in his mirrors, swallowed by his focus on the empty road ahead.
He hit the 10 East with the sun a hot, accusing eye in his rearview. The freeway was a river of early commuters, a crawl of sedans and trucks. He swerved through gaps with an aggression that earned him furious horns and middle fingers. The Charger was a dark blue bullet threading a slow-motion tapestry.
Her note was a crumpled lump in the cup holder. Be happy, hermano. The words played on a loop in his head, a taunt. He imagined her writing it. The set of her jaw, the quiet fury in her fingers. The deliberate, final press of the pen. She’d planned this. While he sat stupidly in the street, she was in his car, leaving her mark.Her gloves.
He touched the inside pocket of his jacket, feeling the soft leather press against his chest. They still held the shape of her hands, the slight curl of her fingers. It felt like holding a ghost’s skeleton.
The miles began to stack. The city bled away into scrubland, then desert. The air through the broken window changed, turning dry and hot, scoured clean. His mind replayed last night’s catastrophe. Not the mechanics in the garage, but the before. The feel of her hips under his hands. The sound of her whisper, a plea and a confession. We can’t keep doing this. He’d given her an out. Then tell me to stop.
She hadn’t.
His phone buzzed, rattling against the plastic of the dash.Mia. Then Brian. Then an unknown number. He ignored them all. The vibrations became a frantic insect hum against the Charger’s own steady growl. He turned the stereo on, blasted a heavy, driving track with no vocals, just a punishing bass line. It drowned the phone, drowned his thoughts, filled the car with pure, mindless vibration.
Two hours out, near a dust-blown exit for a truck stop called “The Last Chance,” something flickered in his memory. They’d broken down here once, years ago. Him and Cat, in some junker they were trying to drive to Phoenix.
Him and Cat, in some junker they were trying to drive to Phoenix. They'd shared a warm Coke and laughed at their own misfortune, sitting on the hood as the sunset burned the sky. The memory was a fresh cut now, nostalgic salt in a raw wound.
He pushed the Charger harder, the speedometer needle trembling past one-ten. The desert became a beige blur, the highway a hypnotic gray ribbon. He scanned the oncoming lanes, every flash of red metal making his heart stutter. Her Charger was a specific, furious crimson. He saw nothing.
Twenty miles later, the traffic ahead began to clot and brake for no visible reason. He downshifted, the engine barking in protest as he slowed. A sickly, sweet smell of spilled coolant washed in through the broken window, mixing with the hot asphalt. Then he saw the flashing lights, a syncopated dance of red and blue staining the sky ahead.
An accident. Two sedans were tangled in a violent, reciprocal embrace of shattered glass and twisted steel, scattered across both eastbound lanes. A police cruiser was angled as a block, its light bar whirling. An ambulance stood with its rear doors open, paramedics moving with weary purpose.
Dom threaded the Charger through the creeping, gawking traffic, his impatience a live wire. He just needed to get past this, get moving again. His eyes flicked over the wreck, assessing it with the detached, mechanical part of his brain that understood metal and velocity. Then he saw it.
Parked on the wide gravel shoulder, just beyond the rear of the ambulance, was a motorcycle.
It was a Ducati Monster, a sleek matte-black thing with a single, vicious red stripe down the fuel tank. Catalina’s bike. He knew every weld, every custom scrape on its frame. The sight of it, just sitting there, empty, sent a jolt of pure lightning through his nervous system.
His foot slammed the brake. The Charger lurched to a stop, half on the shoulder, half in the slow-moving lane. A horn blared behind him. He didn’t hear it. He was out of the car, the door left swinging open.
He started toward the bike, his blood roaring in his ears. The scene took on a new, horrific clarity. The ambulance. The gurney. His legs moved faster, a stumbling run over the uneven gravel. One of the paramedics was closing the ambulance’s rear doors. He saw a flash of dark hair on the gurney inside.
“Cat!” The name was torn from him, a raw sound lost in the desert wind and the drone of idling engines.
A state trooper turned, putting a warning hand up. “Sir, you need to stay back!”
Dominic ignored him, surging forward. His vision tunneled to the narrow space of the ambulance doors. The paramedic gave him a startled look, then shook his head, not in denial, but in a universal gesture of preoccupied urgency. “You family?”
“Yes,” Dom barked, the lie immediate and necessary.
The trooper was advancing now, his posture shifting from warning to intervention. “I need you to step over to my vehicle, sir.”
Just then, a figure detached itself from the shadow of the ambulance’s front bumper. She was leaning against the grille, arms crossed, a dusting of fine desert sand coating her leather jacket and jeans. One knee of her jeans was ripped, a bright bloom of red seeping through the fabric.
Catalina.
She was looking right at him, her expression unreadable beneath a pair of aviator sunglasses. Her lips were pressed into that same thin, furious line from her note.
The relief was so profound it felt like a vacuum, sucking the air from his lungs. She was here. She was upright. She was whole. The trooper followed his gaze, hesitated, then gave a curt nod and turned his attention back to the wreck.
Dom crossed the last few feet separating them. The space between their bodies felt charged, like the moment before a thunderclap. He could smell the sharp, coppery scent of her blood mixing with gasoline and dust. He stopped an arm’s length away.
“You’re bleeding,” he said, his voice gruff.
“Took a slide. It’s a scratch.” Her tone was flat, dismissive. She nodded towards the ambulance
“Paramedics want the passenger. Insisted I stick around for a statement.” She finally looked away from him, back toward the twisted metal. “I was behind the blue Civic. He swerved for something, a coyote maybe. Brake lights, then glass. I laid it down.”
He scanned her again, his gaze clinical. “The bike.”
“It’ll ride. The scratches give it character.” A bitter, humorless smile touched her lips. “Unlike my car, which is halfway to Mexico by now.”
“Your car.” He pulled the crushed note from his pocket, holding it up between two fingers. It fluttered in the hot, diesel-tinged breeze. “You wrote this. Then you slept in mine.”
Her jaw tightened. She refused to look at the paper. “It said what needed saying.”
“Bullshit.” He took a step closer, the gravel crunching under his boot. The scent of her was stronger now—sweat, leather, and that faint, iron tang of drying blood. He saw the tremor in her crossed arms, the rigid control holding her upright.“Happy? You want me to be happy? With some kind of clean life after you just atomize yours?”
“It’s not your life to worry about!” she snapped, her composure cracking. She shoved the sunglasses up onto her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed, exhausted, but blazing. “It’s mine. I walked away from it. That’s the point.”
The ambulance doors shut with a solid thunk. The engine started. It pulled away slowly, its lights still flashing but the siren silent now. The police were directing traffic, a single lane beginning to creep past the wreckage. The immediate audience was gone. They were just two people on a vast shoulder, surrounded by indifferent desert.
“You walked,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, focused intensity. “You left gloves on my floorboard. You put your mouth on my mirror. That’s not walking away, Cat. That’s setting a fucking fire.”
“So what? You came to put it out?” She let out a short, sharp breath that wasn’t a laugh. “I heard the garage last night, Dom. I heard all of it. That sounded like putting out a fire to you?”
The words landed with the force of a physical blow. He didn’t flinch. He met her gaze, holding the ugly truth there between them. Let her see it. Let her see the shame.
“That,” he said, each word measured, “was me trying to burn down a different forest. Because you told me to be careful. Because it’s supposed to be impossible.”
She shook her head, looking out at the shimmering heat mirages on the asphalt. “I shouldn’t have waited. That was stupid. Pathetic.”
He moved then, closing the last of the distance. His hand came up, not to touch her face, but to gently hook his index finger under the strap of her tank top where it peeked above her jacket collar. He pulled it down a half-inch, revealing a fresh, dark bruise on the sharp ridge of her collarbone. The shape of his mouth from the night before last.
“You think this is pathetic?” he asked, his thumb grazing the edge of the bruise.
A full-body shiver went through her. She swayed toward him, a millimeter, before catching herself. “Yes.”
“You’re a liar.” He released the strap. His hand fell to his side. “You left the job details. You made sure Mia was okay. You arranged your entire vanishing act to cause the least amount of damage to the family. You are the least pathetic person I know.”
Her breath hitched. A muscle worked in her jaw.
“Get on the back of the bike,” he said.She blinked. “What?”
“You’re bleeding. Your knee’s wrecked. You can’t ride a Ducati three hundred miles like that.” He gestured with his head toward his idling Charger, still sitting crooked on the shoulder with its driver’s door open. “I’ll trailer the bike to the next town. We’ll get it and your leg fixed.”
“We?” The word was a challenge.
“Yeah. We.” He didn’t elaborate. He just turned and started walking toward the Charger, trusting she would follow.
She didn’t move for a long moment. She watched his retreating back—the broad set of his shoulders, the definite, unshakeable line of him. He’d driven through the night. He’d found her in the middle of nowhere. He wasn’t asking. It wasn’t an offer.
She limped over to the Monster, killed the ignition, and pocketed the key. She walked, stiff-legged, to the Charger. He was already in the driver’s seat, on the phone. She heard his side: “Yeah, Brian. I found her.… A slide, it’s fine.… Near the Last Chance.… I need a trailer, something enclosed.Rent it. Bring it here.… No, don’t bring Mia. Just you.” A pause. “Because I said so.” He hung up.
She got in, the scent of her own jasmine now a permanent ghost in his space, layered over the smell of oil and hot male and shattered glass. The quiet inside the car was a different beast from the desert’s vast silence. It was intimate, charged, loud with the thrum of the engine.
He put the car in drive and pulled onto the shoulder, past the accident scene, picking up speed until they were clear. He took the next exit, a dusty off-ramp leading to a sun-bleached gas station and a sad-looking diner called The Oasis.
He parked at the far end of the lot, away from the semi-trucks. He shut off the engine. The sudden quiet was absolute. They sat, listening to the tick of the cooling engine block. A lizard scurried across the hot pavement outside.
“Brian will be here with a trailer in a few hours,” he finally said, staring straight ahead at the chipped stucco wall of the diner.
Catalina stared at her hands. The grit from the slide was embedded in the lines of her knuckles. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“I had to.”
“Why?” The word was a piece of flint, sharp and ready to spark.
He turned his head slowly to look at her. The interior of the car felt suddenly too small, the air hot and still. “Because you left your gloves.” He reached into his jacket and pulled them out, holding them in the space between the seats. They were a soft, worn accusation. “You don’t go anywhere without these. Not even to the grocery store.”
She looked at them, her eyes narrowing. A simple, undeniable truth. He’d caught her in the lie of her own exit. It was more intimate than the bruise.
She snatched them from his hand, the leather whispering. “Sentimental bullshit.” She shoved them into her own pocket.
“Yeah.” He didn’t argue. He opened his door. “You need to clean that knee. Come on.”
The diner was a time capsule of cracked vinyl and faded laminate. A ceiling fan spun with a lazy, clicking rhythm, moving the smell of old grease and burnt coffee around the room. They took a corner booth, the seats sighing under their weight.
An older waitress with kind eyes and a name tag reading “Flo” brought them water and a first-aid kit without being asked. “Seen a few road rashes in my day, honey,” she said to Catalina, her tone warm. “Antiseptic’s in the blue bottle. Stings like the devil, but it works.”
When she left, Dominic opened the kit. He poured the clear liquid onto a square of gauze. “Let me see it.”
“I can do it.”
“Your hands are shaking.”
She looked down.They were. A fine, constant tremor. From the crash.From him. From everything. She exhaled, a sharp release of air, and slid out of the booth, extending her injured leg into the aisle. He knelt on the worn tile floor in front of her.
The silence was different here. Softer. A public privacy.
He pushed the torn denim aside gently. The wound was a long, angry scrape, oozing a faint pink. Gravel was ground into the meat of her knee. His touch was clinical, focused. He began cleaning it with the antiseptic, his movements precise.
She hissed, her fingers digging into the edge of the table. “Told you it stung.”
“Should’ve worn your leathers,” he muttered, not looking up.
“Wasn’t planning on taking a slide.”
“What were you planning?”
He dabbed at a stubborn piece of grit. The question hung in the air with the smell of iodine.
“To drive until I couldn’t feel it anymore,” she said, her voice low. “The noise in my head. The… everything.”
He stopped. His head was bent, his shaved crown vulnerable. “Did it work?”
“No.”
He resumed cleaning. “Me neither.”
He finished, applying a neat square bandage. His hand lingered for a moment on her calf, just above her boot. The warmth of his palm seeped through her jeans. It was a simple point of contact. It felt like a confession.
He sat back on his heels, looking up at her. “Brian’s bringing a truck and an enclosed trailer. We’ll load the Monster.”
“And then?”
“We’ll go to Vegas.”
She blinked. “What?”
“The meet. Friday. Brian and Leon will handle the money. But someone has to scope the buyer, read the room. You’re better at that than anyone.”
It was a pretext. A thin one. But it was a direction, a purpose that wasn’t about them. It was about the family, the job. It was solid ground.
“You’re using the job as a leash,” she said, but there was no bite in it. Just a tired observation.
“Yeah.” He stood up, brushing dust from his knees. “Is it working?”
Flo returned with two mugs of coffee. They were thick, industrial ceramic, steaming and black. Catalina wrapped her hands around hers, letting the heat bleed into her trembling fingers. “I don’t know what we’re doing, Dom.”
“We’re waiting for Brian.” He slid back into the booth opposite her. “We’re drinking shitty coffee. Then we’re driving to Vegas to do a job.” He took a sip, his face impassive. “That’s all we have to do right now.”
The simplicity of it was an anchor. She focused on the bitter taste of the coffee, the gritty feel of the mug, the hum of the fridge behind the counter. The world shrank to this booth, this bad coffee, this impossible man across from her who had punched through a window for her. Not grand, not dramatic. Just present.
They drank in silence for a while. The tension didn’t leave, but it changed shape. It became a shared weight, not a wall.
“Mia’s pissed at you,” Catalina finally said, a faint, almost-smile touching her lips.
“I know.”
“She made you promise something.”
“To tell you the truth.” He met her gaze over the rim of his mug. “The ugly parts.”
“I heard the ugly part last night.”
He put the mug down. “That wasn’t the truth. That was noise. A distraction I manufactured because I’m a coward.”
The admission was so blunt it stole her breath. She had never heard him use that word about himself.Ever.
“The truth,” he continued, his voice low and steady, “is that I would burn the whole world down before I’d let anyone else have you. Including myself, if that’s what it took to keep you safe. Even from me.” He paused, the words settling into the vinyl and Formica around them. “That’s the ugly part. It’s not desire. It’s possession. It’s selfish. It’s wrong. And it’s the truest thing I own.”
Catalina’s throat tightened. Her coffee cup trembled slightly in her hand. There was no poetry in it, no romantic gloss. It was a stark, brutal inventory of a broken heart. It mirrored her own.
She looked out the window at the empty, shimmering highway. “When we were kids, you broke Bobby Santos’s arm for pulling my hair.”
“He was a punk.”
“You were ten. You didn’t even think about it. You just did it.” She looked back at him. “This feels like that. But we’re not ten. And it’s not my hair.”
A truck’s air brakes hissed outside. A big diesel rig pulled into the lot, followed by a pristine Ford F-150 towing a sleek black enclosed trailer. Brian.
Dominic threw a twenty on the table. “Time to go.”
They walked out into the blinding desert sun. Brian hopped out of the truck, his eyes sweeping over them, assessing. He took in Catalina’s bandaged knee, Dom’s shattered window. He gave a slow nod, a mechanic’s approval of a patched-up system.
“Brought the stuff,” he said, his tone deliberately light. He jerked a thumb at the trailer. “Got a ramp. Should be easy.” He looked at Catalina. “You okay to ride in the truck? Leg might cramp up in the Charger.”
It was a practical consideration, not an intrusion. She appreciated it.
“Yeah,” she said.
Dominic tossed Brian the Charger’s keys. “You drive mine. I’ll ride with her.”
It wasn’t a discussion. Brian caught the keys, a flicker of understanding in his eyes. He was the buffer. The one who would follow, who would handle the logistics, who would give them the space they clearly needed in the cab of that truck.
Loading the Monster was a quiet, efficient ballet. The three of them worked with a wordless默契, rolling the bike up the ramp into the trailer’s dark belly. Catalina secured the straps with familiar, practiced motions. The bike was her baby. Seeing it tucked safely inside felt like locking away a part of the chaos.
She closed the trailer doors with a solid clang. The sound was final.
She and Dom climbed into the cab of the Ford. Brian was already pulling the Charger around, heading for the freeway on-ramp. Dominic started the truck, the diesel engine rumbling to life. The air conditioning blasted cold, crisp air, washing away the diner’s stale warmth.
They followed Brian onto the interstate, falling into formation. The Charger in front, the truck and trailer behind. A convoy heading east, into the heart of the desert. Into Vegas.
For a long time, neither spoke. The hum of the tires on asphalt was a hypnotic drone. The landscape was a relentless expanse of beige and scrub, punctuated by distant, purplish mountains.
Catalina finally shifted in her seat, turning her body slightly toward him. “Tell me about the buyer.”
Business. Safe territory.
Dom kept his eyes on the road, on the back of his own car. “Leon connected him. Imports exotic parts from overseas, needs a fast, quiet domestic distributor. The meet’s at a diner. Brian checked the location. It’s public, but the parking lot is big, open. Easy to see trouble coming.”
“Or to walk into a trap.”
“That’s why we’re scoping it. You’ll go in, get a coffee, sit where you can see the door and the lot. I’ll be outside.”
“In the Charger?”
“In something else. Something they won’t recognize.” He glanced at her. “You still have that blonde wig from the San Diego job?”
A ghost of a real smile touched her lips. “Maybe.”
“Use it.”
They lapsed back into silence, but it was different now. It was the comfortable, focused quiet of planning a job. Of being a crew. Of being partners. It was a familiar skin they could both slip into, a relief from the raw, exposed nerves of the past day.
After another twenty miles, she spoke again, her voice barely above the road noise. “I’m not sorry I left.”
He didn’t look at her. “I know.”
“But I’m sorry you had to look for me.”
This time, he did turn his head. Just for a second. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes held a weary, grateful depth. “Don’t be.”
They drove on. The sun began its slow fall toward the western horizon, painting the sky in strips of orange and violet. Vegas was still hours away, a distant glow on the edge of night. But for now, they were together in the cab of a rumbling truck, a wounded bike in a trailer behind them, and an impossible truth hanging, acknowledged but unspoken, in the cool, artificial air between them. They were moving forward. That was all they had. It was enough. For now.