Page 1 of Agor the Merciless (Orc Mates #10)

The engine growled, its irregular stutter breaking the rhythm of the garage’s noise.

Tools clanged against metal, impact wrenches whined, and classic rock blared from a radio caked with grime.

Zoe Cross leaned over the pickup truck’s open engine bay, her hair pulled back in a ponytail that brushed her shoulders.

Cross her older brother Rick beside him, mirroring the posture their grandfather had passed down through generations of Cross men.

“Yeah, Dad.” Rick’s words dripped with false concern. “I feel for poor Mark, having to put up with all this. Not very ladylike, is it?”

“How much longer on the Harrison truck?” Her father’s boots thudded across the floor as he stepped closer. “We’ve got three more waiting.”

“Done.” Zoe wiped her hands on a rag hanging from her back pocket. “Running perfect now.”

“Guess you’re good for something after all.” Her father chuckled. “Mark coming by later? The boy’s got the patience of a saint.”

“I wonder what his buddies at the bank think,” Rick added. “Dating a grease monkey like you.”

“Think he makes her wash her hands before she touches him?”

They laughed.

“I’ll call Harrison.” Zoe tossed the dirty rag from her back pocket onto a pile of others, grabbed a clean one from the workbench, and wiped her hands more thoroughly, walking toward the small glass-walled office without meeting their eyes.

“You’ve got engine oil on your cheek.” Rick pointed out. “Might want to clean up if you’re seeing Mark tonight. A man likes his women to look like women, not mechanics.”

She clenched her jaw. At this point, their words were noise she had learned to ignore. But they echoed what Mark said in his gentler, more devastating way.

Babe, you know I support your... hobby. But maybe don’t talk about carburetors at dinner with my colleagues? It can be intimidating. Not very attractive when you know more about cars than the guys do.

Mark with his clean fingernails and pressed shirts. Mark who called her “his little tomboy” with a laugh. Mark who introduced her as, “Zoe, she works at her dad’s garage” instead of, “Zoe, the best mechanic in the county.”

Maybe they were right. Maybe she should try harder to be what Mark wanted.

The alternative looked like the empty apartment she returned to every night, with its second-hand furniture and bare walls.

At least with Mark, she wasn’t alone. At least with Mark, she had a shield against evenings filled with only her spiraling thoughts.

She dialed Harrison’s number from the cracked phone on the desk, arranged for him to pick up his truck, then leaned against the desk and rubbed her temples. The Harrison truck was fixed. Three more waited. The work, at least, made sense.

Zoe grabbed her toolbox from beside the office door and made her way back into the main work area.

Her father and Rick had disappeared into the break room, their laughter mingling with the sound of a sports game on TV.

She glanced at the three vehicles waiting for her attention: a minivan with transmission issues, an SUV needing brake work, and a Chevrolet with an oil leak.

She chose the Chevy, setting her toolbox down beside the car and rolling the hydraulic lift into position.

After securing the lift arms under the vehicle’s frame, she hit the button to raise it to working height.

Once it was elevated, she pulled her creeper board from under a workbench, lay back on it, and kicked off with her feet to slide under the Chevrolet on lift number three.

The floor felt cold through the thin fabric of her coveralls as she positioned herself under the chassis.

Above her, the undercarriage of the car told its own story of neglect – rust patches spreading like disease, fluid stains marking past leaks.

Her gaze was fixed on the lift mechanism instead of the car. She’d seen the problems worsening for weeks with growing concern. The main cable stretched taut under the weight of the Chevy, with frayed strands splaying from the metal like split hairs.

“Someone should replace that,” she muttered.

She reached up with her wrench to inspect a leaking transmission seal just as the radio switched to a Zeppelin song, guitars wailing through the otherwise empty garage.

The sound that followed wasn’t music.

It was a loud, terrifying “crack!”

The noise ripped through the garage, and for one suspended moment, nothing happened, then the fall began.

The Chevrolet lurched downward, the car tilting as the lift collapsed and twisted in its descent, sending a shower of rust and metal particles raining down into her eyes as the massive weight of the vehicle dropped with increasing speed.

Zoe scrambled under the falling mass, reacting instinctively.

She rolled left, pushing against the ground with her legs while her right arm extended outward, reaching for clear space beyond the chassis that threatened to crush her.

Too slow. The frame pinned her arm to the floor.

There was a sickening crunch as her limb was crushed.

Pain shot from her fingers to her shoulder.

It erased everything else – her name, the garage, her very existence – until there was only this moment, this unbearable weight pinning her to the ground.

She screamed and kept screaming as footsteps pounded toward where she lay. Her father and Rick appeared at the edge of her vision. Hope pierced through the pain for a second. They’d come for her, they were going to help her, save her.

They stopped short, their eyes fixing not on her trapped arm but on the damaged equipment, the car’s crumpled axle, the broken hydraulic system that would be thousands of dollars in repairs.

“Dammit!” Her father’s face contorted with fury as he surveyed the scene. “That’s a three-thousand-dollar lift! And look at the axle on the Chevy!”

Rick’s boots stepped closer, but still not to her. “I told you that cable was worn! Why is she so careless?”

Zoe stared up at them, mouth open and tears streaming from her eyes, while the pain in her arm throbbed with her heartbeat. She started feeling something worse than the excruciating physical pain.

They hadn’t asked if she was okay.

They hadn’t moved to free her arm.

They were arguing about equipment costs.

The truth she’d been avoiding crystallized.

Her gaze shifted from their angry faces to her trapped arm, bent at an impossible angle with bone torn through skin and blood pooling on the ground.

She wasn’t family, she was inventory, a tool that had just broken.

All those years of backhanded compliments, all those times they’d talked over her, around her, about her, suddenly aligned into perfect clarity: they’d never seen her as anything but an asset, a curiosity, something to be used until it broke down.

“…the insurance claim might not cover…”

“…should’ve replaced…”

“…her fault…”

“…customer’s going to be pissed…”

They moved in and out of her vision, gesturing at the damage, checking the broken cable, examining the car.

The pain in her arm transformed into something with teeth and claws that tore at her flesh.

Her vision narrowed, her thoughts faded one by one, until a single one remained: they weren’t going to help her.

She wasn’t worth a phone call to 911. She had been abandoned.

Her breathing caught on a sob that turned into a whimper.

They didn’t turn around, didn’t acknowledge the sound.

Something hardened inside her chest, a resolve forming from agony and betrayal, solidifying into something unbreakable.

If they wouldn’t save her, she would save herself.

She shifted her weight, trying to relieve the strain on her trapped arm.

Fresh agony bloomed in every cell of her body.

She bit down on her lip as she starting moving her left hand to the pocket of her coveralls.

Sweat beaded on her forehead and mingled with tears that blurred her vision.

Her fingers, slick with blood, fumbled at the edge of her pocket.

Finally, her fingertips brushed the edge of her phone, accidentally pushing it deeper into the fabric.

“No,” she whispered.

She took a breath, steeled herself, and plunged her hand into her pocket.

The movement twisted her body and shifted her broken arm until black spots danced across her vision.

She bit back another scream. Her fingers closed around the phone.

Pulling it out felt like scaling a mountain.

The device nearly slipped from her blood-slick grasp several times before she managed to bring it before her eyes.

Her thumb hovered over the screen. In the background, her father and Rick continued their assessment, debating repair costs, and scheduling problems, and customer reactions.

They never said her name, never mentioned medical care, never acknowledged their daughter and sister lay bleeding on the floor.

Three taps.

9-1-1.