Page 3 of Dirty Mechanic

He jams the gun into my ribs and shoves me toward the tucked car in the bushes.

“We’ve got an appointment at City Hall.” He eases the passenger door open like we’re going on some twisted date.

“City Hall?” I swallow smoke.

His hand clamps down on my arm. “You owe me, Belle. You’re going to pay off my father’s debt.”

What debt?

What debt?

My phone buzzes again. I know it’s Derek, but Mike snatches it before I can even think.

“No distractions.” He slides it into his pocket like he owns me. “You’re mine now.”

Instant regret flares in my chest. Derek’s been trying to reach me for months, and I never answered. I can still hear his voice in those messages, pleading, angry, begging me to come home. But I was too ashamed. Too scared he’d hate me for cutting him off while I tried to figure out my life. In his last voicemail, he said he’d wait for me at my brother’s wedding. And that’s when I realized: without Derek, I might as well not be alive.

My stomach flips, and my brain scrambles for an exit that doesn’t exist. Mike brushes my bangs aside like he has any right to touch me. His fingers graze my forehead with a mocking tenderness that curdles my stomach.

“You’re my golden ticket, Belle. Huntz never filed papers for my mother and never got us citizenship. Since you killed him... You owe me.” His voice is a low rasp in the space between us. “You’re going to be my wife.”

He leans in even closer. “You’re gonna get me a green card.”

“I will never?—”

“It’s either that or prison.” He flings my journal onto the dash like a royal flush in a game of poker I never agreed to play. “Pick your poison. And let’s be honest, orange is not your color.”

The bile rises so fast up my throat, I taste acid. The car lurches forward, the engine roaring like it knows it’s carrying me straight to hell.

I twist in my seat for one last look.

My childhood home collapses in on itself, flames devouring the last fragile pieces of who I used to be as friends and family rush toward the fire. Everything inside me breaks.

Mike floors the gas, and just like that, I’m gone.

Two days later, I’m on the other side of the country, on the outskirts of San Francisco, drifting through a gloomy courthouse. My heels echo like a death knell and my black dress is funeral linen cinched too tight. This isn’t a wedding. It’s my burial.

The bouquet he shoved into my hand wilts with poetic timing, petals bruised and curling. Thorns bite into my palms, but the pain is dull and distant.

Mike prowls beside me.

“Pick up the pace,” he elbows my ribs right where the bruises are blooming and raw, from his “accidental” shove into the door frame last night.

I keep my shoulders squared. Surviving is more important than flinching.

The officiant stands at a plain podium in a gray suit, with clipboard in his hands, and no soul.

I could scream. Run. Beg.

But I already tried that. And got shoved into a door frame.

“Why are you doing this?” My voice cracks against the vaulted ceiling.

Mike’s smirk is all knives. “Without that green card, everything I built disappears. Dear, dead Dad had property in Lords Valley. It’ll be easier to claim if I’m a citizen. This isn’t about romance, sweetheart. It’s survival. I need you. And you?” He leans close and his breath sours my cheek. “You need to keep your pretty little self out of jail and keep your lover boy from spending the rest of his life behind bars, or I’ll expose all your journal confessions.”

I almost laugh. Almost.

Because this is insanity.