Chapter 1
The grease never came out. Not really.
Mateo De La Cruz had stopped fighting it years ago, the same way he'd stopped fighting a lot of things about himself—the scars, the size of his hands, the way people crossed streets when they saw him coming. The black grime lived under his fingernails, ground into the creases of his knuckles, worked so deep into the whorls of his fingerprints that no amount of orange industrial soap could dig it back out. It was part of him now. Like the ink crawling up both arms. Like the steel through his eyebrow and tongue. Like the low, constant hum of something ugly sitting in his chest that felt heavier than the Harley Softail currently pinning him to the concrete.
The floor bit into his spine through his shirt. He didn't move. Just stared up into the guts of the bike, into chrome and cable and three weeks of work, and let the sweat roll down into his ears. April in Texas didn't care that it wasn't summer yet. The garage held heat like a closed fist—metal walls sweating, the smell of gasoline and hot rubber thick enough to chew.
His knuckles ached.
The split skin over three of them kept cracking every time he closed his fist around a wrench, weeping a thin line of red into the grease already there. Two nights ago, some mouthy drunk outside the bar had looked at Diego's face—the scar dragging from his hairline, through his eyebrow, down to his cheekbone like a fault line—and said something about strays that should've been put down.
Mateo had put him through a table before the guy finished the sentence.
Worth it. Every damn time.
The Virgin Mary inked over his heart watched him with her sad painted eyes, her hands folded in prayer that had never once done him any good. Nineteen years old when he got her, some cabrón in Austin telling him she'd keep him safe. She hadn't kept him from anything. Not the fights. Not the years. Not himself.
Across the bay, Diego worked in silence, the way he always did. A ratchet clicking in short, even bursts. The occasional hiss of compressed air. Diego didn't waste words when his hands could say it better—hadn't since they were boys, since the world taught him early that people flinched less from silence than from his voice coming out of that face. Mateo understood him better in the quiet than most people understood each other with a hundred words a day. That was twins for you. Or maybe just them.
They'd built this place with their own hands—stained concrete, chain-hung work lights throwing shadows sharp enough to cut, tools racked with a precision that came from two men who needed to control something when everything else in their lives ran on chaos and blood. The Harley above him was close to finished. Candy-apple red, black flames licking off the tank, an exhaust that would sound like the mountain itself clearing its throat.
His phone buzzed against the workbench.
He didn't reach for it. Didn't have to. He already knew the shape of it—had felt this exact silence building for weeks, the way you feel a storm pressure-drop before the first drop of rain hits.
The phone buzzed again.
Chingada madre.
"You gonna get that?" Diego's voice, low and gravel-rough, cut through the clang of metal.
"No."
"Could be imported."
"It's not."
Silence dropped back over them, comfortable as a blanket. Mateo listened to his brother work and thought that this—grease, heat, the two of them—was the only home that had never once made him feel like too much.
The phone buzzed a third time. He finally rolled out from under the bike, back protesting, shoulders carrying tension that hadn't fully unclenched in longer than he wanted to admit.
He wiped his hand on his jeans before he grabbed the phone, leaving a black smear across the glass anyway. Three texts. Veronica.
can't do dinner tonight, something came up
don't make it a thing mateo, i have a life outside of you two
if you're gonna sulk just say so
No apology in it. No warmth. Just the flat, bored contempt she'd been serving up for weeks now, like she was doing them a favor by staying at all.
Diego's ratchet stopped.
"She cancel?"
"Yeah."
"Second time this month."
"I know."
Mateo stared at the screen until the words blurred into gray static, and underneath the irritation was something colder, something that had been building since the start—the sense that Veronica had never actually wanted them. She wanted the story. Two big tattooed brothers fighting over her, sharing her, proving with their hands and their reputation exactly how much she mattered. She liked walking into a bar on Mateo's arm while Diego trailed a step behind, liked the way other women's eyes followed them, liked being the center of that particular storm.
She just didn't like the storm itself.
Didn't like his hands—too rough, she'd said once, like sandpaper, like she expected a man who rebuilt engines for a living to have the palms of a banker. Didn't like the grease that never fully scrubbed out from under his nails, didn't like the way Diego's scar made strangers stare, didn't like when Spanish slipped out of them mid-argument or mid-sex like it was something shameful instead of the first language either of them had ever loved in.
She'd liked the idea of dangerous. The reality of it—two men who needed to share, who needed control in the bedroom the way they needed air, who needed a woman willing to belong to both of them completely and not just borrow the fantasy for a night out—that reality made her curl her lip like she'd bitten something rotten.
We need to talk, the last text read, and Mateo already knew exactly what talking would mean. An ultimatum dressed up as concern. A demand that they be smaller, softer, less. Or else.
There would be an or else. There was always an or else, with her.
He didn't answer. Just deleted the string of messages and set the phone face-down on the bench like it had personally offended him.
"She's done," he said, flat.
"Good," Diego said, without looking up.
Mateo grabbed the beer he'd left sweating on the workbench, warm now, tasting like piss and bitterness that felt appropriate. He lit the cigarette tucked behind his ear with the Zippo Diego had given him at sixteen—silver, a skull and crossbones etched into the casing—and let the smoke drag rough down his throat. Mama would've smacked the cigarette right out of his mouth if she caught him. Mama wasn't here.
He thought about the last time they'd actually touched Veronica with any real want behind it, and even that memory came back tainted—her tensing under his hands like she was enduring something, her eyes flicking to Diego's scar and away again fast, like she had to brace herself every single time before she let him near her. Like being with them was a transaction she tolerated for what it bought her. Status. A story. Something to hold over other women in this small, gossiping town who wouldn't dare go near the De La Cruz brothers.
She'd never once looked at either of them like they were something worth keeping. Only something worth having, which wasn't the same thing at all.
"We're not built for what women like that want," Diego said quietly, still not looking over, his eyes on some middle distance that had nothing to do with the engine in front of him. "The soft kind. The kind that doesn't cost anything to hold."
Mateo didn't answer. There wasn't an answer that didn't taste like defeat.
They stood there in the heat and the grease and the smell of hot metal, the mountain pressing down outside the open bay door like it was trying to remind them whose land this was, whose blood ran through it. Somewhere up that mountain, Mama was probably already cooking for Sunday, already gathering the family that never seemed to run out of noise or need. Down below, in town, people still crossed streets. Still whispered De La Cruz like a curse and a rumor in the same breath.
They'd been sharing women since they were old enough to understand what that meant—it ran in the De La Cruz blood the way violence and loyalty did, two men, one woman, all of them bound tighter for it instead of torn apart. The town called it wrong. Called it a lot of things. It was just how they'd always done things, how their father had done things before some rival's bullet ended that particular story early.
Most women ran the second they understood it wasn't a phase, wasn't a fantasy that ended with the lights back on. That there was no choosing one twin over the other, no version of this where she got to keep the easy one and cut the scarred one loose. They'd tried it separate once, years back—two women, two beds, two arrangements running parallel—and it had lasted three miserable months before they'd both understood sharing wasn't a preference. It was the only way either of them had ever known how to love something all the way through.
Veronica had said she understood that, once, in the beginning. She'd lied.
Mateo's knuckles split open again around the wrench, fresh blood mixing into old grease, and he didn't stop to wrap it. Just let it bleed, let it join every other stain already living in his skin.
"You good?" Diego asked, not looking up.
"Yeah."
"Mentiroso."
Mateo almost smiled. Almost. "Yeah."
The sun dropped behind the ridge outside, bleeding orange and then red through the open bay door, painting the tools and the chrome and the two of them in the color of something dying slow. The mountain went dark and watchful the way it always did at dusk, holding its secrets the way it held its dead.
Maybe that's all they'd ever be to anyone who came close enough to look. Too big, too marked, too much. Two men who fixed everything with their hands except the thing they actually wanted fixed.
But he had Diego. Had this garage, this grease, this ground that had raised four brothers and buried a father and kept going anyway. Had a family up that mountain that understood exactly what it meant to be too much for the rest of the world, and loved them for it instead of despite it.
It wasn't enough. But it was something to hold onto while the rest of it burned down around them.
The engine sat half-finished between them, patient, waiting on hands that knew how to bring dead things back. It would take hours yet. Maybe days.
They'd finish it. They always did.
Because finishing meant purpose. Meant something to do with hands built for breaking things, besides reaching for another woman who'd already decided, somewhere behind her pretty, bored eyes, that she was owed better than the De La Cruz name.
The radio crackled out old outlaw country, all dead men and second chances that never came. Fluorescent light buzzed overhead, throwing hard shadows across scarred knuckles and inked forearms and a face carved open by a knife three years gone.
And in the heat, in the grease, in the long red dying light, two brothers worked in silence.
Waiting for something to change.
Certain, in the marrow-deep way you're certain of weather and grief, that it never would.
Working anyway.
Because it was all they had left to give.
