"Ow!" Harper King swallowed a curse as she sucked on her pinched thumb. The big Corvette suspended above her was in decent shape, but the axle was dented all to hell. The owner had been pissed when she'd recommended he replace the axle or sell the car. Given that it was an expensive classic, he'd opted for the replacement, but he'd grumbled the entire time. Between the parts and labor to fix them, new axles could cost almost as much as the car itself. She didn't mind the work, but the customers at King Auto Repair usually didn't like the price.

"You okay, Harper?" A deep voice came from nearby. She glanced around and saw her older brother's boots as he stopped next to the car she was beneath.

"Yeah, I'm fine, Mason." She lay flat on her creeper and pushed herself so she rolled out from underneath the Corvette. Her thumb still stung from where it had gotten caught in part of the undercarriage. She glowered at the car. "This axle, though, is going to have a very bad day tomorrow." She tilted her left wrist to check her watch. It was a little after nine at night, and her brother should have been working, not here in the garage.

Mason held out a hand, his brown eyes full of worry. He and Liam didn't approve of her running the mechanic shop on her own, but she was damned good at it, and they needed to get with the century.

Mason's eyes darkened with shadows, and his voice lowered. "Liam and I have a meeting tonight. You got any more jobs, or can you watch the bar with Neil for the rest of the night?"

She let Mason lift her up onto her feet, and she glanced around at the shop. "Yeah, I can watch it for you." She didn't mind tending bar most of the time, but her true love was the auto shop.

King Auto Repair shared a building with King's Bar, the bar that her brothers ran together. It wasn't much, but given that Lawrence, Kansas, was a little college town of just under a hundred thousand people, it passed for the center of the local nightlife.

Harper wiped at the sweat on her brow. It was quiet. The usual sounds of electric drills, men whistling, car hoods slamming, and the symphony of choking engines, sputtering motors, and hydraulic ramps going up and down were absent since they'd closed two hours ago. Her two employees, Jeff and Alan, had already left for the day. The shop had closed at seven, and she'd been so deep into her work that she'd lost track of time. It wasn't the first time that had happened. When she was working, she could dive so deep into the job that the rest of the world just fell away.

"You and Liam will be careful, won't you?" she asked him.

Mason, at twenty—nine, and Liam, at thirty—one, were grown men, but Harper still worried about them. Ever since they had lost their parents on K—Day, the day the Krinar invaded Earth, the three of them seemed to be standing alone against the world.

"We'll be fine," Mason promised her. He and Liam wouldn't let her join their meetings because they thought it was too dangerous for her. They were running a resistance group out of the back of the bar. Every couple of weeks they held a meeting with local men and women who wanted to find a way to resist the Krinar occupation. But even if they had let her join, she wouldn't have. Humans couldn't fight the Krinar—or the Ks, as most humans called them—and it was just out of plain old human stubbornness that they even tried.

From the moment they had arrived five years ago, the aliens had taken charge, almost effortlessly. They looked human enough, just insanely attractive, like muscled supermodels. They weren't skinny and gray with black oval eyes like many people obsessed with extraterrestrials had expected them to be, and they sure as shit didn't need help phoning home like E.T. The Krinar were stronger, faster, and smarter than humans. They lived for thousands of years and had technology that made Earth science look like humans were still banging rocks together trying to make fire.

We never stood a chance when they invaded. What makes anyone think we have one now?

Harper sighed and rubbed her grease—covered hands on a towel and watched Mason walk back through the hall that connected the bar to the garage. Then she busied herself with closing down the shop. She made a note in her calendar to call the Corvette owner tomorrow with an update, but the simple task of writing tended to make her head hurt.

She'd been diagnosed with severe dyslexia in high school. She'd graduated high school, barely, but she hadn't been able to get into college. Numbers were easier to write, but words and names? It was like she was watching the letters dance around the page, and it gave her a migraine. If her father hadn't discovered she had a knack for mechanics, she didn't know where she might have ended up.

Thankfully, engines, mechanics, and electronics all came to her with stunning clarity. When she'd turned eighteen, she'd been able to take over her father's repair shop.

Harper paused to look at the photo of her parents that hung behind the reception desk inside the shop. In the photo her parents were standing outside the repair shop entrance. It had been taken nearly twenty years ago when she was only four. Her father beamed with pride, and her mother was looking at him with admiration. They'd been so in love, so in tune with one another.

And they were gone.

A deep sting lanced through Harper's chest, a pain of loss and sorrow that would never fully heal, no matter how much time had passed. No one deserved to die the way they had.

She kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed them to the glass of the framed photo. "Night, Mom and Dad."

Then she lowered the shop doors, set the alarm system, turned off the lights, and passed through the hall and into the small office between the auto shop and the bar. The large desk against the far wall by the single window was littered with paperwork from both the shop and the bar. Harper growled. Every night she came back here she had to clean up after Mason and Liam. They were great at dealing with vendors and customers, but they sucked at basic business organization and bookkeeping. She practically had to pester them to keep up their records.

Harper shoved the papers aside to retrieve the folded set of clean clothes she brought to work every day. Shop work always left her khaki work suit covered in grease. She changed into her jean shorts and T—shirt with the King's Bar logo, a retro—looking crown beneath the King name in a bold stylistic font. Then she removed her work boots and slipped on some simple leather sandals. She wasn't girly, not compared to most girls she knew, but after work she did like to feel a bit more feminine, even if she was tending bar for her older brothers.

As she exited the office, she could hear the rowdy sounds of the bar over the thrumming bass of the bar's modern jukebox. She opened the door and scanned the room. The walnut wood tables and even the bar itself were full, which was typical for a Saturday night. The kids from the University of Kansas loved to come and hang out after tough classes all week.

"Harper!" Jessie Lang, one of the full—time waitresses, grinned and waved at Harper. Jessie carried a full tray of beers toward a table of men who were watching the nearest flat—screen TV hanging from one of the bar's support beams. They whooped as someone made a touchdown. College football was serious business in Kansas, and any good bar worth its salt would have a dozen TVs up and running with the latest games on.

Harper smiled and waved at Jessie as they shared an amused shrug at the men talking football stats. She and Jessie were close in age, and she usually spent her free weekends hanging out with Jessie.

A lot had changed since the Krinar had arrived. They had shut down production of beef and poultry, for one thing. Enforced veganism, most people called it, and she had to admit, of all the jackbooted declarations she had expected to come down the pipe from their new overlords, that was pretty damn close to the bottom of the list.

But it had hit the Midwest hard. Many cities became ghost towns, and people had moved away and sold their grazing fields, which were unsuitable for crops and were now empty and valueless. It was why so much resistance had formed here against the Krinar. Mason and Liam had mobilized their friends who'd lost work when their homes had been sucked into the economic black hole the Krinar invasion had created. And their friends had brought other friends, and so on.

All because those damn aliens didn't eat meat.

If I ever meet one of them, I'll shove a cheeseburger right down their throat. The rebellious thought made her smile widen. Having to eat the plant—based protein burger patties made her gag.