Chapter 11 Eleven

Dax was standing behind the desk. She didn't sit. She didn't speak immediately. She let him stand there in the silence for a full five seconds, which was longer than it sounds when nobody in the room is breathing easily.

Then she put the listening device on the desk between them.

Reaper looked at it. Something moved behind his eyes, fast and controlled, there and gone before most people would have caught it. But Dax wasn't most people and neither, by now, was I.

"Found it in the storage room," she said. "Behind the oil canisters. Same shelf you were working near on Tuesday."

"Could have been anyone," Reaper said.

"It could have." Dax reached into the desk drawer and pulled out her laptop. She turned it around. A still image on the screen, timestamp in the corner, Tuesday at 2:17 PM, the storage room, grainy but clear enough. Reaper's hand going behind the oil canisters. "But it wasn't."

The room went quiet in a different way than before.

Reaper looked at the screen for a long moment. Then he looked at Dax, and whatever calculation he'd been running behind that easy face finally stopped running. His shoulders dropped half an inch. Not defeat exactly. More like a man who'd been holding something heavy for a long time and had just decided to put it down.

"How long have you known?" he said.

"Long enough." Dax closed the laptop. "I want to know what you told Kane tonight."

"Dax"

"What did you tell him, Reaper."

He looked at Tank. Tank looked straight back at him with nothing on his face that was going to help him.

"I told him you moved the files," Reaper said. "That you were close to making a move."

"What else?"

A pause. "That the Chen kid had seen the evidence. That he knew the full picture."

Dax's expression didn't change. "So Kane knows Zed is a liability to him, not just a rider."

"I didn't say it like that."

"You didn't have to." She came around the desk slowly and stopped in front of him. She was half a foot shorter than him and it didn't matter at all. "Eleven years, Reaper. You've been in this club for eleven years. You rode with us when we had nothing. You were there when Marcus died." Her voice stayed level. "Why."

Reaper's jaw worked. He looked at the floor. "Kane has my sister. Has had her for eight months. She borrowed money from one of his fronts and couldn't pay. He's been holding that over me since March." He looked up. "I didn't have a choice, Dax."

The room stayed quiet. Tank made a sound in his throat that wasn't quite a word.

Dax looked at Reaper for a long time. I watched her face, the way she processed it, the way the information landed and got weighed against everything else she was already carrying.

"You should have come to me in March," she said.

"I know."

"You let him into this compound. You let him hear every conversation, every plan, everything I've been building." Her voice was still level but there was something underneath it now, not anger, something colder than anger. "Because of that, Kane's men are circling this building tonight and I have a rider who is now a target for reasons that have nothing to do with the race."

Reaper said nothing.

"Where is your sister?" Dax said. He blinked. "What?"

"Where is she, Reaper. Right now, tonight. Where does Kane have her?"

He looked at her like he was trying to figure out what the question was actually asking. "East side. There's a house on Mercer Street he uses for—"

"Tank." Dax didn't look away from Reaper. "Crow and Santos. Mercer Street. Now."

Tank pulled out his phone and was already dialing as he walked out.

Reaper stared at Dax. "You're going to get her out."

"I'm going to try." She crossed back behind the desk. "Sit down. You're not going anywhere tonight, and you're going to tell me everything you told Kane. Every conversation, every detail, in order. Starting from March."

Reaper sat down. He looked like a man who had been underwater for eight months and had just broken the surface and wasn't sure yet if the air was real.

I stood up. "I'll wait outside." "Stay," Dax said.

I sat back down.

She pulled out a notepad and a pen and looked at Reaper. "Start talking."

He talked for forty minutes. Dax wrote, asked questions, wrote more. I listened and said nothing. The picture that built itself from Reaper's words was worse than I'd expected and about as bad as Dax had probably planned for. Kane had known about the investigation for five months. He knew about the federal contact. He knew the evidence had been moved. He didn't know where, which was the only thing working in our favor.

He also knew about the championship plan. Not the full shape of it, not what Dax intended to do with the win, but enough to know she was using it as a pressure point.

Which meant Venom and Cage weren't just there to win a race anymore.

They were there to make sure I didn't finish one.

When Reaper finished, Dax put down the pen and looked at her notes for a moment. Then her phone buzzed on the desk. She picked it up, read the message, and set it back down.

"Crow has your sister," she said. "She's safe."

Reaper put his face in his hands. His shoulders shook once, hard, and then he pulled himself back together with the effort of a man who hadn't let himself fall apart in a long time and wasn't going to start now.

Tank came back through the door two minutes later. He looked at Dax. She looked at him. Something passed between them that didn't need words.

"The patrol on the east road," Tank said. "It stopped twenty minutes ago."

"Kane's pulling back," Dax said. "For tonight." She looked at the listening device still sitting on the desk. "He knows we found it. He'll reassess."

"How long before he moves again?" I asked.

"Days. Maybe less." She looked at me. "Which means the timeline for everything moves up. I was planning to contact the federal agent after the championship. That's not possible now."

"So you contact them before."

"If I contact them before the race, Kane finds out and runs. He's been running from federal exposure for three years. He has contingencies." She shook her head. "I need him at that championship. I need him physically present and confident enough to have brought his people, his evidence, his operation. If he runs before that, we lose half the case."

"Then we hold the line until race day," I said.

"Four and a half weeks," she said. "With Kane knowing we're close. With Cage and Venom knowing you're the rider." She looked at me steadily. "Still want to be in this room?"

I thought about my father slumped over an engine with his tools still in his hands. I thought about Marcus Steele and Reaper's sister and two years of Dax sitting in this office building a case alone while the man responsible rode free.

"I was in this room before I knew any of that," I said. "That hasn't changed."

Something moved across her face. Small and fast, the same flash I'd seen at the private track when I came out of the switchback clean. She looked back at her notes before I could read it properly.

"Get some sleep," she said. "Both of you. Tomorrow we change every protocol in this compound and we start again."

I walked to the door. Behind me I heard Reaper say her name, quiet, like a man who owed a debt he didn't know how to start paying.

Dax's voice came back, low and even. "We'll talk tomorrow, Reaper. Get some rest."

I walked down the hall to my room and sat on the edge of the bed with my boots still on.

Four and a half weeks.

Kane knew my name now. Knew my face. Knew I'd seen everything.

I reached under the bed and pulled out the photograph of my father and Marcus Steele. Looked at it for a moment in the low light.

Then I put it back, lay down, and stared at the ceiling.

The road ahead just got a lot longer and a lot more dangerous.

But I'd been riding dangerous roads in the dark for three years.

The difference now was that I finally knew where I was going.