Chapter 12 Twelve

Dax had called a meeting at seven.

Though not the full club. Six people. Me, Tank, Reaper, and three senior members I'd seen around the compound but hadn't spoken to directly. A woman named Vic who ran the club's books and had forearms covered in faded tattoos. A quiet, broad man called Dutch's cousin everyone called Priest. And Santos, who'd gone to Mercer Street with Crow the night before and come back with Reaper's sister.

Reaper sat at the end of the table with his hands flat in front of him. He looked like he hadn't slept. He probably hadn't.

Dax stood at the head of the table and didn't waste time.

"Kane knows the investigation is close," she said. "He knows the files have been moved. He knows Zed has seen the evidence. What he doesn't know is where the files are or when I'm planning to move on with him." She looked around the table. "We're going to use that window."

"How wide is the window?" Vic asked.

"Narrow. Days, not weeks, before he tries something." Dax pulled a sheet from the folder in front of her and slid copies down the table. "New protocols. Effective today. No phones in the garage or the storage areas. All course communication between me and Zed happens in this office or on the track, nowhere else. Compound access gets restricted to patched members only until race day. Prospects go on supervised detail."

The priest looked at the sheet. "Lenny?"

"Gone," Dax said. "Santos dealt with it last night."

Nobody asked what it meant. I didn't either.

"Reaper stays on the compound," Dax continued. "He rides no runs, handles no external contact, and answers only to me and Tank until this is finished." She looked at Reaper when she said it, not as a punishment, as a fact. Reaper nodded without looking up.

Tank was watching Dax with an expression I hadn't seen on him before. Not the hostility from day one, not the careful neutrality of the last few days. Something closer to respect, the kind that gets built from watching someone make hard calls without flinching.

"What do we do about the race?" Santos asked. He was looking at me.

"We prepare for it the same way we planned," Dax said. "Zed rides. We won the championship. Kane brings his operation to that event because he needs the win as much as we do. When he does, the federal contact moves." She paused. "But we have to get there first. Four and a half weeks. That's the job."

The meeting broke up fifteen minutes later. People moved with purpose, no side conversations, no lingering. The hole in the wall had been found and now everyone was focused on what came next.

I poured a coffee in the kitchen and Vic appeared beside me.

"You know what you're riding into," she said. It wasn't a question.

"More every day."

She looked at me for a moment with sharp, assessing eyes. "Chen Wei. I knew your father. Not well, but enough." She poured her own coffee. "He did beautiful work. The kind you don't see anymore." She picked up her mug. "Don't let them make this only about revenge. Your father wouldn't have wanted that."

She walked out before I could answer.

I stood in the kitchen with that sitting on me and drank my coffee.

The track session that afternoon was the hardest Dax had run me yet.

Six passes. Full speed from the second pass onward. She changed the debrief structure, no more stopping in the empty lot, we rode straight back to the compound and went over everything in her office with the door locked and the notes taken by hand, nothing on the laptop.

On the fifth pass I found the line through the blind crest at mile six.

It wasn't what I'd expected. The instinct was to scrub speed on the approach the way Venom did, to come over controlled and set up the left bend after. But the surface on the right side of the crest was smoother than the left, a strip maybe two meters wide that the deterioration hadn't touched yet. If you moved your line right on the approach and carried your speed, the front stayed planted over the crest and you hit the left bend with more momentum than Venom's setup allowed.

It was a half-second. Maybe more.

I didn't tell Dax immediately. I rode the sixth pass and did it again to make sure it wasn't luck.

It wasn't luck.

Back in the office she was looking at her notebook when I sat down.

"The crest," I said.

She looked up.

"Right side of the approach. The surface is cleaner. If you move the line over and carry speed instead of scrubbing, the front stays down and you come out of the left bend faster than Venom's setup." I looked at her. "Half a second minimum."

Dax was quiet for a moment. She looked at her notes, then back at me. "You ran it twice."

"Yes."

"Same result both times?"

"Yes."

She wrote it down. Closed the notebook. "That puts you inside two seconds."

"If I close the rest in the technical sections, it's enough."

She looked at me steadily. "Venom is going to know his setup is compromised the moment you come out of that crest ahead of him. He'll adjust."

"Let him adjust. Adjusting mid-race is not the same as having a line that's been built for weeks."

Something in her expression shifted. She held my gaze for a second longer than usual, then looked back at the desk. "Good," she said.

Just that. One word. The same way she'd said it after the switchback on the third lap.

I stood to leave.

"Vic talked to you this morning," she said.

I stopped. "Yes."

"What did she say?"

"That she knew my father. That his work was beautiful." I paused. "That I shouldn't let this become only about revenge."

Dax was quiet for a moment. "She's right."

"I know." I looked back at her. "Doesn't make it easier."

"No," she said. "It doesn't."

I opened the door.

"Zed." Her voice was lower than usual. I turned. She was looking at the desk, not at me. "What Vic said about your father. It's true. I've seen the bikes he built for this club. Dutch sold two of them to cover debts three years ago. I bought them back." She paused. "They're in the back of the garage. Under the covers near the east wall."

I stood in the doorway and didn't move for a second.

"I bought them back the same month I started building the case," she said. "I don't know what I planned to do with them. I just knew they shouldn't be gone."

She picked up her pen and went back to her notes like she hadn't just handed me something that cracked three years of certainty straight down the middle.

I walked to the garage.

I found the east wall. Two bikes under canvas covers, pushed back against the shelving like they'd been waiting quietly for someone to remember they existed.

I pulled the cover off the first one.

My father's work. Unmistakable. The way he shaped a tank, the way he ran his lines, the particular angle of his custom exhaust brackets. I'd grown up watching these details come to life under his hands in our garage on Clement Street.

I stood there for a long time with my hand on the handlebar.

Then I put the cover back, walked to the Ducati, and picked up my tools.

I had two seconds to close and four and a half weeks to close them in.

My father had built beautiful things in hard circumstances his whole life.

The least I could do was finish what he started.