Chapter 5 Five

"Three laps," she said. "Full throttle on the straight. The switchback at the north end is tighter than anything you've raced. Don't find out how tight the hard way."

"What's the surface like coming out of it?"

"Broken. The outside edge is worse." She pushed off the fence post. "The clock starts when you move."

I pulled my helmet on, rolled to the two orange cones Reaper had set as the start line, and opened the throttle.

The Ducati launched hard into the dark. Cold air hit my chest like a fist. Pine trees blurred into a single wall on both sides. The engine was clean and honest under me, every adjustment I'd made that morning paying back in real time, nothing hesitating, nothing pulling. Just power going exactly where I asked it.

Then the switchback came out of the dark.

Near ninety degrees. Concrete barriers flush on the outside edge. No run-off, no margin, no room to change your mind once you committed.

I braked hard. Dropped two gears. Threw the bike in.

The rear stepped out. My knee scraped asphalt. One long half-second where the machine was making its own decisions and I was just along for the outcome.

I leaned harder. The tire bit. We came around.

I was back on the throttle before the adrenaline finished hitting.

Second lap cleaner. Third cleaner still.

I rolled back to the cones and pulled off my helmet. Pulse loud, hands steady. Three laps where nothing existed except the road and the next decision in front of me. Three laps where Zed Chen, with his dead father and his inherited debt and his enemy's spare room, disappeared entirely.

I almost didn't want to stop, believe me.

Dax walked over from the edge of the lamplight. She'd been standing there while I rode and I hadn't noticed when she moved. She stopped a few feet away and looked at me the way she'd looked at the Road Glide before she told Tank he'd been doing it wrong for years.

"The first switchback nearly had you," she said.

"Nearly."

"Venom doesn't nearly." She pulled a folded map from her vest and spread it flat across the Ducati's headlight. "Eight miles total. Three straights, two technical sections, a blind crest at mile six that swallows time and doesn't give it back. He's won the last two championships. He'll know every crack in that road before race day."

I leaned over the map. "So will I."

She looked sideways at me. Something shifted in her expression, just barely, the same way it had when the Road Glide fired up clean that morning. She folded the map before I'd finished reading it.

"Reconnaissance starts tomorrow," she said. "You ride the course clean on the first pass. No pushing, just reading. We build from there."

"You've been watching me race," I said. "Before last night."

"I need you at your best, not your bravest. Those aren't the same thing."

"How long have you been watching, Dax?"

She tucked the map back into her vest and turned toward her Harley. "The temperature's dropping. Pack the bike up. Your tire pressure will be off in the cold."

She walked away and I let her go, because there was an answer buried inside the not-answering and I needed a minute alone with it.

She had known who I was before the helmet came off. Before Snake made his threat. Before the airstrip and the fifty grand and the deal that came out of nowhere and landed perfectly.

It hadn't come out of nowhere.

She'd been building toward it. Watching, waiting, calculating the exact right moment to move. That was Dax Steele. Three steps ahead and patient enough to wait for the board to catch up.

The question was how far back she'd started counting.

We rode back through the compound gate in silence. One light above the main door. Two perimeter men nodded at Dax without breaking their lean against the fence. The compound at midnight was the same as the compound at noon except quieter, the hostility settled into something that felt more like waiting.

We pulled into the garage and cut our engines at the same moment. The silence rushed in.

Dax dismounted and stripped off her gloves. She crossed to the workbench, set something down, and was heading for the side door when she stopped. Turned back.

"Your lap times tonight." She held my gaze steady. "You're four seconds off Venom's best from last year's championship."

"Six weeks is a long time."

"Four seconds is longer than you think at race speed." She paused, and whatever she said next she said the same way she said everything, flat and direct, like she'd already decided it was true. "But the way you came out of that switchback on the third lap. That's not something I can teach a rider. Either you have it or you don't." "And?"

"And you have it." No warmth in it. Just fact. "Be in the garage at six. We go over the championship course maps before we ride it."

She pushed through the side door. It swung shut behind her and the garage went quiet again.

I stood there with the Ducati ticking as the engine cooled, the Iron Wolves logo watching me from the wall, and four seconds sitting in my head like a problem I was already taking apart.

Not the gap itself. What was inside it. Where it lived in the eight miles. How to find it and close it before race day with a man who didn't nearly anything waiting on the other side of the finish line.

I crouched beside the Ducati and started wiping down the chain. The work settled something in my chest the way it always did, hands moving through the familiar motions while my mind ran the course over and over. The switchback. The blind crest at mile six. The broken surface on the outside edge of the turn.

I could close four seconds.

I'd rebuilt engines from nothing with less to work with than this.

What I couldn't shake, no matter how many times I ran the course in my head, was the other thing. The thing that had nothing to do with lap times or Venom or the championship.

Dax Steele had been watching me race before any of this started. Weeks before the airstrip, before the helmet came off, before Snake and his fifty thousand dollars handed her the perfect opening to walk up to me and make her offer.

She hadn't stumbled into that deal. She'd engineered it.

Which meant she'd been waiting for the right moment to bring me inside these walls. Inside this compound. Inside her war.

And the part that kept me crouched beside that bike long after the chain was clean and the garage had gone cold around me wasn't that she'd planned it.

It was that I still didn't know why she'd needed it to be me specifically.

I was planning to find out though . But I needed to be smart about it, patient the way she was patient, and that meant playing the game on the surface while I dug underneath it.