Chapter 7 Seven

I sat down and looked at all three without touching any of them. She let me look. She was leaning back in her chair with her arms crossed, watching me the way she always watched, like she was waiting to see what I noticed first.

"The photograph," I said.

She nodded and pushed it across the desk.

It was a race. Nighttime, shot from a distance, grainy the way phone cameras went grainy in low light. Two bikes side by side on a straight I didn't recognize. The rider on the left was on a blacked-out Kawasaki, no markings, no club colors. The rider on the right was on a Death Dealers bike, the logo visible even in the bad light.

"Turn it over," Dax said.

I did. A date, three weeks ago. And four words. He knows you're here. I set it down. "Who took this?"

"Someone inside the Death Dealers who's been feeding me information for eight months." She picked up the burner phone, turned it over once, set it back down. "He stopped making contact six days ago."

"You think Kane found him."

"I think if Kane found him, we've got a bigger problem than four seconds on a lap time." She opened the laptop and turned it toward me. A map on the screen, the same territory breakdown I'd seen the first night, red and blue zones. "Kane knows you're inside this compound. He knows I recruited you. What he doesn't know yet is that you've seen the files."

"How long before he finds that out?"

"Depends on who in this club is talking to him."

The room went quiet. I looked at her. She looked back at me and didn't move, didn't soften it, just let it sit there between us like a third person in the room.

"You think the traitor is already moving," I said.

"I think the traitor has been moving for a while and I haven't been able to pin them because they're careful." She turned the laptop back toward herself. "But careful people make mistakes when the pressure goes up. And the pressure is going up."

"What do you need from me?"

"Eyes open. In the garage, in the main room, anywhere you're moving around this compound. You're new, which means people are less guarded around you than they are around each other. They've had years to build their walls with me." She held my gaze. "You notice anything, you come to me directly. Not Tank. Not Reaper. Me."

"Not exactly a comfortable position to be in."

"No," she agreed. "It's not."

I leaned back in the chair. Outside the office the compound was doing its evening thing, engines, voices, the clatter of the kitchen two doors down. Normal sounds from a place that had a very abnormal problem growing inside it.

"The name on the paper," I said.

Dax picked it up and held it without giving it to me. "Cage. Rides with the Death Dealers out of the east corridor. He was the one who planted the tracker on your Ducati the night of the race." She set it back down. "He'll be at the championship. Kane uses him as eyes on the ground at every major event."

"And you want me to what, keep track of him during the race?"

"I want you to know his face so you're not surprised if he does something stupid on the track." She said it the same way she said everything that mattered, quiet and without drama. "Venom wins races. Cage makes sure the people who might beat Venom don't finish."

I felt that settle in my chest. "He took out your riders in the last two championships."

"Venom took the credit. Cage did the work." She closed the laptop. "This championship isn't just about the prize money or the territory. Kane needs to win it to consolidate his position before the federal case I've been building gets close enough to move on. He'll do whatever it takes." "Including killing a rider."

"He's done it before." No hesitation. No softening. Just the flat honest truth of it laid out in front of me. "Which is why the four seconds matter, Zed. If you're far enough ahead, Cage can't reach you."

I stood up and walked to the window. The compound yard below was lit by two overhead lamps, bikes lined up, two prospects washing down the concrete near the gate. Everything looked exactly like what it was supposed to look like. Nothing looked like what it actually was.

"You should have told me this before I agreed," I said.

"You wouldn't have agreed if I had."

I turned around. She was watching me, still and straight in her chair, not apologetic, not defensive. She'd made a calculation and she was standing behind it.

"That's not your call," I said.

"No. It wasn't." She held my gaze. "I'm telling you now because you're inside this and you deserve to know the full weight of it. Not because I owe you an apology. Because you're smarter than riding blind and I need you thinking clearly."

I looked at her for a long moment. The thing about Dax Steele was that she never dressed anything up. She didn't make her moves pretty. She just made them and stood there while you decided what to do with them.

"Four seconds," I said. "Four seconds," she said back.

I moved toward the door. My hand was on the frame when her voice came across the room, lower than usual, stripped of the control she wore like a second jacket.

"My source going quiet," she said. "It's the third time someone helping me with this has disappeared."

I stopped but didn't turn around.

"The first two were accidents." A pause, short and tight. "Marcus was the second."

I stood in the doorway for a moment with that sitting on top of everything else. Her brother. Not a suspicious accident the way the town had whispered it. Not a coincidence. Kane had killed him and Dax had been carrying that alone for two years, building her case brick by quiet brick while the man responsible rode free.

I didn't say anything because there was nothing to say.

I walked back to the garage, picked up a wrench, and got back to work on the Ducati.

Five and a half weeks. Cage was going to be on that track.

And now I was riding for more than fifty thousand dollars and my father's name.