Chapter 3
Three
Sienna
Play Destroy - Poppy & Grimes
If I had a dollar for every time a man thought I was dead before the fight even started, I wouldn’t need to be in this fucking race.
But here I am.
And it doesn’t take a goddamn genius to know that every piece of shit here wants me to crash and burn.
The crowd is feral. A mass of bodies packed into the pit’s rusted bleachers and makeshift scaffolding, all of them hungry for blood, for wreckage, for the next poor bastard to splatter across the track.
No one comes to The Gauntlet to watch a clean race. They come to watch machines burn, bones break, and men die screaming. They come to collect on bets, to drink, to fight, and to shove their fists in the air and roar for violence like it’s the only language they understand.
Tonight, I’m the show.
I hear it in the restless murmurs, the sneers, the bets still being placed.
“She won’t make it past the first turn.”
“Bitch doesn’t even belong here.”
“Five minutes. That’s all I’m giving her.”
They aren’t just waiting for the race to start, they’re waiting for me to fucking die.
And then, something changes.
The buzz of conversation shifts, confusion rippling through the pit. Someone shouts, another curses, and then my eyes snap to the massive digital betting screen hanging above the track.
A new wager flashes across it.
$1,000,000—Sienna Vega—TO WIN.
My stomach tightens as I hear the voices and snarls somewhere behind me.
“What the fuck is Carter playing at?”
“He just threw a mil on the dead girl?”
“Motherfucker bet against himself?”
It spreads fast.
Shock turns to anger. The bookies are pissed, the high-rollers are murmuring, and the tension in the pit shifts to being as sharp as a knife’s edge.
Riot Carter didn’t just bet on me.
He bet against himself.
I exhale slowly, keeping my face blank.
Riot Carter just bet on me.
The reigning champion of The Gauntlet, the undefeated bastard who’s put more bodies in the dirt than I can count, just threw money on my survival.
The pit reacts instantly. A ripple of low murmurs, tension so sharp it cuts through the smoke and oil-stained air like a live wire.
Bets are placed before every race—on winners, on crashes, on how many poor bastards won’t make it to the finish line.
The high rollers throw down fortunes, and the Syndicate makes sure the odds stay in their favor.
But The Gauntlet isn’t just one race—it’s six levels of hell designed to chew racers up and spit out whatever’s left.
First, the Qualifier. A warm-up round, if you can call a slaughter that. You don’t win, you don’t move on. Simple.
Then The Bone Yard. Wrecked factories, rusted-out shipping containers, rigged explosives, and snipers in the shadows. Blink, and you’re fucking gone.
The Concrete Graveyard. Crumbling highways, broken overpasses, and jumps where if you don’t hit full throttle, you plummet straight into nothing.
The Dead Zone. Underground tunnels—pitch black, riddled with traps, toxic gas, and things lurking in the dark that don’t need engines to kill you.
Neon Nightmare. A shifting cyberpunk hellscape where the track itself moves, holograms trick you into crashing, and the roads disappear right under your wheels.
And the final round? The Gauntlet. The worst of everything combined. No rules. No mercy. No second chances. Only one of us is supposed to make it out alive.
So yeah, Riot betting on me? That’s possibly the dumbest thing he’s ever done… and the most dangerous.
I glance over as he swings one leg over a machine built for destruction—a custom Ducati Panigale V4, matte black with ghosted red trim.
A monster.
He flicks the kill switch, and the engine growls, deep and low, a sound that rumbles through the ground like a fucking earthquake.
The body is reinforced with carbon fiber plating, military-grade bulletproof panels along the side fairings.
The wheels? Kevlar-reinforced. The exhaust?
Custom-tuned for raw, untouchable speed.
And then there are the weapons.
Twin retractable blades built into the sides. A short-range EMP disruptor rigged under the frame. Steel spikes on the front axle designed to shred anyone stupid enough to get too close.
It’s not a bike.
It’s a goddamn death machine.
And he rides it like he was born in fire.
Riot’s head tilts just slightly, those cold, unreadable eyes flicking to me, sizing me up. Then, without a word, he pulls on his helmet, revs the engine, and rolls up to the starting line.
I exhale slowly, forcing my heartbeat to steady.
I grip the throttle.
And then?
The race begins.
The moment the starting light flashes green, the track erupts.
Engines scream, tires burn, and metal collides with flesh as racers surge forward in a chaos of speed and violence. The air is thick with exhaust and bloodlust, the sound of roaring engines drowned only by the screams of the dying.
The first attack comes fast. Too fast.
To my left, a racer swings a spiked chain, aiming straight for my handlebars.
I duck.
The chain whips over my helmet, sparks shrieking as it scrapes across my visor. No time to breathe. No time to think. Just move, react, survive.
Another rider closes in fast from the right, front wheel inches from my rear tire. He’s trying to cut me off, pin me against the guardrail, send me flying into the concrete.
I see it coming.
At the last second, I yank my bike sideways, cutting between two racers just as he lunges. He doesn’t have time to correct. His front wheel clips another rider, and before I even hear the impact, he’s spinning out, slamming into the bike beside him.
The crowd fucking loses it.
A wall of noise erupts from the stands—a mix of wild cheers, angry shouts, and the sick, hungry roar of gamblers watching their money burn. The ones who bet against me? Pissed. The ones who just watched me nearly take a bastard out? Loving every second of it.
They didn’t expect me to last thirty seconds.
I just did.
Guess I just ruined someone’s goddamn payday.
But the race doesn’t slow. It only gets worse.
Up ahead, the track bottlenecks into a rigged kill zone, a brutal, Syndicate-designed execution trap. The kind of shit made to thin the herd, force collisions, and break necks.
If the track doesn’t kill us, the other racers will.
A bike ahead of me hits the wrong patch of asphalt—
Boom.
The explosion rattles my ribs, heat licking up my spine as metal, flames, and body parts scatter across the track.
The Gauntlet doesn’t just want blood. It demands it.
Flames roar outward, swallowing everything in their path.
The racer ahead doesn’t even have time to scream.
His bike shatters apart mid-air, chunks of twisted metal spinning off like shrapnel, one of the tires bouncing violently down the track before catching fire.
His body—or what’s left of it—bursts through the smoke, one arm still attached, the other torn away in the blast, flesh seared black, bones jagged and exposed.
I see his helmet bounce once, twice, then rolls off the track, visor cracked, blood pooling beneath it.
The heat still licks at my back, the scent of charred flesh and burning oil thick in my throat.
One down.
Too many left to go.
I don’t blink.
I don’t look back.
Because I’m still here.
For now.
I swerve hard, dodging a wreck, my chest heaving, heart hammering. The bike underneath me groans, the engine struggling, but I don’t ease up on the throttle.
Then I hear it.
A click. A sharp, high-pitched beep.
The kind of sound that means I’m already dead.
I glance down. A blinking red light near my exhaust.
Fucking hell. An explosive dart.
I don’t have time to think.
Another sharp, high-pitched beep kicks in, and a flashing red lights up on my frame, blinking like a goddamn countdown.
Five seconds.
Four.
Panic claws up my throat, but I shove it down, twisting hard on the throttle. I can’t stop. Can’t slow down. If I jump now, I’ll wipe out. If I stay on, I’ll be fucking vaporized.
Three.
The thunder of an engine cuts through the chaos as Riot pulls up alongside me.
Visor down. Face unreadable.
Two.
Riot flicks up his visor, blue eyes locking onto mine—cold, ruthless, final.
"Jump on."
Panic coils tight in my chest. My breath catches, my grip on the throttle locking up. Every instinct screams at me to keep riding, to find another way.
"No." The word is sharp and automatic. Useless.
His fingers tighten around the throttle, body coiled with tension. I can’t see his expression through the helmet, but I feel it. The impatience, the fury, the brutal certainty that I don’t have a fucking choice.
"Get the fuck on. Now."
One.
The tracker beeps faster. My heartbeat slams against my ribs.
Fuck.
I hate this. Hate that he’s right. Hate that I need him. Hate that my survival is in his hands.
I grit my teeth and launch myself off my bike, fingers grabbing for him, legs wrapping around the seat as I land hard.
Zero.
My bike detonates behind me, the explosion roaring like a beast, flames licking at my back as Riot rips us down the track.
The explosion slams into my back, a blast wave of heat and shrapnel roaring through the air.
Riot doesn’t flinch.
He doesn’t slow.
Instead, he just twists the throttle and takes off down the track, cutting through the wreckage like the fucking reaper himself.
I barely catch my breath, my arms locked tight around his waist, my body pressed flush against his back. Every muscle under his leather jacket is hard, unyielding—built for war. The vibration of his bike hums between my thighs, shaking every nerve in my body.
And then there’s the scent of him.
Leather, smoke, sweat, and something darker, something lethal. Like burnt ozone before a storm, like the scent of asphalt after it’s been painted in blood.
“I swear, if we die because you were showing off,” I mutter against his shoulder.
"Still got your mouth, I see."
I sneer, my fingers digging into his jacket. "Still got my knife, too. Wanna find out where I’ll put it?"
Before I can blink, he yanks the handlebars, swerving the bike hard to the side.
My stomach drops.
I lurch, nearly sliding off the back, my grip scrambling for something—anything—before instinct kicks in I clamp my thighs around him, holding on for dear fucking life.
His smirk is damn near audible. "Maybe you should worry less about stabbing me and more about holding on."
He’s cocky and smug. Like he’s enjoying every second of this.
I growl under my breath. "Maybe you should shut the fuck up."
Another low chuckle. "Nah. I like hearing you whine."
Fucker.
A rush of heat floods my face, my nails digging into the leather at his stomach before I can stop myself.
"I swear to god—"
"Swear later." His voice is nothing but gravel and menace. "Right now, try not to fucking fall off."
I grit my teeth, pressing my cheek against his back, feeling the raw power of him, the heat of his body, and the steady, ruthless heartbeat under my palms.
“Good girl,”
This motherfucker.
I’m going to kill him.
If we survive this, I am absolutely fucking killing him.
The final stretch is a blur of wreckage and screams. The track is littered with bodies, burning bikes, the last desperate efforts of racers who refuse to die without taking someone with them.
Riot cuts through them like a goddamn executioner.
One racer moves to block us, his tires spike-rigged, built to shred anything that gets too close.
Riot growls, low and amused. "Hold on."
He jerks the bike hard, metal colliding with metal, clipping the bastard’s front tire at the perfect angle. The racer wobbles, overcorrects—
And then we leave him in the fucking dirt.
Another comes from the side, blade snapping out from his fairing, aiming for my thigh.
I see it a second too late, but Riot doesn’t.
His hand snatches the knife from his thigh holster and flicks it with a precision that should be impossible at this speed.
The blade buries deep into the bastard’s exposed leg.
He screams, swerves—
And then crashes into the guardrail at 120 mph.
I barely hear his body hit the pavement before we’re already gone.
The finish line looms ahead but the crowd isn’t cheering anymore—they’re screaming, confused, furious, watching their bets go up in flames.
I dig my fingers into Riot’s jacket, adrenaline still slamming through my bloodstream.
We cross the line together.
And the world slows.
The neon strobes flicker. The crowd is a deafening riot of disbelief, curses, and howls of outrage.
I inhale sharply, my cheek still pressed against Riot’s back, his scent a mix of sweat, smoke, and leather.
We fucking made it.
But before relief can settle, something else does.
This wasn’t the real race.
This was just a test.
A warm-up.
A chance for The Syndicate to see what we can do before they throw us into the real fucking show.
And the Final Gauntlet?
That’s when the real monsters come out.
I swallow hard, my fingers still curled into Riot’s jacket, gripping the leather like it’s the only thing keeping me grounded.
His voice is low. Rough. Almost amused.
"You still breathing back there, Little Stray?"
I exhale slowly. Then smirk, even though my fucking legs are shaking.
"Disappointed?"
Riot chuckles, dark and quiet, like he already knew I was going to survive.
"Nah," he murmurs. "After all, I did bet on you."