Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
Riot
Ride Or Die - Saintino Le Saint
The road ahead feels endless. Sun beating down through a haze of smog, cracked asphalt unraveling beneath our wheels, wind slicing through leather like a warning.
We’ve been riding for hours now, and it’s the kind of silence that doesn’t ask for permission.
The kind that sets into your bones and makes itself at home.
Behind me, Sin shifts slightly. Not because she’s tired, but because she’s reading me. I feel it in the way her thighs press tighter around mine when my shoulder stiffens. I feel it in the way her hands don’t grip too hard or too soft, like she knows how to ground me without tethering me.
She’s been doing that a lot lately.
It started the night Doc died. When she crawled into the dark beside me and didn’t ask for anything in return.
When she stitched my wound and told me repeatedly in her feisty, annoying yet goddamn sexy tone of hers, that I wasn’t invincible.
When she held me like I wasn’t a weapon, like I was just a man falling apart.
Since that night, she’s been in the pit more. Shoulders set, hands steady, always moving. Rewiring shit with Ghost. Digging through scrap with Bishop. Patching what’s busted. Keeping the rest of us from falling apart while pretending she isn’t doing any of it.
She was always part of this. Always sharp. Always loud. But now? She’s everywhere. Checking in like Doc used to, without the bedside tone, just a look and a question you better answer straight.
She doesn’t talk about it or try to step into Doc’s place. No one could.
But she’s there. Every day. Smart mouth still running, doing what needs doing without being told. Holding shit together the only way she knows how—quietly, stubbornly, like it’s her job to keep us all from fucking cracking.
None of us asked her to.
She just did it.
Because that’s who the hell she is.
I glance at the rear-view HUD and catch the edge of her helmet tilted down against my back. She’s holding on like today, it’s not about keeping her balance, but about not letting go.
My jaw tightens.
There are things I don’t say to her. Things I don’t know how to say.
That watching her move through grief alongside us, like it’s a battlefield makes me want her even more.
That the way she looked with Jace under her, blood on her knuckles and her gun in his mouth, made something in me twist low and vicious.
That if I ever lose her, I won’t survive it.
I can’t lose any of them, but especially her.
The memory of Doc settles behind my ribs like shrapnel. Sharp and constant. Every breath scrapes against it. I keep waiting for it to dull, for the ache to back off, but it doesn't. It just digs deeper.
Grief like this doesn’t scream. It lingers. It rots slow beneath the surface just out of sight.
I’ve thrown everything I have left into the bike, into prep, and keeping my hands busy so I don’t start tearing things apart just to feel like I’m doing something. Anything.
But it’s still there.
In every silence.
Every breath, and every second I look at my crew and see one less face staring back.
And no matter how fast I ride, how hard I push, it’s never going to be enough to outrun it.
The skyline shifts ahead of us. Towers jutting like broken bones against the horizon, their edges pulsing with fractured neon. We’re close now. Another half hour, maybe less.
Halcyon Verge.
District built on chrome and illusion. It glows from the outside, all color and static, but underneath, it’s just rot in a prettier dress.
The Verge is where failed tech goes to pretend it’s still alive.
Syndicate prototypes, unstable mods, half-tested race stimulants that haven’t been cleared by anyone with a conscience.
The fourth Gauntlet.
The Neon Nightmare.
The name doesn’t lie.
Glass roads slicked with oil and rain. LED-lit tunnels that loop and dive without warning.
Strobe rigs that hit like flashbangs. One stretch of track is supposed to drop you straight into pitch-black and feed hallucinogenic gas through your comms. Just a little taste.
Just enough to make you see things you’d rather forget.
This one isn’t about speed.
It’s about sanity.
If we’re not locked in step, if even one thought between us misfires, we don’t make it out.
Sin is the only one I trust on the back of my bike, and the only one who can keep me from riding headfirst into a fire just to fucking feel something.
The escort meets us at the district gate.
Black Syndicate transports, crawl out of the Verge’s mouth and box us in like a funeral procession.
Drones buzz overhead, low and deliberate, scanning us as we roll in.
Guns sweep with their movement. The warning is clear: stay sharp, stay silent, stay in line.
We do.
The gates slide open, metal teeth grinding in protest. The Verge yawns wide, pulsing and flickering like a broken circuit board on the edge of overload. Everything here hums wrong. Too bright, sharp, and clean in a way that makes my skin itch.
Digital billboards flash product ads so fast they look like seizures. Glitching faces sell guns, pills, sex, and fame. One screen shows last week’s race deaths like a highlight reel.
Her voice crackles through the comm, dry and unimpressed. “This place looks like a rave and a war zone had a baby.”
I smirk, eyes on the skyline. “Welcome to Halcyon Verge.”
The pit is already half-built when we pull in. Metal scaffolding. Strobe lights flickering in sync with bass lines no one asked for. Billboard towers are stacked above the loading docks, displaying names, stats, odds. And us burned across the middle in stylized fonts and blood-spatter backgrounds.
CARTER & VEGA – 3RD PLACE ODDS. 1ST PLACE BODY COUNT.
Ghost hops down first and starts barking orders. Bishop throws open the side panels on the crew hauler. Luca’s already bickering with a handler who parked too close to the mod station.
Sin swings off the bike and gives the new mod panel a quick once-over. The green demon’s already bolted into place, right above the rear fork—smug little bastard grinning like it knows something the rest of us don’t. Her monster. Our warning sign.
“Not creepy at all,” Luca mutters, eyeing it like it might blink.
“It’s watching me,” Ghost adds under his breath. “I hate it.”
Sin smirks, brushing her fingers across the edge of the panel. “Good. That means it’s doing its job.”
The bike’s been rebuilt better than before. Stronger. Cooler. Faster. And it feels like it’s ours in a way it didn’t before. Not just something we’re riding into hell, but something we’ve pulled out of it.
I light a cigarette. Smoke coils between my fingers as I lean against the frame of the bike, watching the crew work like the grief hasn’t gutted us, like we’re not all bleeding under the surface.
Bishop and Luca are bickering at each other over torque specs, sharp little jabs that almost sound like normal. Ghost is hunched over a wiring panel, mumbling curses at a faulty sensor like it personally betrayed him.
And Sin, she wasted no time getting to work.
She’s crouched low on the other side of the bike, ratchet in hand, dark braid looped messily over one shoulder, grease streaked across her cheekbone.
Tank top clinging to her in all the right places, shoulders slick with sweat, arms cut tight from work and rage.
Legs poured into shredded combat leggings, boots scuffed to hell, like she kicked her way through every bad day that ever looked at her wrong.
Mouth fierce. Eyes sharper than any blade I’ve ever carried.
And fuck me, she looks like war.
Not some delicate thing you protect, but something you pray to before the killing starts.
I take another drag and hold the smoke, letting it burn in my lungs while I watch her swipe the back of her wrist across her face, leaving a smear of oil and fury in its place.
For a second, just a second, it almost feels like we’re okay.
Then the shift hits.
Sharp footsteps and raised voices at the edge of the pit. Sin tenses. Her shoulders lock. Her whole frame coils like she already knows. I follow the noise.
And there he is.
Jace, standing like The Gauntlet never touched him.
Helmet under his arm, leathers spotless, swaggering like a fucking revenant dragged out of hell just to piss me off.
That same grin’s stretched across his face, smug and soulless, like he knows something the rest of us don’t. Like he thinks he’s already won.
Behind me, it’s like someone’s lit a fuse beneath Sin’s skin and she’s daring it to burn.
She watches him without blinking, shoulders squared, chest rising slow.
She doesn’t speak, but her silence isn’t hesitation, it’s precision.
Like she’s already playing out how fast she could reach him before someone tries to stop her.
I don’t give her the chance.
I step out and meet Jace halfway, jaw locked, cigarette still burning low between my fingers.
“The fuck are you doing here?” I ask, voice like gravel and smoke.
That grin of his doesn’t even twitch. “Didn’t think you’d miss me, Carter.”
I blow a stream of smoke toward his face, slow and steady, watching the way he doesn’t flinch. “Syndicate scraped you off the concrete like something stuck to the bottom of their boot. Thought we were finally done with you.”
“Yeah, well…” He shrugs like it’s nothing, gaze slipping past me. I don’t need to turn around to know who he’s looking at. “Someone higher up must’ve thought I still had potential. Or maybe they just like a little drama before the end.”
That look he gives her, quick, and cutting, says more than words.
My fingers tighten around the cigarette as I step in close, close enough that I can smell the chemical clean still clinging to his new gear. He reeks of Syndicate. Of deals and protection and something rotten underneath.
“Try that again,” I say, voice low and cold enough to cut steel. “Look at her one more time.”