Chapter 4 #3
“She saw Isaac near her bike before her run.” Dane exhales sharply. “There’s no footage of him touching it, no hard evidence. But the mechanics who looked at the wreckage said the failure was weird. It wasn’t just a snapped frame. The suspension had been tampered with.”
My stomach churns. If that’s true and Raine actually did that… if he sabotaged her bike knowing exactly what could happen…
“Why the fuck didn’t anyone say anything?”
“Because it was easier to blame the bike and say the frame failed. That Crews Racing was reckless, and we should have never been building our own frames. That our ego was the reason she almost fucking died.” Dane scoffs.
“So they did, and Dad let them. I did, too, because honestly, shutting everything down was easier than fighting back, especially while Alaina was trying to recover.”
The headlines blur in my mind. I remember the scandal, the debates, the fucking drama. People argued about safety standards, about whether Crews Bikes had been too aggressive in their designs. I also remember how the whole thing just disappeared, along with the Crews name.
“This is Alaina’s way of getting revenge.” Dane’s voice is deadly serious, and my eyes snap to his. “She wins. She beats Raine. And then she tells the world exactly who she is.”
My heart slams against my ribs. “She’s planning to out herself?”
“Publicly. Right in front of the UCI, the teams, the media. She’s going to take the podium, take the title, take everything from him.
And then, she’s going to rip off the mask and tell the world exactly who just handed him his ass.
She wants to humiliate him because we all know his pride is where it’ll hurt him the most.”
Jesus-fucking-Christ.
I scrub a hand over my face. “You guys have money. You could have investigated. Hired lawyers.” I gesture wildly toward the door, toward the fucking racecourse, as if that somehow explains everything wrong with this situation.
“Why the hell would you make her risk herself, her entire fucking future for a goddamn vendetta?”
They will never let her near another UCI race again after this.
Dane’s nostrils flare, and I think he might lash out at me. Instead, he laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “You think I let her do this? You think I had a fucking choice?”
“You’re her big brother. She adores you and would do anything you tell her to do.” I glare at him. “Of course, you had a choice.”
“No, Finn.” He shakes his head. “I didn’t.”
“So, what? You’re saying she made the choice for you?”
“I’m saying if I hadn’t helped her, she’d be dead.”
What?
I take a step back as if denying his words, but Dane doesn’t stop.
“You think I don’t know how stupid and dangerous this is?
” His voice rises. “You think I want to be here? Watching my little sister throw herself into this insane-fucking-mission knowing damn well it won’t do what she thinks it’ll do for her?
” He steps toward me, eyes blazing. “You think I wanted to walk away from my whole fucking life only to come back seven years later to find her standing on the same goddamn mountain, chasing down the same goddamn ghosts?”
I fight the urge to step back as he continues his tirade.
“If I hadn’t helped her, she wouldn’t be here, Finn. And I don’t mean here as in Fort William.” His voice drops a register and becomes rougher. “I mean here as in alive. Alaina didn’t live after the crash. She survived. Barely.”
And where the fuck was I? Sitting in hotel rooms, scrolling past headlines, wondering why they didn’t answer my calls.
“You don’t know what it was like after. You don’t know what it did to her.
All the pain and the surgeries and the broken dreams.” His hands curl into fists at his sides, and his eyes go distant with the memory.
“You don’t know how many nights I sat outside her door, too fucking scared to go to sleep because I didn’t know whether she’d still be breathing when I woke up. ”
His eyes fill with tears, and my nose starts to burn in the tense silence that follows.
“You could have called me, Dane,” I say eventually, my voice barely above a whisper. “I would have been there for you.”
I called him every day for at least a year, but he never picked up, not even once, so I stopped.
I shouldn’t have.
“She was gone, man. Gone. And there was nothing I could do. Nothing you could have done.” He swallows. “Nothing but let her have this.”
“So this whole thing, this disguise, this insane fucking plan…”
“It fueled her.” Dane’s eyes drop to the floor.
“She lived because of this. She got out of bed because of this. She trained, she rebuilt herself, she became unstoppable. All because of this. Because of spite. She’s only alive because she had this to fight for, and I’m not only terrified of what happens when she wins this. I’m terrified of what happens after.”
I blink and take an involuntary step backward. “What do you mean?”
Dane lifts his gaze, and his eyes are hollow.
“What will happen to her when she has nothing left to fight for?”
Well, fuck.