Chapter Nine
Draygon
By the time the sun starts going down and half the shop’s cleared out, I still can’t get the whole situation with Echo out of my head.
It’s under my skin.
That’s the fucking problem.
I’ve spent the entire afternoon trying to shove it aside. Tried to tell myself it doesn’t matter, that whatever weird little grenade she dropped into the middle of the team this morning can wait. Except it didn’t wait.
It followed me straight onto the track, sat in the back of my head through every lap, every corner, every straight. I was still riding clean, still fast, but not clean enough for me. Not fucking sharp enough.
I missed my marks twice. Braked late way too many times and came in hotter than I meant to and knew it the second my tires hit the line.
That shit doesn’t happen, not with me.
Sure, I’m pissed she kept something from me.
But underneath all that, there’s something else chewing at me too.
Curiosity. The kind that makes anger harder to hold onto cleanly.
Was she actually fucking playing all of us?
Did she know exactly what she was doing every step of the way?
Or did this get away from her the same way it got away from the rest of us?
That’s the part I can’t leave alone.
Because what I don’t want to admit is that this feels personal in a way I didn’t allow for.
I’m not used to being caught off guard, not by anyone, let alone a woman.
And yet Echo’s been catching me off guard since the second she opened her mouth and looked entirely too unimpressed by me.
The garage is quieter than usual by this point in the day. Most of the guys have either fucked off already or disappeared into whatever corner of work they’ve got left. The place has settled into that low industrial hum I know better than my own goddamn pulse.
Fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. The occasional clang of metal from deeper in the bays. Oil, rubber, grease, heat, and old concrete baked by years of engines and friction. This place is noise and grit and movement.
But it’s home.
I’m still in my race suit, but only halfway.
The top half is peeled down and hanging at my waist, the legs still on, tank underneath damp and clinging to my back after the track.
I should’ve showered. Fuck I should’ve just stripped out of my suit, cleaned up my station and gone home.
Should’ve let this sit until tomorrow when I had a cooler head and a better excuse to ask the questions I need answered.
But I can’t.
Because if I leave here without talking to her, I’m just gonna spend all night replaying this shit anyway.
I check the office first.
Then the break room.
Then the side bay where Wolfe usually ends up when he wants to pretend he isn’t hovering around everybody else’s shit.
No Echo.
I finally spot her through the open side door near the edge of the lot, standing by the chain-link fence with her arms folded tight over herself, staring out toward the street like she’s halfway gone already.
The wind keeps catching her hair and tossing it around her shoulders, dark and thick and loose down her back.
She’s still in those black denim shorts, the kind that hug her just enough to be distracting without looking like they’re trying.
Long legs. Bare skin. Grease still smudged faintly on one arm like she forgot to clean all the way up.
And for one stupid second, I just stand there looking at her.
I hate how easy it is now, recognizing her shape before I’ve even fully thought about it. The tilt of her head. The stubborn line of her shoulders. The way she always looks like she’s either about to say something that’ll get under your skin or disappear so far into herself you’ll never reach her.
Then I shove the door open harder than I need to.
It bangs against the wall.
She turns fast, and the second her eyes land on me I see it—that small flicker of expectation, like she knows why I’m here.
Good.
I head straight for her.
“Got a minute?” I ask.
My voice makes it clear I’m not asking for permission.
Her chin lifts a little, defiant even now. “Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
She watches me come closer, and I can feel the tension building between us with every step. It’s not loud, it’s tight. More dangerous. The kind of tension that hums under the skin and makes every word feel like it could tip into something worse.
Or something else.
She lets out a slow breath through her nose. “Then I guess I’m all yours.”
There’s attitude in it, but I catch the strain underneath. Fuck. I hate that I catch it at all.
I stop in front of her, close enough to see the way the breeze keeps catching pieces of her hair and throwing them across her face, and the smell something soft and feminine under the grease and fuel is clinging to the air around us.
It doesn’t belong here. Neither does she.
That thought should make this easier.
Instead it just makes me angrier, because I don’t know if I mean she doesn’t belong here because she’s too good for a place like this, or because I haven’t decided if she’s a threat to what we’ve built.
“So do you finally want to tell me why the hell you didn’t say who you were that night? Or any time in between?" I ask.
No warm-up or easing in. I’m already too wound up for that.
Her expression barely shifts. “That’s how you want to start this?”
“I mean I feel like we’ve wasted enough time dancing around the truth, don’t you? So why didn’t you tell me who you were?”
She folds her arms tighter across herself. “You didn’t exactly hand me a full biography either.”
I laugh once, short and sharp. “Not the same thing.”
“No?” she asks. “Because it seems pretty fucking similar from where I’m standing.”
My jaw tightens. “You didn’t need one. You already knew all about me.”
Her eyes lock on mine.
“Exactly how much do you think I learned about you?” she shoots back. “And why the hell do you think I was so fixated on you instead of my own brothers?” She rolls her eyes, sharp and annoyed. “Jesus, you’re making it sound like I’m some creepy stalker fangirl.”
“Aren’t you?” I ask, the word coming out harder than I mean it to. “What was the plan, then? Use your newly discovered brothers as an in with the Speed Demons? Get your claws into not one, but three of Tampa’s most eligible bachelors?”
The second it leaves my mouth, I know I pushed too far.
I see it hit her.
She goes completely still.
“What?” she says, and the quiet in her voice is worse than if she’d yelled. “You actually think I’d do that?”
She scoffs, turning her eyes back toward the street, but I catch the hurt in them before she looks away.
“I didn’t plan any of this,” she says. “I didn’t go to that bar knowing you’d be there. How could I?” She glances back at me, her expression tightening. “And in case you forgot, Isla brought me over to your table. I didn’t exactly invite myself.”
“Still doesn’t explain why you knew all that and said nothing.”
“I had my reasons.”
“Yeah?” I step closer. “Then give me one.”
Her eyes flash. “Maybe I don’t owe you one. Maybe it wasn’t my place to tell you who I was, or why I was here.”
That almost does it.
I take another step and she stays where she is, which only makes the pressure between us sharper.
She doesn’t back down. She never fucking backs down.
I should respect that. I probably do, in some dark inconvenient place I don’t want to examine right now.
But mostly it just makes me want to shake the truth out of her.
“You knew who I was,” I say, my voice low. “From the moment you saw me that night in the bar, you knew and you think I’m not owed an explanation on why you just kept it from me?”
Finally, she says, “I wanted to meet you without all the noise first.”
I blink at her. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“No, I heard the words. That doesn’t mean they make sense.”
Her jaw tightens. “I knew your name. I knew your reputation. I knew your team. I knew the kind of headlines attached to all of you.” She gestures vaguely toward the garage behind me, like that one motion covers the whole world I live in. “I didn’t want all of that to be the first thing between us.”
Us.
That word lands in my chest and sits there, heavy and irritating.
I ignore it.
“So instead,” I say, “you decided to keep it to yourself and let me be the idiot in the conversation?”
Her eyes narrow. “I didn’t make you an idiot.”
“No? Because that’s not how it feels.”
That slips out rougher than I mean it to, and I hate it the second it’s out there. Hate that I’ve let enough honesty through for her to hear it.
Something changes in her face. Not much. Just enough for me to notice.
“I wasn’t trying to make a fool of you,” she says, quieter now.
“Then what were you trying to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit.”
“No.” Her voice sharpens again. “Not bullshit. I genuinely didn’t know. I just...”
She cuts herself off and looks away toward the road beyond the fence. Cars slide past in streaks of sound and fading light. The city keeps moving like this conversation isn’t threatening to crack something open between us.
I wait.
After a second, she looks back at me. “I wanted to know if you were actually like them.”
“Them?”
“The stories. The interviews. The rumors. The version people build when someone becomes a name instead of a person.”
That one gets under my skin because I know exactly what she means.
I’ve seen people do it my whole life. Take a racer, a team, a public life, and flatten it into something easier to consume.
Dangerous. Cocky. Untouchable. They make us into versions of ourselves they can understand and judge from a distance.
That doesn’t mean she gets to do it too.
“And?” I ask. “What’d you decide?”
Her gaze flicks over my face. My mouth. Back to my eyes.
The look lingers long enough to make my pulse turn ugly.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
I should step back. I should shut this down before it slips into the territory I’ve been trying to keep us out of. But I’m standing too close and she smells too good and I’m still mad enough that every breath feels sharp in my lungs.