Chapter Twenty-Six
Echo
Four months later, Andre is yelling at me to get the fuck away from my own motorcycle, so apparently even certains do not change in the midst of tragedy.
“I heard you,” I call without looking up, still crouched beside the bike with one hand braced against my knee while I check the rearset for what has to be the third time.
“Then why are you still touching it?”
“Because something felt off.”
“You have a mechanic.”
I finally straighten and wipe my hands down the thighs of my leathers before looking at him.
“I am a mechanic.”
“No, today, you’re a rider.”
“I contain multitudes.”
Andre stares at me for a long second, looking increasingly like he regrets every decision that led to putting a number on my back.
“Echo, if I see a fucking tool in your hand again before this race, I’m zip-tying your gloves together.”
A laugh comes from the bay beside mine, and I don’t even have to look to know it’s Talon.
“Enjoying yourself over there?”
“Fucking right I am,”
I glance over and find him leaning against his bike with his helmet tucked beneath one arm, looking entirely too pleased with my suffering. Four months ago, I probably would’ve thrown something at him.
Now I just smile sweetly and say, “Remember when I beat you at the TT?”
The smile drops off his face so quickly it almost makes Andre’s threats worth it.
“You beat me by less than a half a second.”
“Still beat you.”
“You’ve been saying that for four months.”
“And I’m going to keep saying it for the next sixty years, so you should probably start working on acceptance.”
Sayshen walks past at exactly the wrong moment and catches enough of the conversation to immediately side with me, because apparently older brothers are legally obligated to make things worse.
“She does have a point.”
Talon looks between us with complete betrayal.
“Whose brother are you?”
“Both of yours, unfortunately.”
I grin and start to turn back toward the bike before Andre clears his throat loudly enough to remind me that I’m apparently forbidden from touching anything mechanical until after the race. He points toward the rider area, and I lift both hands in surrender before walking away.
Honestly, he’s probably right.
Today is my third race weekend as an official Speed Demon, and Andre is still adjusting to the fact that hiring a rider who can also tear down half the motorcycles in his garage means occasionally having to physically stop her from doing both jobs at once.
I’m working on boundaries, though.
Very slowly.
The number three stretches across the front of my leathers now, bright against the Speed Demons logo, and even after months of wearing it, sometimes I still catch myself looking down at it.
Three.
The first time I wore it, it felt like grief stitched into leather.
Wolfe had just died, his place on the TT grid was empty, and I chose three because three men had somehow managed to make me feel wanted before I ever understood how badly I needed that. One of them never got to see what came after.
Now the number belongs to something else too.
I’ve raced in it. Sweated through it. Sworn inside my helmet while wearing it.
I even took my first podium in it two weeks ago, which I might’ve handled with slightly more maturity if Talon hadn’t finished behind me. There is a picture on Bex’s phone of me standing on the podium holding up two fingers in his direction.
It was totally worth it though.
A hand catches the back of my leathers and pulls me backward just before I walk directly into a tire cart.
“Jesus, pretty girl. Eyes up.”
I glance over my shoulder and find Draygon staring down at me, one eyebrow raised while his hand moves from the back of my suit to my waist.
“I saw it.”
“You were three inches from eating shit.”
“I was testing your reflexes.”
“Bullshit.”
“Passed, though.”
The corner of his mouth moves, and something warm settles beneath my ribs because he looks good.
Not fake good. Not I slept three hours but nobody needs to know that good. Actually good.
Thorne comes around the next bay while tugging his glove into place with his teeth, hair a complete fucking mess because apparently getting a haircut is beneath him during race season. His eyes land on Draygon’s hand at my waist and narrow with immediate offense.
“Oi. You planning on hogging our woman all bloody morning, mate, or do the rest of us get a turn?”
Draygon barely looks at him. “You’re late.”
“Yeah, well, some of us have standards and need more than thirty seconds to get dressed.” Thorne steps right into my space before I can say anything, hooks both hands beneath my thighs and lifts me clean off the ground like I weigh absolutely nothing.
“Thorne!”
He grins when my arms automatically lock around his shoulders. “There she is.”
“You’re supposed to be getting ready.”
“I am ready.” His gaze drops deliberately over my leathers before coming back to my face, that cocky little smile getting worse. “Just needed a proper look first.”
I roll my eyes, but he’s already pulling me closer.
“Christ,” he murmurs, quieter now, one hand settling against my ass to keep me up. “Don’t think I’m ever getting tired of seeing you in these leathers, love. Bloody unfair, innit?”
“Pretty sure Andre would disagree.”
“Andre’s got no taste.”
Then he kisses me.
I melt into him as his mouth moves over mine slowly, his thumb brushing against my hip while Draygon makes absolutely no effort to pretend he isn’t watching.
When Thorne finally pulls back, he keeps me against him for another second, forehead nearly touching mine.
“Much better.”
“You done?”
“Not remotely.” His grin turns filthy. “But apparently you’ve got a race.”
Draygon reaches over and catches the back of Thorne’s leathers, tugging him away from me. “Put her down before Andre kills all three of us.”
Thorne reluctantly lowers me back to the floor, still looking far too pleased with himself. “Fucking possessive, this one. Man gets one hand on our girl and suddenly he thinks he owns the schedule.”
I smooth my leathers and glance between them. “You two realize I’m standing right here?”
“Yeah,” Thorne says, eyes dropping over me again. “That’s sort of the problem, innit?”
There are parts of Thorne that changed after Wolfe.
Parts of all of us did. He still has mornings where I find him outside the cabin before sunrise with untouched coffee beside him, staring at nothing.
He still goes quiet sometimes when somebody says something Wolfe would’ve laughed at, and I can almost see the memory hit before he smooths his face over.
But he doesn’t disappear anymore.
He doesn’t run when something gets too close or too real. He stays with me, with Draygon, with the team, and maybe most importantly, with himself.
Draygon stayed too, though he never really had a problem with that.
His issue was learning that being there for everyone didn’t mean carrying the entire fucking building on his shoulders.
He still checks on us, still notices everything and still somehow knows when I’ve eaten nothing but coffee until noon, but now sometimes he lets me take care of him back.
We’re figuring it out, together.
Across the garage, Revel suddenly announces, loud enough for everyone to hear, that somebody has committed sabotage, and when I look over, Cece is standing beside his bike holding his energy drink behind her back.
“You’ve had three,” she tells him.
“I’m an athlete.”
“You’re a medical emergency.”
Reign laughs from his bay while Lena shakes her head beside him, and Bex already has her phone out because apparently none of us have been allowed private humiliation since the day she met this team.
Andre rubs both hands over his face, muttering something about retirement while Revel tries to convince Cece that caffeine is part of his training plan.
And there it is.
Normal.
Our version of it anyway.
Loud, messy, ridiculous and occasionally requiring intervention.
Mine.
A whistle cuts through the garage a few minutes later, and the mood shifts the way it always does before a race.
The jokes thin out, helmets come up, gloves tighten and Andre starts moving between us with that focused expression he gets every time he has to send a group of people he cares about onto a track and pretend it doesn’t scare the shit out of him.
I reach for my helmet, then realize my other glove is sitting on the equipment bench a few feet away.
Dad is standing near it.
I still catch myself doing that sometimes.
Thinking the word before remembering how new it is.
Four months hasn’t magically fixed twenty-two years of missing each other.
There are still weird silences, questions neither of us knows how to ask and entire parts of my childhood he’s trying to learn after the fact.
Sometimes he talks about Evelyn before she left and I get to meet a version of my mother I never knew.
Sometimes I tell him about growing up and watch guilt flash across his face for things that were never his fault, but he calls me now, and I answer.
Sometimes I even call him first.
He came to this race too, and not just because Talon and Sayshen are here.
But for me.
That still does something weird to my chest.
I nod toward the bench without really thinking about it. “Dad, toss me my other glove?”
The word leaves my mouth so naturally that it takes half a second for me to realize what I said.
His hand pauses, and then he smiles, small and warm, as he picks up the glove and tosses it to me. “Catch.”
I do, and that’s it. No speech or tears.
Thank fuck.
But when I turn away, I’m smiling like an idiot.
Talon notices immediately from across the garage. His eyebrow lifts, and I point at him before he can say a single word.
“Don’t.”
His expression softens anyway.
Asshole.
Andre catches me on the shoulder as he passes. “You ready?”
I pull on my glove and look toward the track.
“Yeah.”
And I am.
The track still scares me sometimes, and I think it probably always will.
After the TT, it took weeks before I could watch one of them disappear around a corner without my chest tightening until they came back into view.
Every yellow flag made my stomach drop. Every engine note that changed unexpectedly pulled my attention away from whatever I was doing.
For a while, I hated that something I’d loved for so long had become tangled up with fear.
But Wolfe’s crash didn’t make racing any more dangerous than it already was. It just made it impossible to pretend otherwise.
That’s one of the things grief changed permanently.
I don’t think healing means forgetting what happened or reaching some magical point where I’m not afraid anymore.
I think it means learning to carry the fear without letting it control every decision.
It means accepting that loving people who do dangerous things comes with knowing something could happen, and deciding they’re still worth loving anyway.
Maybe loving anyone is like that.
Nothing is guaranteed.
That used to terrify me enough that I kept one foot pointed toward the exit everywhere I went. If I never settled in, never needed anybody too much and never let somewhere become home, then there was less to lose when it disappeared.
Except never letting yourself have something because you might lose it eventually is still losing it.
You just do it early.
The marshal waves me forward, and I roll out of the garage toward pit lane. The bike hums beneath me, familiar now in a way I never expected, every vibration and tiny shift something my body understands before I have to think about it.
The number three sits on the front.
My number.
I glance toward the wall as I pass the team, and they’re all there.
Andre with his headset already on. Dad beside him. Talon and Sayshen standing farther back, both of them watching like they’re definitely going to critique every fucking corner afterward. Reign, Revel, Thorne and Draygon lined along the edge of the garage.
My people.
My family.
There’s still someone missing from that picture.
There always will be.
But the empty space doesn’t erase everyone standing around it anymore.
I settle behind the screen as I reach the grid, flexing my fingers once around the grips while the engine vibrates beneath me. Somewhere inside my helmet, my breathing sounds louder than it should.
I think about Mom.
About the life she gave me, even if there were pieces of it she kept from me for too long.
I think about my brothers and the father who never knew I existed until I showed up and detonated half his life.
I think about Thorne and Draygon, both of them somehow teaching me that loving someone doesn’t have to mean losing pieces of yourself to keep them.
And I think about Wolfe.
About blue eyes, stupid fucking cereal, stolen food, warm hands and fireflies.
About the man who called me one because he saw something bright in me before I knew how to see it myself.
Losing him will always hurt.
I know that now.
But grief isn’t the only thing he left me with.
He left me love too.
He left me proof that I can let people close enough to matter and survive the risk that comes with it. That something ending doesn’t make everything before it less worth having.
The marshal steps forward.
My pulse kicks harder.
For most of my life, I thought home was somewhere other people got to have. I thought maybe I’d missed my chance at it, or maybe some people were just built to keep moving forever.
I know better now.
Home isn’t a building.
It isn’t a place that can’t change or people who can never leave.
It’s knowing there are people waiting when I come back around.
It’s being missed when I’m gone.
It’s having somewhere I want to return to.
The marshal raises his hand.
I lean forward over the tank.
For once, I’m not wondering how long any of it will last.
I’m not waiting for the next loss.
I’m not looking for the exit.
His hand drops.
I twist the throttle and launch.
The bike surges beneath me, the track opening ahead as everything else falls away. The first corner comes fast, and I hit it clean, then the next, letting instinct take over as the world narrows to speed and sound and the way the machine moves with me.
I’m not Evelyn’s secret anymore.
I’m not Wolfe’s replacement.
I’m not the girl living out of bags because staying anywhere felt too dangerous.
I’m a daughter.
A sister.
A mechanic.
A racer.
A Speed Demon.
I’m loved.
I belong.
And as I tip the bike into the next corner with the number three cutting through the wind, I smile inside my helmet.
I’m Echo Cooper-Shaw.
And I found my home.
THE END