Chapter 14
Century
Torque Ridge sat twenty minutes east of Crossbend in a converted shipping yard that had no business pretending it was a track, which was exactly why men with more pride than sense loved racing there.
Rusted containers lined the far side, chain-link fences bowed under the pressure of crowds who always wanted to stand too close, and old industrial gates opened directly onto the asphalt.
Barrels marked turns where real barriers should’ve been; half-assed barricades leaned under their own weight.
It was underground racing stripped down to its bones, the kind of place where the crowd came to feel the danger through the fence, and every racer knew one bad line could turn a machine into scrap and a man into something Cage would spend hours stitching back together.
Kane stood near the pit entrance with Edge at his side, both of them studying the track with the same quiet focus they wore before the war.
Chief—his road name reflected his job since he was Kane’s primary crew chief—Nitro, Drift, and a few other trusted Kings were already there, scattered around the pit like we’d come for routine prep instead of looking for the kind of bullshit desperate men pulled when they didn’t think they could win clean.
We headed out from the pit to walk the track, boots scuffing over dirty asphalt while the noise of crews and spectators grew heavier behind us.
I rolled my shoulders once, trying to loosen tension that had nothing to do with the race and everything to do with Saylor waiting back at the compound until we cleared the place.
She’d wanted to come with me from the start, stubborn woman that she was, but I’d told her she could stand in my pit once I knew the ground beneath her feet wasn’t hiding a trap.
She’d stared me down for ten full seconds before agreeing, and the fact that she trusted me enough to wait had almost made me drag her into my room instead of leaving.
I glanced at Kane as we moved along the first stretch. “You talk to King?”
Kane didn’t look over right away. His eyes stayed on the pavement, scanning cracks, seams, and scattered gravel for anything that didn’t belong. “I did.”
Edge walked on Kane’s other side, his posture casual in a way that would’ve fooled exactly nobody who knew him. “Hounds in?”
“They’re in,” Kane confirmed. “If things go sideways and Sutton needs to vanish, King’s people will take care of her. New name, paperwork, and life. She’ll disappear clean.”
The Hounds of Hellfire weren’t a club most people wanted owing them favors, but they were allies.
It was only well known in the right circles, but their specialty was making people disappear.
And when they decided to help someone, that person didn’t get found.
Gone like a federal program wished it could manage.
I exhaled through my nose. “Good.”
Kane’s gaze finally slid to me. “You still don’t like that it might be necessary.”
“No.” I looked down the track where the asphalt narrowed into a hard right near a line of dented barrels. “I don’t like that Saylor’s heart still hurts over a woman who keeps handing her knives and acting shocked when she bleeds. But I’m not racing for Sutton because she earned protection.”
“You’re racing because Saylor needs to know her twin won’t be slaughtered,” Edge murmured.
“Yeah.”
Edge’s mouth twisting into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Soft of you.”
I shot him a look. “Nothing soft about me, asshole. Or my bullets.”
Kane’s mouth barely moved, but amusement flickered through his eyes. “Save it for the race.”
“Or your woman,” Edge added. “Though I’m guessing you haven’t been saving much for later.”
I stopped walking just long enough to stare at him. “You ever get tired of hearing yourself talk?”
“No.” Edge gave me a pleased grin. “One of my favorite sounds.”
Nitro snorted from ahead of us, crouching near the inside of the turn. “Some of us are trying to keep Century alive long enough for Saylor to make an honest man out of him.”
I grunted and kept walking.
We started the inspection in earnest after that, spreading out enough to cover ground without looking like we were sweeping for a bomb.
Officially, we were checking the course because Torque Ridge was always one storm away from becoming a death trap.
Unofficially, none of us trusted the Diesel Serpents to keep the race clean.
They had already proven they were reckless enough to threaten Saylor, stupid enough to think Sutton could manipulate me, and desperate enough to push into Redline Kings territory without understanding the price. Men like that didn’t suddenly discover honor because a wager had rules.
At the dip before the second hard turn, Nitro lifted two fingers. “Hold up.”
The whole group stilled, but nobody made it look dramatic.
Kane stopped beside a stack of barrels and glanced toward the crowd like he was watching the fence.
Edge angled his body to block any long view from the Serpents’ pit.
Drift kept walking another few steps, making the pause look like staggered coverage instead of a find.
I moved toward Nitro and crouched beside him, following the line of his gaze to the asphalt.
At first glance, it looked like a dirty patch of pavement. Torque Ridge had stains everywhere, but this one caught light wrong. Too smooth and fresh.
Chief came down beside me and touched two gloved fingers to the edge of it, then rubbed them together, his mouth flattening. “Not old oil.”
I leaned closer and caught the faint chemical bite under the usual stink of fuel and asphalt. “Gear oil?”
“Mixed with something slicker.” Chief scraped lightly at the edge with a small blade from his pocket. “Thin enough to spread. Then dusted over it to dull the shine.”
Nitro pointed two yards past it, near the track seam. “There’s more grit there than there should be. Fine stuff. Not gravel. Looks like they brushed it across the exit line.”
I followed the arc in my head, feeling the turn through muscle memory before I ever put wheels on it. Come in fast, lean, correct for the dip, hit the outside slick if you ran the line they expected me to take, then catch that fine grit right as the tire tried to grab again.
On a bike, that wasn’t a mistake. This was a setup meant to make the rear step out at speed, maybe force a low-side, worse if the rider fought the machine instead of letting physics have its tantrum. It was subtle enough that anyone not looking hard might blame the track for being Torque Ridge.
Edge crouched on my other side, eyes on the patch. “Pathetic.”
“Yeah,” Nitro muttered. “Fucking lazy. If you’re gonna try to kill somebody, at least don’t do it like a coward with a bottle and a broom.”
Chief looked at him. “That’s your professional assessment?”
“That and their line prediction is insulting.” He looked at me, his mouth curving just a little. “They think you’ll take the flashy outside cut through the dip.”
I stood slowly, fighting the urge to look toward the Serpents’ pit. “They don’t know how I ride.”
“No, they don’t,” Kane agreed from behind me.
The fury in my chest wanted action. To walk into their pit, drag their racer by the throat to this patch of dirty asphalt, and make him eat the shit off the ground before I broke his jaw, then fed him to the nearest gator.
But anger wasn’t strategy, and Kane’s stillness beside me was a heavy reminder.
Confronting them now would tell them we’d found it.
Removing the trap quietly would leave them believing they’d stacked the odds, and men who believed they had a secret advantage got sloppy when the advantage didn’t appear.
“We clean it.”
Chief nodded. “I have compound and pads in the cart. We can make it look like we’re dealing with track grime.”
“Do it,” Kane ordered.
We worked without drawing attention, and when we were done, it was just safe enough that the trap was gone and the Serpents wouldn’t know it until their rider expected me to wreck and watched me fly through that section because the road belonged to me.
Edge’s grin was mean as we made our way back to the pit. “They’re going to be very disappointed.”
“They’ll live,” Nitro murmured.
I glanced at Edge. “Briefly?”
Edge’s grin widened, and his eyes glinted with a frightening twinkle. “Depends how disappointed Kane feels.”
Kane kept walking. “Race first.”
The public wager mattered because the racing world would see the Diesel Serpents lose after bragging too loudly and pushing too hard.
But the private debt mattered more. They had threatened Saylor, used Sutton, and tried cheating the race by putting a trap on our track like we were amateurs too stupid to read pavement.
Winning would settle the terms. What happened after would settle the insult.
By the time we returned to the pit, the crowd had thickened against the chain-link fences. Saylor was waiting near my bike with Rev, Blitz, and one of the prospects close enough to make me feel better about leaving her there.
Her eyes found me before I reached her. She tried to smile, but nerves sat around the edges of it, tightening her mouth and pulling faint lines between her brows. I hated seeing worry on her face. Hated even more that Sutton and the Diesel Serpents had put it there.
When I reached her, I didn’t say anything at first, just slid a hand around the back of her neck and pulled her in for a kiss hard enough to make her fingers clutch at my shirt. The taste of her settled me more than the track inspection had, and when I pulled back, her eyes were darker.
“Track okay?” she asked.
“Fine.”
She studied me. “That sounded like a very suspicious fine.”
“Teacher voice?”
“Very suspicious teacher voice.”
I brushed my thumb along the side of her throat, feeling her pulse jump. “Track’s handled.”
“That is not better.”
“Trust me, baby.”