Iris
The road doesn’t choose favorites. It only remembers who hesitated.
The moment he steps away from me, the mask slides back into place.
The killer. The ghost. The man who’s won six races and left six bodies in his wake.
I smooth my dress once more, run fingers through my hair, and become the architect again. The woman who built this circuit knows every inch of its cruelty.
The crowd is screaming now—anticipation reaching fever pitch.
I walk to the starting line on shaking legs.
Lucian is already in his car—a track modified Aston Martin, all carbon fiber and aggressive angles. He revs the engine, and it screams like a dying animal. The car may be faster than Ronan’s, but his street smarts will beat out Lucian’s need for power.
It has to.
Ronan slides into the Camaro without a word.
I raise my arm.
The city goes still.
Even the engines seem to hesitate—snarling low, hungry, like they know what’s about to be asked of them. Like they can smell the blood that hasn’t been spilled yet.
The crowd compresses inward, bodies packed tight along barricades and rooftops, breath caught in thousands of throats at once. They came for spectacle. They’re about to witness an execution.
I drop the signal.
Lucian launches like the road belongs to him.
Throttle pinned. Tires screaming. His car surges forward violently.
The cameras blinking red on his dashboard, hungry for proof of his dominance.
He doesn’t just take the lead—he announces it.
Weaves through the opening stretch with theatrical aggression, bullying the space where there shouldn’t be any, forcing the world to accommodate him.
He wants witnesses.
He wants this immortalized.
He doesn’t understand yet that he’s already dead.
The route unspools beneath them exactly as I built it—cruel, deliberate, a serpent of asphalt threading through Miami’s arterial system. Every turn is calculated. Every straightaway is measured. A death trap disguised as a race course.
I built this.
I designed his execution.
Brickell rises first, glass towers looming like judges presiding over a sentencing. Headlights fracture against mirrored facades, reflections lying about distance and speed.
Lucian drifts wide through the turns, tires burning, smoke blooming behind him like funeral incense. He’s performing for the city, for the cameras, for the myth he believes he already is. Every movement is theatrical. Every gesture is designed for replay.
He doesn’t see the predator closing behind him.
Ronan holds the racing line.
Clean. Controlled. Patient as death.
He’s not racing Lucian. He’s stalking him. Waiting for the perfect moment to strike. His movements are precise—no wasted motion, no unnecessary aggression.
They tear out of the canyon and onto the Rickenbacker Causeway, the bridge stretching long and exposed over black water.
Wind claws at the cars. Salt spray ghosts across the asphalt, making everything slick, treacherous.
Construction squeezes the lanes into something barely passable with orange barrels and concrete barriers.
This is where people die.
The water below is black and hungry, waiting with the patience of something that knows it will be fed. Waves crash against the pilings—rhythmic and relentless.
Lucian doesn’t lift.
Neither does Ronan.
They’re side by side now, engines screaming in unison, metal vibrating so hard I feel it in my chest from half a mile away. The sound is wrong—too loud, too violent, the mechanical shriek of machines being pushed past their breaking point.
Lucian rides the outside lane, inches from open water and oblivion.
Ronan locks the inside, steady as a blade, finding flesh.
Paint trades. Metal kisses metal. Sparks fly in the darkness like dying stars.
The crowd’s roar swells—this is what they came for. Two kings refusing to yield. Blood sport dressed as entertainment. They don’t yet understand they’re watching a murder.
They enter the tight construction zone.
The trap closes.
The guillotine falls.
Single file only.
The road narrows to a throat barely wide enough for one car. Orange barrels compress inward like a vise. Concrete barriers rise on both sides—unforgiving, absolute, the walls of a death chamber.
Lucian makes his move.
He jerks the wheel right, violent and sudden, trying to shove Ronan into the barrier—an act born of arrogance, of a man who has never learned restraint, who believes the universe will make room for him simply because he demands it.
One of them has to yield.
One of them has to back down.
Ronan doesn’t move.
The sound is catastrophic. The metal screams in protest, sparks erupting in a blinding spray that lights up the night like a welder’s torch. The smell hits me even from here; burning rubber, scorched metal, the acrid stench of something fundamental breaking.
Lucian’s car clips the barrier at top speed.
The angle is wrong. The speed is wrong. Physics turns into a traitor. Momentum becomes an executioner.
He overcorrects.
For a brief glance, I see his face through the windshield.
The arrogance is gone.
Just the sudden, daunting realization that the road isn’t impressed by his name. That money can’t negotiate with physics. That he’s not special. Not chosen. Not immortal.
Just meat and bone about to meet water at terminal velocity.
The guardrail gives way.
Lucian’s car clears the edge.
The world holds its breath.
Time distorts, stretching impossibly long, every millisecond expanding into eternity. The car hangs suspended between asphalt and water, between life and consequence, between what was and what will never be again.
For a fraction of a second, it almost looks like he might recover—like the universe might grant him one final mercy.
Then gravity remembers him.
The fall is violent.
The car rotates as it drops—nose over tail, a grotesque pirouette performed for an audience waiting for the fallout. I can see him inside, silhouetted against the dashboard lights, body rigid with a certain knowledge of what’s coming.
Three seconds.
That’s how long it takes to fall from the causeway to the water.
Three seconds to regret every choice that led him here.
The impact is catastrophic.
The water doesn’t cushion.
At this speed and angle, water is concrete. Unforgiving. Absolute.
I hear bones breaking from here.
Or maybe I just imagine it.
Maybe I’ve imagined this moment so many times while designing this route that I know exactly what it sounds like. The snap of ribs. The wet crack of a skull meeting dashboard. The gurgle of lungs filling with salt water and blood.
The car hits and keeps going—momentum driving it down into the black. Water rushes in through shattered windows, through the crumpled frame.
For one brief moment, the headlights stay on underwater. The twin beams cutting through the murk, a desperate last gasp of technology.
Then they flicker and die.
The world falls abruptly silent. Like the period at the end of a sentence written in blood and hubris.
The kind of silence that comes after violence, when the world is still processing what it just witnessed.
Then Ronan surges past the flare-marked finish line.
Alone.
The crowd doesn’t cheer.
They stare in awe.
Phones lower slowly, like people waking from a nightmare. The realization spreads through them like poison. They didn’t just watch a race. They watched a murder. They’re witnesses now. Accomplices. Complicit in something that can’t be undone.
The crowd scatters like roaches when the lights come on—desperate to distance themselves from what they’ve seen, what they’ve been part of. Within minutes, the street is empty except for the Camaro idling at the line and my Chevelle still parked where I left it.
And me.
Standing alone in the middle of the road, watching smoke rise from the water below.
Then I hear the Camaro’s door open.
Ronan is out of the car, moving toward me with purpose. His hands find my face, tilting it up, eyes searching mine like I’m the one who was in danger.
For a long moment, we just stare at each other. Two people who’ve built something beautiful and terrible, who’ve turned violence into art, who’ve just watched a man die because of what we created.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I say.
The words come out broken.
“I know.” His forehead drops to mine. “Neither can I.”
“Seven men, Ronan. Seven.”
“I know.”
“We did this. My father built this. We—”
“We’re done,” he says, and it’s not a question.
It’s a decision. Final.
I pull back to look at him. “What?”
“We’re done.” His hands slide down to grip my shoulders. “With all of it. The circuit. The races. The deaths. We’re walking away.”
“We can’t just—”
“Yes, we can.” His voice is certain in a way I’ve never heard before. “We choose to. Right now. Together.”
My throat tightens. “The circuit won’t just disappear because we leave.”
“No.” He glances toward the water, where Lucian’s car is already being swallowed by the dark. “Someone will take over. But it won’t be us. Not anymore.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care.” He looks back at me, and his eyes are devastated but clear. “Let them have it. Let them destroy themselves. We’re done watching people die for our entertainment.”
“Otto—”
“Will understand. Either way, we’re leaving.”
The weight of seven races and seven deaths crashes down on me all at once. The careful calculations. The routes are designed to punish. The men who died because I was good at turning geography into violence.
“I killed him,” I whisper.
“We both did.” Ronan’s grip tightens. “And we’re both walking away before we kill anyone else.”
“What do we do instead?”
“Live.” He says it like it’s simple. Like it’s possible. “We just... live. No more races. No more death. Just us.”
I want to argue. I want to point out all the reasons why it’s not that easy, why we can’t just walk away from something I helped to build and maintain from nothing.
But I’m so tired.
Tired of the violence. Tired of the fear. Tired of watching men die and calling it sport.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” I take a shaky breath. “We’re done. Both of us. Together.”
We stand there in the middle of the empty causeway, two people who’ve chosen each other over everything else. Over power. Over legacy. Over the beautiful, terrible thing we built together.
The ocean still roars below, relentless and hungry.
But we’re not feeding it anymore.
I look at Ronan—this man who’s killed for me, who’s bled for me, who’s choosing to walk away from everything he knows because staying means more death.
For the first time, love doesn’t arrive at full speed, burning rubber and leaving bodies in its wake.
It stays, and it survives.