“I wish like hell I wasn’t asking this,” Hank said. “But this isn’t just about a dirty bottle and a crooked mechanic. The Dragons play rough. Marcus plays rough. If they think you’re a threat, they’ll push back. I’ve seen what that looks like off-track.”
She watched his face, really watched it, and he knew she saw more there than he usually let anyone see. Old dust, old heat. The kind that clung to your lungs no matter how many years passed.
“How bad,” she asked softly.
“Bad enough,” he said. “In the desert, it was explosives on the side of a road or a kid with a phone and a detonator. Here, it’s a bike that mysteriously malfunctioned or a woman who tripped on a set of stairs when no one was watching. Different stage, same play.”
Her breath hitched. “You really think they’d go that far?”
“I think people who cheat at a level that can kill someone are already comfortable crossing lines,” he said. “And I think you’re important to me. That’s not a variable I’m willing to risk.”
The last words slipped out before he could filter them.
Her eyes went dark and soft all at once.
“Important to you,” she repeated quietly.
“Yeah.” His voice came out rough; he didn’t try to clean it up. “You are. I’ve had maybe three months where my head shut up and the noise dropped to something livable; one of them was here, with you. I can’t walk into turn one tomorrow wondering if the Dragons have decided to send a message to the woman who caught them with their hand in the cookie jar.”
A quiet beat stretched between them, full of engine rumble and shouted orders from the far side of the trailers and the pulse of his own heart.
Bree’s chin lifted a fraction. “So this is about your focus.”
“It’s about your safety,” he said. “And yeah, it’s about my focus, because my focus is one of the things that keeps me alive on a bike. I’m better on track if I know you’re behind a locked door than if I think you’re out here trying to get perfect reference photos in a war zone.”
Her mouth twisted. “When you put it like that, you make Copper Moon sound very un-touristy.”
He almost smiled. “Tourists don’t normally stumble into performance-enhancing sabotage.”
She looked down at the sketchbook, then back up at him. Conflict flickered across her face; the artist who’d come for light and motion, the woman who’d just seen the underbelly.
“I hate feeling useless,” she admitted. “Like my job is to stay out of the way while the grown-ups handle it.”
“You’re not useless,” he said. “You’ve already done more than you know. You’re giving me a way to protect my team and level the field. But sometimes the bravest thing you can do is sit tight and let the people with muscle and experience take the hit.”
“And you’re the muscle,” she said.
“Among others,” he replied. “I’ll loop Brian and Colby in. I’ve got a buddy working tech in the regional series; I’ll see who’s around on this crew that still gives a damn about clean racing. We’ll be smart.”
Her gaze searched his, looking for cracks. “And what if they find another way to cheat?”
“Then we’ll keep watching,” he said. “But we can’t be everywhere. We start with what we know.”
She exhaled, long and slow. “You’re asking a lot.”
“I know.”
Silence fell again, thicker this time. She stood close enough that he could see the fine spray of freckles on her nose, the tiny smudge of graphite near her thumb where she’d apparently rubbed at something without thinking.
He realized he had braced his hand against the trailer beside her head at some point and leaned in, angling his body toward hers as if gravity had shifted.
Her eyes flicked to his mouth, just for a second, then back up.
The fear in her gaze hadn’t disappeared, but something else lived there too; a warmth that had been growing in stolen mornings and late-night texts and quiet walks in the dunes.
“You’re serious about this,” she said. “You’re not just being a caveman.”
“I’ve been accused of worse,” he said, half a breath from her now. “But yeah, I’m serious.”
