“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.”
