Page 133 of Blood & Throttle

It’s ours.

Twenty-Four

Riot

Ride Or Die - Saintino Le Saint

The road ahead feels endless.Sun beating down through a haze of smog, cracked asphalt unraveling beneath our wheels, wind slicing through leather like a warning. We’ve been riding for hours now, and it’s the kind of silence that doesn’t ask for permission. The kind that sets into your bones and makes itself at home.

Behind me, Sin shifts slightly. Not because she’s tired, but because she’s reading me. I feel it in the way her thighs press tighter around mine when my shoulder stiffens. I feel it in the way her hands don’t grip too hard or too soft, like she knows how to ground me without tethering me.

She’s been doing that a lot lately.

It started the night Doc died. When she crawled into the dark beside me and didn’t ask for anything in return. When she stitched my wound and told me repeatedly in her feisty, annoying yet goddamn sexy tone of hers, that I wasn’t invincible.When she held me like I wasn’t a weapon, like I was just a man falling apart.

Since that night, she’s been in the pit more. Shoulders set, hands steady, always moving. Rewiring shit with Ghost. Digging through scrap with Bishop. Patching what’s busted. Keeping the rest of us from falling apart while pretending she isn’t doing any of it.

She was always part of this. Always sharp. Always loud. But now? She’s everywhere. Checking in like Doc used to, without the bedside tone, just a look and a question you better answer straight.

She doesn’t talk about it or try to step into Doc’s place.No one could.

But she’s there. Every day. Smart mouth still running, doing what needs doing without being told. Holding shit together the only way she knows how—quietly, stubbornly, like it’s her job to keep us all from fucking cracking.

None of us asked her to.

She just did it.

Because that’s who the hell she is.

I glance at the rear-view HUD and catch the edge of her helmet tilted down against my back. She’s holding on like today, it’s not about keeping her balance, but about not letting go.

My jaw tightens.

There are things I don’t say to her. Things I don’t know how to say.

That watching her move through grief alongside us, like it’s a battlefield makes me want her even more.

That the way she looked with Jace under her, blood on her knuckles and her gun in his mouth, made something in me twist low and vicious.

That if I ever lose her, I won’t survive it.

I can’t lose any of them, but especially her.

The memory of Doc settles behind my ribs like shrapnel. Sharp and constant. Every breath scrapes against it. I keep waiting for it to dull, for the ache to back off, but it doesn't. It just digs deeper.

Grief like this doesn’t scream. It lingers. It rots slow beneath the surface just out of sight.

I’ve thrown everything I have left into the bike, into prep, and keeping my hands busy so I don’t start tearing things apart just to feel like I’m doing something. Anything.

But it’s still there.

In every silence.

Every breath, and every second I look at my crew and see one less face staring back.

And no matter how fast I ride, how hard I push, it’s never going to be enough to outrun it.

The skyline shifts aheadof us. Towers jutting like broken bones against the horizon, their edges pulsing with fractured neon. We’re close now. Another half hour, maybe less.