Page 171 of Blood & Throttle

“If you grunt any louder,Riot, I’m gonna start selling tickets to this moan-fest.”

Riot doesn’t even glance up from the bike’s guts. Just mutters, “You wanna hold the torch or hold your tongue, Vega?”

“Not my tongue you should be worried about,” I shoot back with a smirk.

Ghost, crouched beside Riot, snorts under his breath but keeps working, fingers dancing over the tablet like a hacker possessed. The garage is a chaotic mess of sparks, sweat, and tension. Scattered mod parts, discarded wrappers, stripped wires curling like veins out of busted panels. The Widowmaker mod—the one Ghost swore might melt us alive if timed wrong—is already half-installed.

The air tastes like smoke and static. Like war.

Riot’s covered in grease, sweat glistening along the cords of his neck, shirt long gone. He’s focused, deadly in the way onlyhe can be. His forearms flex as he twists a wire harness into place, jaw locked like he's forcing the rage to stay caged.

“You ever think of doing something relaxing?” I ask, sliding down next to them. “Like yoga. Or, I don’t know, slaughtering fewer people.”

“Mod’s done,” he says instead, wiping his hands on a rag before tossing it aside. “Get on. Try the HUD overlay.”

The bike hums as I swing one leg over. The display flickers to life across the helmet visor, sharp and green. Threat signals, thermal overlays, atmospheric readouts—it’s all mapped in perfect clarity. And dead center, a flickering skull icon glows blood-red. The Widowmaker.

“Hell of a name,” I murmur.

“You’ll earn it tomorrow,” Riot replies, stepping up behind me, one hand settling low on my hip. “We hit that burst at the wrong second, it’ll turn us into ash.”

“Noted.”

Taz paces the far edge of the garage, her paws silent on cracked tile, hackles raised. She knows. She always knows when it’s close.

Bishop and Luca are outside the bunker rigging traps. I can hear them arguing faintly through the broken windows. EMP snares, spike lines, whatever bullshit Ghost cooked up to slow Syndicate pursuit if things go sideways.

Not if.

When.

Because tomorrow is the last Gauntlet.

Deadmoor.

And a crowd that wants us dead.

Ghost finally stands, stretching, headset shifting over his slicked-back hair. He’s pale as hell, like always, with that ghost light stare of his—gray, unreadable, unblinking. His utilitybelt’s fully stocked, fingers twitching like he’s already three thoughts ahead of everyone.

“Drive’s still unraveling,” he mutters. “Whatever the Syndicate scrubbed, it was deep. Someone wanted this shit buried.”

He doesn’t have to say what we’re all thinking. That brief flicker of my face on the surveillance log—barely a second, grainy and distorted—was enough to sink its claws behind my eyes and stay there. I don’t remember it. Don’t know when or where it was taken. But it’s proof that the Syndicate had eyes on me long before they admitted it. That there’s more to uncover and they buried it deep for a reason.

“Pull what you can,” I tell Ghost, voice low but steady. “If there’s anything in there we can use, anything to bring them down or clear my name, I want it.”

Ghost nods once and turns back to his screen, already moving.

Riot steps toward the back bench, rummaging in one of the compartments. When he turns, there’s something clutched in his palm—small, dull brass glinting under the low lights.

“Here,” he says, and tosses it to me.

I catch it mid-air.

It’s a bullet. AK round. Real steel. But it’s been hollowed out, polished, fitted to a matte black keychain ring. And on the side, etched deep into the casing in Riot’s unmistakable scrawl—Little Stray.

I don’t say anything at first.

Neither does he.