Baddie Cinderella with 4 MC bullies Riders

Chapter 5

Dani’s POV

The President lined up six motorcycles in the center of the garage at eight o'clock sharp. Six machines, six mechanics, and zero room for excuses.

"Each one of you gets a bike," the President announced, pacing slowly in front of us with his hands behind his back. "You inspect it top to bottom. You find every problem. You write it down. No asking your neighbor, no peeking at someone else's clipboard. This is not a group project. This is your individual test."

My palms were sweating. I wiped them against my jeans and stared at the row of chrome and steel in front of me. I had inspected dozens of bikes before, but never like this. Never in competition against the senior guys who had been wrenching since before I could walk.

"You nervous, Shorty?" Big Mike whispered from beside me, nudging my elbow with his thick arm.

"No," I lied. My stomach was doing backflips.

"Liar," Mike grinned. "Your left eye twitches when you're scared. It's doing it right now."

"Shut up, Mike."

The President pointed at each mechanic and assigned them a machine. When his finger landed on me, he nodded toward a matte black cruiser at the far end of the row. It was a beast of a bike, heavy and mean looking.

"That one is yours. You have forty five minutes. Clock starts now."

I grabbed my flashlight, my clipboard, and my wrench set and went straight to work. The garage was dead quiet except for the sound of tools clicking and boots scraping on concrete. Nobody talked. Nobody joked. Everyone was focused because everyone knew this evaluation decided who made the final Iron Run team.

I started with the obvious stuff. Tires, brake lines, chain tension, oil levels. Everything checked out clean. Too clean, actually. My gut told me something was off. The President was not the kind of man who would give us an easy test. There had to be something hiding in this machine.

I got down on my back and slid underneath the frame with my flashlight between my teeth. I checked the exhaust headers, the lower frame welds, the kickstand mount. Nothing. I was running out of time and running out of ideas, and the panic was starting to crawl up my throat like a cold hand.

Then I saw it.

A hairline fracture running along the inside of the rear swing arm, right where the shock absorber bolted into the frame. It was so thin you could barely see it with the naked eye. If I had not angled my flashlight at exactly that spot, I would have missed it completely.

I scrambled out from under the bike and wrote it down on my clipboard, my hand shaking with adrenaline. A cracked swing arm at high speed would snap the entire rear suspension. The back tire would lock sideways, and the rider would go down hard. It was a death trap hiding in plain sight.

When the forty five minutes ended, the President collected our clipboards one by one. He read through them slowly, his face giving nothing away. When he got to mine, he stopped.

"You found the swing arm fracture," the President said, looking at me over the top of the clipboard.

"Yes sir."

He glanced around the room at the other mechanics. None of them had caught it. I could see it on their faces. Old Hank raised his eyebrows and walked over to check the swing arm himself. After a few seconds, he let out a low whistle.

"Well damn," Hank muttered, stepping back with his arms crossed.

The President looked at me again. There was something close to pride in his eyes, but he did not let it stay long.

"Good catch," he said firmly. "Your eye is sharper than most guys twice your age. But your brake line report was incomplete. You missed the wear pattern on the front caliper pads, and your chain tension measurement was off by two millimeters. Sharp instincts are not enough if your fundamentals are sloppy. Tighten up your basics."

"Yes sir," I nodded, swallowing hard. "I will."

He walked away toward the office, and I stood there clutching my clipboard against my chest. Half of me wanted to scream with excitement because I had found something nobody else did. The other half of me felt the sting of his criticism sitting right on top of that pride like a weight. But instead of letting it crush me, I felt something stronger building inside my ribs. I was going to study those fundamentals until my eyes bled. Nobody was going to call my basics sloppy twice.

That afternoon, the riders took the track again. I watched from the pit wall with my arms folded, squinting against the dust kicked up by the bikes screaming past. Cole was out there pushing hard. Too hard. Every time he came around the far turn, his lean angle got deeper and his speed got faster. The other riders were pacing themselves, but Cole looked like he was trying to outrun something that had nothing to do with the race.

When he finally pulled into the pit, his engine was screaming at a pitch that made my teeth hurt. I walked straight up to his bike before he even had his helmet off.

"What are you doing out there?" I snapped, grabbing the handlebar to steady the vibrating machine. "Do you hear that engine? That is not a normal sound, Cole. Something is rattling loose in your lower end."

Cole pulled his helmet off and ran his hand through his sweaty hair. "It is fine. The bike sounds fine."

"It does not sound fine. It sounds like a blender full of gravel." I pressed my palm flat against the engine case and felt the irregular pulse shaking through the metal. "You have a bearing that is starting to go. If you keep hammering on it like that, you are going to seize the motor in the middle of a lap."

"I know my own bike better than anyone in this garage," Cole shot back, his jaw tight. "I have been riding this machine for four years."

"And I have been fixing it for three of those years, so sit down and let me look at it before you blow it up." I grabbed my socket set and dropped to my knees beside the engine without waiting for his permission.

"You are the bossiest person I have ever met in my entire life," Cole grumbled, but he stepped aside and let me work.

"And you are the most stubborn rider I have ever met in mine, so we are even."

Big Mike leaned against the pit wall, watching us go back and forth with a huge grin spreading across his face.

"Man, you two sound exactly like my grandparents," Mike laughed loudly. "They have been married fifty three years, and every single morning my grandma yells at my grandpa about something he is doing wrong, and every single morning my grandpa just stands there and takes it. You two are literally an old married couple."

Cody nearly spit out his water. "He is right! That is exactly what you look like right now. Cole just standing there while she yells at him with a wrench in her hand."

The whole pit crew burst out laughing. My face flushed hot, and I kept my eyes locked on the engine bolt I was loosening, refusing to look up.

Cole leaned back against the pit wall and crossed his arms, shaking his head with that lazy, easy grin of his.

"Living with someone as stubborn as her would exhaust any man on this planet," Cole said, tilting his chin toward me. "I would need a vacation every other week just to recover."

Everyone howled. Even Hank cracked a rare smile from across the bay. I forced myself to laugh along with them because that was what everyone expected. The cool girl who could take a joke. The tough little mechanic who never got her feelings hurt.

But underneath that laugh, something quietly cracked inside my chest. His words settled into that bruised spot behind my ribs where I kept all the things I could not say out loud. He talked about being with me like it was a joke. Like the very idea was so impossible, so ridiculous, that it was nothing more than comedy material for the guys.

I turned back to his engine and tightened the bolt in silence. Maybe I really was being paranoid. Maybe I had been reading signals that were never there. Cole was Cole. He was kind to me the same way he was kind to everyone in the club. There was nothing special about the coffee he brought me, or the sandwich, or the way he squeezed my shoulder. That was just who he was.

I needed to stop doing this to myself. I needed to stop building castles out of crumbs and then wondering why they kept falling down. Whatever I thought we could be, it probably was never going to happen. And the sooner I buried that stupid hope for good, the better off I would be.