Baddie Cinderella with 4 MC bullies Riders

Chapter 6

Dani’s POV

Three days before the qualifier, the Iron Blade garage turned into a war zone of grease, noise, and deadlines.

Every bay was full. Every tool cart was in use. Bikes were lined up bumper to bumper along the south wall waiting for final checks, and the air smelled like hot rubber and chain lube. I had not slept more than four hours a night all week, and my hands were so raw from wrenching that I had to wrap tape around three of my fingers just to grip a socket.

"Hey, can you look at my rear suspension real quick?" Cody called from across the shop, waving me over. "Something feels loose when I lean into the corners."

"Give me five minutes," I called back, finishing the oil change I was already elbow deep in.

"Forget five minutes, get over here now!" Travis yelled from the opposite bay. "My throttle cable feels sticky. I need you before my practice slot."

"She is not a damn genie in a bottle, Travis," Big Mike laughed, throwing a shop towel at his head. "Wait your turn."

I moved from bike to bike without stopping. Somewhere between noon and two o'clock, I stopped counting how many machines I had touched. Every time I finished one job, two more riders were standing behind me with their helmets in their hands and their faces looking stressed. I did not even notice that nobody was going to the senior mechanics anymore. They were all coming straight to me.

"You need to eat something," Hank muttered as he passed me carrying a box of brake pads. "You look like a ghost with a ponytail."

"I will eat when I am done."

"You said that four hours ago." He dropped a granola bar on my toolbox without slowing down.

I shoved it in my pocket and kept working. There was no time to stop. The qualifier was breathing down our necks, and every single bolt, every cable, every tire pressure reading had to be perfect. One mistake out on that track and somebody could get hurt or worse.

By eleven o'clock that night, the garage was mostly empty. The riders had gone back to the clubhouse, and the other mechanics had packed up their carts and headed home. I was the only one left, moving through the row of finished bikes with my flashlight and clipboard, doing one last round of checks before I locked up.

I got to Cody's cruiser first. I had replaced his rear brake pads that morning and torqued every bolt myself. I remembered doing it because I had triple checked the numbers after Hank's lecture about my sloppy fundamentals. I was absolutely certain I had tightened everything properly.

But when I put my wrench on the rear caliper mounting bolt, it turned.

It was loose.

I stared at it for a long second, my stomach going cold. That bolt should not have moved. I had torqued it to spec less than twelve hours ago. I tightened it again, wrote down the time and the bike number on my clipboard, and moved on.

Two bikes later, I found another problem. The fuel line clamp on Travis's machine was backed off just enough to allow a slow drip. It was not a catastrophic failure, not yet, but at high speed that drip would spray fuel onto the hot exhaust headers. I had checked that clamp yesterday. I was sure of it.

My hands stopped moving. I stood there in the quiet garage, staring at the fuel line with my flashlight beam shaking slightly in my grip.

Maybe I forgot. Maybe I was so tired that I missed it the first time. That was the logical answer, and I wanted to believe it. But two mistakes on two different bikes in the same night felt wrong. It felt like a pattern.

I pulled my small black notebook from my back pocket, the same one I used at the paddock, and started a new page. I wrote down both bikes, both problems, the dates I had originally done the work, and the condition I found them in tonight. I did not write any conclusions. I just wrote the facts.

I was not going to accuse anyone of anything. Not yet. Not without proof.

The next morning, the paddock was buzzing with activity. Visiting clubs had set up their tents and pit areas all around the fairgrounds, and the smell of exhaust and barbecue smoke filled the warm morning air. I was carrying a heavy toolbox across the lot when a tall mechanic from the Desert Wolves stepped into my path.

"Hey, you are the girl from Iron Blade, right?" He had a sun burnt face and oil stained fingers that told me he was a real wrench turner, not just a weekend warrior.

"That is me." I shifted the toolbox to my other hand.

"My buddy told me you caught a swing arm fracture that five other mechanics missed during an evaluation." He looked genuinely impressed. "That is a hell of a find. Most guys would not even think to check there."

"I check everything," I shrugged, trying not to let the compliment go to my head. "That is kind of the whole point of the job."

He laughed and stuck out his hand. "Name is Ray. If you ever get bored of Iron Blade, we could use eyes like yours in our shop."

"She is not going anywhere," a low voice came from behind me.

I turned around and saw Cole walking up with two bottles of water, his leather vest open over a white t shirt that was doing absolutely criminal things to his chest. He handed me one of the bottles without looking at Ray, his jaw set in a way that was barely noticeable unless you knew his face the way I did.

"Just making conversation, brother," Ray held up his hands with an easy smile. "No poaching. Just respect."

"Appreciate it," Cole nodded, his voice polite but short. He put his hand on the small of my back and steered me toward our pit area.

"That was rude," I told him, twisting the cap off my water.

"That was not rude. That was efficient." His hand stayed on my back for three more steps before he dropped it.

I hated how much I noticed when he touched me. I hated how the warmth of his palm burned through my thin shirt like a brand. I took a long drink of water to cool down my face.

Throughout the rest of the day, it happened two more times. A mechanic from a club out of Arizona asked me about my method for adjusting valve clearances. A young rider from the Midnight Kings, the same club whose guy had mocked me at the paddock days ago, actually came over and apologized for his teammate's attitude.

"He is an i***t," the young rider told me. "Everyone in the paddock is talking about the girl mechanic at Iron Blade who knows more about engines than half the men out here."

I felt my chest swell with something warm and unfamiliar. Pride, maybe. Or just the feeling of being seen for the first time by people outside my own club. These were strangers who had no reason to be nice to me, and they were going out of their way to tell me I was good at what I did.

Cole watched these interactions from a distance, leaning against his bike with his arms crossed. He did not say anything about them. He did not seem bothered or jealous. He just watched and then went back to adjusting his mirrors like it was nothing worth thinking about.

Of course he did not care. Why would he. I was family. Just the kid sister. Nobody got jealous over their little sister talking to strangers.

I pushed the thought away and focused on what mattered.

That night, long after midnight, I sat alone on my workbench with my notebook open under the harsh fluorescent light. I had added three more entries over the past two days. A loose spark plug wire on Dex's bike. A missing cotter pin on the front axle of the backup cruiser. A slightly deflated rear tire on a machine I had personally pumped and checked the day before.

Each one by itself was nothing. A forgotten step. A tired mistake. An honest oversight.

But all of them together, written out in a row on the same page, looked like something else entirely.

I chewed the end of my pen and stared at the list. My tired brain wanted to tell me I was being crazy. That I was overthinking things because I was exhausted and stressed and running on granola bars and black coffee. And maybe that was true. Maybe I was just a paranoid girl seeing ghosts in the shadows.

But my gut, the same gut that had caught the cracked brake line on Travis's bike and the fractured swing arm during the evaluation, was telling me that something was not right. Too many small things had gone wrong on too many different machines. And every single one of them was a bike I had personally worked on.

I closed the notebook and shoved it deep into my jacket pocket. I was not going to run to the President with a list of maybes. I was not going to start pointing fingers without real evidence. If someone was messing with these bikes, I needed to catch them in the act. And if I was wrong, if all of this really was just exhaustion and bad luck, then nobody ever needed to know I suspected anything at all.

I turned off the shop light and walked out into the cool night air alone, my mind already planning how to set a quiet trap.