Filthy and Dirty with the Bikers

3

Zoe

"What does that mean?" I asked. "Not yet?"

Ryder didn't answer right away. He walked a slow circle around the wreckage of the main bay, hands in his pockets, like he was measuring the space in his head. Jax stayed by the entrance, still watching me with that same suspicious weight. Mason had drifted toward the back of the garage, toward the covered shapes I hadn't had the strength to look at since the fire.

"We have a championship coming up," Ryder said finally. "The biggest underground race on the East Coast. Invitation only, money that would make your bank loan look like pocket change."

"Okay," I said slowly. "I don't see what that has to do with me."

"It has everything to do with you." He stopped in front of me, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to hold his eyes. "Three weeks ago, someone attacked our garage. Burned two bikes beyond saving and put our third out of commission. We need them race-ready in six weeks, and right now we don't have the hands to do it."

"So hire mechanics."

"We did." Jax's voice came from the doorway, flat and hard. "They quit after the second threat."

That stopped me. "Someone's threatening your mechanics?"

"Someone's been trying to keep us out of that championship since the day we qualified," Ryder said. "Which brings me back to you. Your father built engines nobody else in this state could touch. We heard you're just as good, maybe better."

"You heard wrong. I mean, I'm good. I'm not."

"You rebuilt a 1978 Shovelhead engine from scratch when you were nineteen," Mason said quietly from across the garage. I hadn't even realized he was listening. "Your father talked about it at a swap meet two years ago. Said you diagnosed a problem three master mechanics missed."

I stared at him, unsettled that a stranger knew that story better than most of my actual friends did.

"Here's the offer," Ryder said, drawing my attention back to him. "You rebuild our three race bikes. In exchange, we suspend collection on the debt until after the championship. No interest accruing, no pressure, no men showing up at your door demanding payment you don't have."

"And after the championship?"

"We'll discuss terms then. Reasonable ones."

I almost laughed. "You want me to just trust that. Trust three strangers from a motorcycle club my father apparently owed a fortune to, take your word that you won't just take the garage anyway the second I'm done being useful."

"You don't have to trust us," Ryder said. "You just have to do the math. Right now you have no garage, no income, and a debt you can't pay. This is the only offer on the table that doesn't end with you losing everything by Friday."

He wasn't wrong, and I hated that he wasn't wrong.

"I don't work for criminals," I said anyway, because some stubborn, exhausted part of me needed to say it out loud even if it didn't matter.

Jax pushed off the doorframe, something sharp in his expression. "You'll work for criminals if it means keeping daddy's garage. Don't act like this is about principle."

"Jax," Ryder said, low, and Jax went quiet, though the tension didn't leave his shoulders.

I turned away from all three of them, walking toward the back corner where the tarps were, where I'd been avoiding looking since the fire because some things you just aren't ready to see. Mason had already pulled one of the covers back, revealing a bike underneath that made my breath catch despite everything.

It was beautiful, even half wrecked. A custom build, low and lean, the kind of machine somebody had poured real love into. The front end was scorched, one side panel warped from heat, but the frame underneath still had good bones.

Mason crouched beside it, running his hand along the fuel line with the kind of care most people reserve for something alive. He hit the ignition, more out of habit than expectation, and the engine turned over with a rough, uneven cough before dying completely.

"There," he murmured, mostly to himself. He leaned closer, listening to the last dying sputter like it had told him something. "Timing chain's stretched. That's not fire damage. That's wear nobody caught before the attack even happened."

"You can tell that just from the sound?" I asked before I could stop myself.

He looked up at me, something like surprise flickering across his quiet face, like he hadn't expected me to actually engage. "You couldn't?"

I crouched down next to him without meaning to, close enough to see what he saw. I put my hand on the tank, feeling the last bit of warmth from the failed start, and listened to the silence where the engine used to be. He was right. I could hear it too, now that I was paying attention, the ghost of a rattle underneath the misfire.

"Timing chain," I agreed quietly. "Maybe the tensioner too."

Mason smiled, small and genuine, the first easy expression I'd seen from any of them. "Your father was right about you."

I straightened up fast, annoyed at how much that comment settled somewhere warm in my chest when I didn't want it to. I looked back at Ryder, who hadn't moved from where he stood watching the whole exchange with that same unreadable calm, and at Jax, who was watching me like he still hadn't decided if I was a liar.

I thought about the bank, and Greg's polite, useless sympathy. I thought about the toolbox with my father's handwriting on the side, and the ashes where my whole childhood used to stand. I thought about three generations of Carters and how I was the only one left to decide whether that name still meant anything.

I didn't have a choice. Not really. I just had the illusion of one, and pretending otherwise wasn't going to save the garage.

"Six weeks," I said, forcing the words out before I lost my nerve. "I rebuild your bikes, you leave the debt alone until after the race. That's the deal."

Ryder held out his hand, and I stared at it for a long moment before I finally shook it.

"That's the deal," he said.

Behind him, Jax exhaled like he still didn't like it, and Mason was already crouched back over the engine, already halfway lost in the work.

I had no idea, standing there in the ruins of everything I loved, that I'd just agreed to something far bigger than three motorcycles.