Page 4 of Sinful
Stupid. Suspicious. Should've just ignored it, played it off. But panic makes you stupid.
"Right. Bailey. My mistake." He smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes. "Have a good night."
He walks past me toward a black pickup truck I didn't notice before.
Too focused on my bike, on escaping, on the race.
Now I notice everything.
The truck's plates—obscured by dirt, deliberately.
The way he moves—controlled, military maybe, or something else.
The way he said my name—certain, like he's been looking for me.
I throw my leg over the bike, hands shaking so bad I almost drop the keys.
The engine roars to life, and I don't wait.
Just go.
Gravel spitting under my tires, the Kawasaki eating up distance between me and whatever the fuck that was.
The desert highway is empty this time of night.
Just me and the broken white line and the suffocating dark pressing in from all sides.
I push the bike to eighty. Ninety.
The speed helps. Always does.
Wind tears at my jacket, the engine screams, and for these few minutes, I'm not running from anything.
I'm just riding.
Just existing in the space between one mile marker and the next.
The race site is an abandoned airstrip forty minutes outside Austin.
Exactly the kind of place cops don't bother with because there's nothing out here but rattlesnakes and bad decisions.
I can see the lights from a mile away—portable floods someone hauled in, generators humming, casting everything in harsh white that makes the desert look alien.
Cars and bikes line the makeshift road, maybe forty vehicles total.
Good turnout.
Means the pot's probably bigger than Raze said.
I park at the edge, away from the crowd.
Old habit. Always know your exits. Always be ready to run.
"Hell! Thought you might pussy out!" Raze appears, grinning like the devil's accountant.
He's skinny, all elbows and angles, with a face that's been broken and reset too many times to look right anymore.
But he runs clean races—no guns, no cops on payroll, just speed and money and the kind of reputation that keeps people honest.
