Page 19 of Rogue Riders Duet

“So, what? You’re saying she made the choice for you?”

“I’m saying if I hadn’t helped her, she’d be dead.”

What?

I take a step back as if denying his words, but Dane doesn’t stop.

“You think I don’t know how stupid and dangerous this is?” His voice rises. “You think I want to be here? Watching my little sister throw herself into this insane-fucking-mission knowing damn well it won’t do what she thinks it’ll do for her?” He steps toward me, eyes blazing. “You think I wanted to walk away from my whole fucking life only to come back seven years later to find her standing on the same goddamn mountain, chasing down the same goddamn ghosts?”

I fight the urge to step back as he continues his tirade.

“If I hadn’t helped her, she wouldn’t be here, Finn. And I don’t mean here as in Fort William.” His voice drops a register and becomes rougher. “I mean here as in alive. Alaina didn’t live after the crash. She survived. Barely.”

And where the fuck was I? Sitting in hotel rooms, scrolling past headlines, wondering why they didn’t answer my calls.

“You don’t know what it was like after. You don’t know what it did to her. All the pain and the surgeries and the broken dreams.” His hands curl into fists at his sides, and his eyes go distant with the memory. “You don’t know how many nights I sat outside her door, too fucking scared to go to sleep because I didn’t know whether she’d still be breathing when I woke up.”

His eyes fill with tears, and my nose starts to burn in the tense silence that follows.

“You could have called me, Dane,” I say eventually, my voice barely above a whisper. “I would have been there for you.”

I called him every day for at least a year, but he never picked up, not even once, so I stopped.

I shouldn’t have.

“She was gone, man. Gone. And there was nothing I could do. Nothing you could have done.” He swallows. “Nothing but let her have this.”

“So this whole thing, this disguise, this insane fucking plan…”

“It fueled her.” Dane’s eyes drop to the floor. “She lived because of this. She got out of bed because of this. She trained, she rebuilt herself, she became unstoppable. All because of this. Because of spite. She’s only alive because she had this to fight for, and I’m not only terrified of what happens when she wins this. I’m terrified of what happens after.”

I blink and take an involuntary step backward. “What do you mean?”

Dane lifts his gaze, and his eyes are hollow.

“What will happen to her when she has nothing left to fight for?”

Well, fuck.

FIVE

Finn disappears into the crowd like he wasn’t just sitting next to me, trying to peel back my skin with his stare to see what’s underneath.

But he didn’t.

Or, I don’t think he did.

I thought for sure he would say something after the hiccup, but maybe it was just the disruption that startled him, a weird sound in a high-pressure moment. Maybe he forgot that was even a thing I used to do. It’s been years, and it’s not like I was ever important to him in the first place.

Not like he was to me.

I shake the thought off and dig my gloved fingers into my knee pads to focus as the speaker crackles overhead.

“At the top, the final rider of the day, number sixty-nine. Luc Delacroix!”

The crowd erupts in a sea of voices shouting his name. “Luc, Luc, Luc!” The syllables bounce off the mountains, reverberating through the finish corral.

“French fry,” Raine mutters under his breath, making me stiffen, and my fingers curl into my gloves.