Page 273 of Rogue Riders Duet

EIGHTEEN

The garage smells like dust, chain grease, and ghosts.

I stand still in the doorway, arms crossed, spine locked, every muscle tense like my body knows what this room means before my brain lets me feel it. It’s cold in here—colder than it should be in October—but maybe that’s just me.

Four bikes line the left wall. All Dane’s. Each of them is a timestamp, a fucking shrine. There’s the one from his first World Cup win, still crusted with mud, like it was too sacred to clean. Next to it stand the ones from the seasons of his other overall wins, and the last one, the one he raced the year I crashed, still has the mechanic’s marker on the rear suspension.

Across from them are two bikes that used to be mine.

One of them still has the teal grips I begged Dane for on my birthday last year. It looks smaller than I remember, like it shrank while I was busy learning how to walk again.

The one that broke under me isn’t here, though. I don’t know whether the factory retrieved it to check for the failure or if Dane disposed of it, but either way, it vanished, as if it had never existed.

Like it never happened.

I step closer, boots echoing off concrete. My fingers brush the handlebars of my old bike, and they tremble. It’s ridiculous how much this hunk of carbon owns me. How my chest clenches like it remembers the feel of air ripping out of my lungs, but if I want revenge, then I have to start here.

I slide the bike out of its rack, and my ribs already protest the movement, as does my hip.

It’s fine.

I don’t need to be whole. I just need to be fast.

The tires are low, but the bike still rolls, and that’s enough for what I want right now. I push it outside, past the porch, down the gravel, and to the trailhead just behind the house.

The morning air is thick with fog, and the track ahead splits almost immediately into two black lines. One veers left, the other plunges straight down, steep enough to make seasoned racers flinch. Dane and I built both. We never believed in blue runs.

Easy was boring.

Rolling the bike to the start of the trail, I realize it feels heavier than I remember, or maybe I’m just weaker. Probably both.

I try to swing my right leg over the saddle, but I don’t manage to get it high enough.

I back up, try again, but my hip locks like the joint is frozen in place. The third time I try, something spasms and pain arcs down my thigh.

“Fuck!” I hiss through clenched teeth, head dropping forward.

I don’t want to cry. I don’t cry.

But my eyes sting anyway.

This shouldn’t be this hard.

I squeeze my eyes shut, suck in a breath, and then bite down, grit through, and shove my leg up and over. The scream stays silent in my throat, but I’m on the bike now, perched at the top of a trail only lunatics would ride before breakfast, and I’m shaking because I’m back on a bike, back on what almost killed me.

My breath comes in sharp bursts as my vision sways.

My lungs are trying to expand, but there’s no air, none, just pain, and the weight of a broken body folding in on itself. I’m suffocating on my own blood while the medics scream, and I can’t scream because I⁠—

I blink hard. This is not real. I’m fine.

But the tremor in my arms is real, and the bile in my throat is too. I try to breathe the panic down while my gaze is zeroed in on the screws on the stem of the bike, and anxious thoughts fill my mind.

Who was the last one to touch this bike?

Me?

Dane?