Chapter 60

Lumi

He looked at me, and for a second I thought he wouldn’t answer. His jaw tightened, that familiar wall creeping back up behind his eyes. But then it dropped again, just as quickly as it had come.

"A lot," he said quietly. "Every single day."

I didn’t say anything else. I just reached over and slipped my hand into his, holding on, letting him know he didn’t have to say anything more than that if he didn’t want to.

He looked down at our joined hands like he wasn’t quite used to being held like that, gently, without anyone needing anything from him.

Then his fingers curled around mine, firm and warm, and he pulled me up onto my feet.

"Come on," he said, his voice a little rougher now. "There’s more to see."

He led me around the edge of the valley, past the old training loop, toward a rise in the land where the sound of engines grew louder with every step.

As we crested the small hill, the noise hit me properly, a deep, rolling roar of machines, mixed with shouting and laughter and the sharp smell of fuel in the air.

Below us was a proper track. Not glossy or polished, but alive. Dozens of people stood along makeshift barriers, bikes lined up in rows, riders in worn leather jackets leaning against their machines, talking, laughing, waiting.

"They actually race here," I said, half to myself, staring down at the crowd.

"Every day," Ren said. "Same crowd, mostly. Some new faces now and then."

He walked me down the slope, and as we got closer, a man near the front barrier turned, caught sight of Ren, and broke into a wide grin.

"No way," the man said, jogging over, pulling Ren into a rough, one-armed hug. "Look what the wind blew in. It’s been what, three years?" I raised a brow.

Ren has been around three years ago? And I wasn’t aware? I made a quiet note to ask him about that later. There are so many things that aren’t clear. But now wasn’t about me, it was about him and I have to respect that.

"Something like that," Ren said, and there was that same easy warmth in his voice from before, the one that only seemed to come out around people who knew him from a time before all the titles, the pack and the responsibility.

"You riding today?" the man asked, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise the second the words left his mouth.

"If you’ll have me," Ren said.

The man let out a short laugh, shaking his head like he couldn’t quite believe it.

"Have you? Mate, they’ve been asking about you for months. Half of them think you retired. The other half think you died." He clapped Ren on the shoulder again. "Get a gear. I’ll sort you a spot in the next round."

Ren turned to me before he did anything else. He guided me away from the noise and the crowd, up a narrow set of wooden steps built into the side of the hill, toward a small covered platform tucked off to the side.

It looked out over the whole track, high enough to see everything, but far enough back that it felt private, almost hidden.

"This is for special guests," he said, settling me into a worn but comfortable chair at the front of the platform. "You’ll see everything from here. And nobody will bother you."

My chest ached a little at that. Guests. People who mattered. I was sitting in the one place at this entire track built for people someone cared about.

"You’ll be right there," he said, pointing toward the starting line. "I won’t be far."

"Okay," I whispered.

He held my gaze for one more second, like he wanted to say something else, then turned and walked back down the steps toward the rows of waiting bikes.

I sat forward in the chair, my hands gripping the wooden railing in front of me, watching him move through the crowd below.

Riders came up to him one after another, shaking his hand, thumping his back, calling out things I couldn’t hear from this far up. He belonged here.

It showed in the way he stood, loose and easy, nothing like the tense, guarded man that I know.

He walked along a row of bikes, running his hand over a few of them, before stopping at a lean, dark red machine near the end. He said something to the man beside it, who nodded and stepped back, handing him a worn helmet.

My heart was already pounding, and the race hadn’t even started.

A horn sounded, sharp and sudden, and the crowd along the barriers surged forward, shouting and cheering.

Six bikes rolled up to the starting line, Ren’s among them, his shoulders squared, his head low over the handlebars.

I gripped the railing so hard my knuckles went white.

The horn sounded again, and the world exploded into noise.

The bikes tore off the line all at once, dirt flying up behind them in a thick brown cloud.

My eyes found Ren immediately, the dark red bike cutting through the pack with a kind of ease that made my breath catch in my throat.

He wasn’t fighting the track. He was reading it, leaning low into every curve, finding gaps that didn’t seem to exist until he was already through them.

By the second lap, he’d pulled ahead of two riders. By the third, he was neck and neck with the leader, close enough that their tyres nearly touched on the final curve.

I was on my feet without even realising it, my hands pressed against my mouth, my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my ears.

"Come on," I whispered, then louder, "Come on, Ren!"

He hit the last straight with the other rider still beside him, both of them low and flat against their machines, engines screaming. For one agonising second, I couldn’t tell who was ahead.

Then the dark red bike surged forward, just barely, just enough, and crossed the line half a length in front.

The crowd below erupted, and so did I, a laugh tearing out of me that felt like it had been locked away for years.

I clapped my hands over my mouth, tears stinging unexpectedly at the corners of my eyes, watching him slow the bike down, circle back, and pull his helmet off.

He was breathing hard, grinning wide and unguarded, and the second his eyes found mine up on that platform, he lifted one hand and pointed straight at me, like he wanted the whole crowd to know exactly who he’d been racing for.

My chest felt too full to hold everything inside it. Watching him down there, free and lit up and completely himself, I understood something I’d been trying not to admit for weeks.

I wasn’t just falling for him. I think I already had.

I didn’t wait to be told to come down. The second he pulled his helmet off, I was already moving, half stumbling down the wooden steps, my legs slipping on the last one before a stranger’s hand caught my elbow and steadied me with a laugh.

"Careful there, love," the man said, grinning. "Don’t want you falling before he gets the chance to catch you himself."

I laughed, breathless, and pushed through the crowd toward the track. Riders and spectators alike were still cheering, someone banging on the side of a bike like a drum, but none of it mattered.

My eyes were fixed on Ren, walking his bike off the dirt, sweat sticking his hair to his forehead, that same wide, unguarded grin still on his face.

The moment he saw me coming, he let the bike lean against a stand and met me halfway.

"Well?" he said, arms opening slightly like he already knew what was coming. "What did you..."

I didn’t let him finish. I threw my arms around his neck and he caught me easily, lifting me half off my feet, laughing against my hair.

"You were incredible," I said into his shoulder, my voice muffled and a little shaky. "Ren, that was...I’ve never seen anything like that in my life."

"Yeah?" He pulled back just enough to look at me, his hands settling on my waist. There was something almost shy in his expression, which felt strange coming from a man who could silence a room full of grown men with one look. "You liked it?"

"I loved it," I said honestly. "I understand now. Why you do it. Why you needed to."

Something in his face softened completely at that, like he’d been waiting his whole life for someone to actually understand instead of just tolerate it.

"Come on," he said, nodding toward the crowd. "Let me introduce you properly. They’ll talk your ear off, fair warning."

He wasn’t wrong. For the next half hour, rider after rider came up, clapping him on the back, asking where he’d been, teasing him about disappearing without a word for three years.

A few of them looked at me curiously, then looked at Ren, then smiled like they’d figured something out they weren’t going to say out loud.

Ren kept one hand resting lightly at the small of my back the entire time, like he wasn’t planning on letting more than a few inches sit between us.

By the time we finally pulled away and started walking back toward where the bike was parked near the lake, the sky had shifted into a soft orange, the sun sinking low behind the hills.

"Thank you for today," I said quietly, as we walked. "All of it. The cliff, the lake, this place. You didn’t have to do any of it."

"I wanted to," he said simply. "You needed to breathe for a few hours. Everyone deserves that, even in the middle of a war."