Page 33 of Racer

“Got it,” he announced, eyes lit with triumph. “I finally cracked the encrypted ledger from the betting syndicate about ten minutes ago. The teams backed by the kingpin all exhibit abnormal win-loss ratios, often tied to suspicious crashes or sudden performance shifts. We're talking race after race.”

“Throwing them and rigging results,” Jude muttered, a muscle jumping in his jaw.

“And profiting off every damn one,” Jax added. “But now we have names, data, and patterns. Enough to make them sweat.”

Kane gave a grim nod. “We finally know who’s dirty and who we’re going to burn down.”

Jude smirked. “And which team owners we can approach with a plan.”

He sounded so sure, so in control. It made me want to crawl into his lap and never leave.

I snorted at the totally inappropriate thought that maybe then I’d finally learn what promise he’d made to Kane. All three men looked at me, and I pressed my lips together as I waved off their concern.

“Sorry. Just looking forward to making these guys pay so Mason doesn’t wake up wondering what we’ve been doing all these weeks.”

None of them looked convinced I was really okay. Jude flung his arm over the back of my chair, and Kane’s eyes narrowed slightly. His expression shifted, making him less like a club president and more like a protective pseudo big brother.

Jax sat down and waited to see what happened next.

“There’s more,” Kane said quietly.

Jude’s arm brushed my shoulders as he straightened. I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t. Not when my gut told me that this wasn’t going to be about strategy or takedowns. Or even revenge.

He needed to tell me something about Mason.

Kane glanced at Jax, who gave a small nod and mumbled something about giving us a minute before backing out of the office.

“Deviant and Jax have been digging into your brother’s data logger,” Kane told me.

I froze, my stomach doing an unpleasant flip. “I thought it was too damaged.”

“It was pretty damn bad,” he agreed with a sharp nod. “But Jax and Deviant split the load between them. One took the rig’s onboard system, the other tackled the backup telemetry. They worked around the corrupt data and found a sliver of clean entry points.”

My breath caught.

“They recovered some of the crash data?” My voice came out strangled, barely more than a whisper.

Kane nodded again. “Not all of it. But just enough.”

Hope flared that I would finally get the answers I wanted. Even though Dez Franklin’s guys basically admitted to messing with his car, it wasn’t enough for me. I needed the details to wrap my head around what happened to my brother. How they managed to take out the guy I’d always thought of as invincible.

Jude reached over, his fingers interlacing with mine, his grip firm and grounding.

After taking a deep breath, I asked, “What did they find?”

Kane scanned my expression before calling, “Come back in, Jax.”

Jax returned with his laptop tucked under his arm. He set it on the desk in front of Jude and me. Flipping it open, he pulled up the file they’d recovered. “We noticed strange ECU behavior in the crash data. The air-fuel ratio suddenly spiked lean at full throttle, right before engine detonation.”

I leaned forward to get a closer look at the numbers. “They altered the map to reduce the injector duty cycle under full throttle, which fits with what we found under the hood of his car.”

“That’d fuck up the engine for sure,” Jude agreed.

“So the engine stalled on that turn, and that’s why my brother crashed,” I whispered. “But the car ran normally inpractice. Mason wouldn’t have missed something like this, and neither would I.”

“They loaded a kill map and set a map-switching condition they knew he wouldn’t hit during practice.” Jax tapped the keyboard to split the screen. “It didn’t change over until he hit 6800 RPM for a full five seconds.”

I thought back to the night Mason crashed. “Probably during the first straight when he went full throttle.”

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