Page 14 of Redline Baby

"I am."

"That's why you've been watching me?" I ask, aiming for a smirk, mostly landing it.

"Partly that too." He turns the bottle a quarter turn against the bar, like the sentence isn't finished yet and he knows it. "You ride like Ni says you race. Committed to the corner, every time, no matter what's coming out the other side."

"That a compliment or a warning?"

"Depends on how much you'd like it to be one." A ghost of a smile. "You've got a good crowd around you tonight. Loud bunch. Good laugh."

"I'm a delight," I say. "Ask anyone."

"I have. Dex says you haven't slowed down in about three weeks."

He says it lightly, conversationally, in the same tone he used for Ni's thermos of coffee.

But it lands somewhere under my ribs anyway, a small, cold coin dropping straight to the bottom of my stomach.

"Dex talks too much," I say, and I hear the edge come into my own voice, thin and defensive, and I hate that he can probably hear it too.

"He does," Soren agrees easily, letting it go exactly like that.

No push.

No follow-up question waiting to trap me.

He just picks his bottle back up. "I like him. He's loyal."

I sit there for a second, off-balance, waiting for the rest of it, the part where he tells me what he thinks he sees, the diagnosis, the I know what you're doing, little one—because that's how this always goes, that's the script, that's how Charles used to do it: cut straight through the noise in four words and leave me standing there naked in front of him.

I brace for it.

It doesn't come.

Soren just watches the room, unbothered, entirely present beside me, and lets the silence stretch long enough that it should be uncomfortable and somehow isn't.

Not from him.

Not the way it is from everyone else.

"You're not going to say it," I say finally, and I don't even know what it is, except that I can feel the shape of something withheld, sitting there patient and enormous, and it's making me itch worse than if he'd just come out with it.

"Say what?" he asks, and there's nothing coy in it. He seems genuinely willing to wait for me to tell him.

I open my mouth.

Nothing comes out.

I close it again.

"So..." I say instead, grabbing for the nearest exit ramp, the way I always do, the way I've done my whole life. "Ni said you own a shop too."

Soren lets me have the exit.

He doesn't drag me back to the thing I almost said. He just tips his head, easy, like the change of subject is a perfectly reasonable place to land.

"Halverson Moto," he says. "About twenty minutes from here. Mostly custom fab and vintage restorations."

"Restorations."