This isnt a fanfiction i do with a light heart, i am aware it has mistakes and what it contains going forward, i will come back and do better editing when im able to get this whole story off of my chest , this story is made as a release of remorse and lingering guilt in the name of my best friend Shane who passed away recently due to a heart attack leaving everyone in shock and misery at his loss. i have made this story, combining his two favorite things apart from his two boys as a way to release and just ease my mind, i hope you enjoy this story as much as i do, onto the story ...
...
Dom hated being micro-managed.
He didn't call it that out loud—Dom didn't complain in pretty words—but the annoyance sat in the set of his jaw all the way back from Malibu. He'd built that race to be controlled. Clean. Paid-in, filtered, safer than the old chaos.
And then an unknown number had slid into it like a hand on the wheel.
Time changed. Location withheld. Instructions delivered like commandments.
Dom could handle heat. He could handle cops.
What he couldn't stand was being moved by someone he couldn't put a face to.
Back at the shop, the crew moved in that quiet, post-run way—engines cooling, adrenaline fading, everyone pretending they weren't rattled by how much the city had changed. Letty wiped her hands on a rag. Vince paced once, then forced himself still. Leon leaned on a fender and stared at nothing like he was replaying the intersection where Sunny's race had flashed by.
Dom didn't replay the intersection.
He replayed the message.
He found Jesse near the workbench, eyes still bright with nervous energy, fingers tapping an invisible rhythm. Jesse always knew what was happening online before anyone else did. He was plugged in the way young people were plugged in—half curiosity, half survival.
"Jesse," Dom said.
Jesse looked up instantly. "Yeah?"
"I want you to find whoever's behind that number," Dom said quietly. "The one that reslotted our race."
Jesse blinked. "The burner?"
Dom's eyes stayed steady. "Yeah."
Jesse swallowed, suddenly less excited. "Dom… I tried. Like, I already tried. I figured you'd ask."
Dom's jaw tightened. "And?"
Jesse exhaled hard and shook his head. "Nothing. No carrier match. No return ping. No traces in the police database—like… not even the stuff that should show up. It's like it doesn't exist."
Letty muttered, "Of course."
Jesse nodded, eyes wide. "And—this is the weird part—somebody I know who knows a guy… said the feds are pissed too. Like, annoyed annoyed. Because they can't get ahead of it. They don't know where anything is until it's already happening."
Dom stared at Jesse for a beat, then looked away as if the answer had confirmed something he already suspected.
Because Dom had hated being moved…
…but he also understood why it worked.
If races were selected by one outside singular party—time and place withheld until the last hour—then nobody had forewarning long enough to snitch. Nobody could get drunk and talk too much. Nobody could accidentally leak a location days early.
And the cops couldn't prepare for a race they didn't know existed.
It was control.
Not Dom's control.
But control that protected the scene.
Dom's voice stayed low. "Keep looking," he said.
Jesse nodded quickly. "Yeah. Yeah, I will."
Dom didn't say thank you. Dom rarely did in words.
But the way he patted Jesse's shoulder once—firm, brief—was its own kind of gratitude.
Then Dom walked away with the weight of it in his chest:
Someone unseen had hijacked his event.
And it might've saved them all.
Across town, Jacob Cooper sat in his office chair at Cooper's Auto and stared at the screen like it was a confession.
The system interface had changed.
Not loudly. Not with fanfare.
Just a new section, clean and clinical, sitting beneath the shop menu like it had always belonged there.
SUBSYSTEM UNLOCKED: RACE ORGANISER
CONTROL LEVEL: LIMITED (OPERATIONAL)
FUNCTION: Schedule/route selection within 60-minute window
VISIBILITY: ANONYMOUS
NOTE: Does not reveal driver identity
Jacob's hands trembled slightly above the keyboard.
This was what he'd wanted when the participation portal appeared—some kind of control, some kind of brake pedal on the chaos.
And the system had handed it to him in the only way it ever handed him anything:
Not as a gift.
As a tool with teeth.
He scrolled through the parameters, reading and rereading until his eyes stung:
Races could be created and finalized up to one hour before start.
Locations could be withheld until "arrival window."
Participants could be filtered through meet admission lists.
No persistent organizer identity.
Payments could be structured without a traceable ledger.
The system even solved the part that made his stomach twist most—the money.
It offered a mechanism that felt disturbingly practical:
Cash collected at the meet by someone trusted (a human face the scene already knew), then deposited to that person's hands in a way that looked like normal street handling. That trusted person would pay out the winner. No bank records. No digital trail. Just street economics, tightened into a controlled pipeline.
Jacob sat back and closed his eyes.
He didn't want to be running an underground racing calendar.
He didn't want to become the invisible hand steering people around like chess pieces.
But he'd seen what happened when things stayed open and loud.
He'd seen bodies.
He'd seen fear.
He'd seen enforcement turn the city into a hunting ground.
So he made the choice that tasted like ash:
He took the control anyway.
Not because he wanted power.
Because he wanted fewer people crushed by it.
He set a new race with careful, trembling precision—route designed to minimize civilian exposure, start window narrow, finish point clean, location withheld until the last hour. He selected the trusted collector option and chose a payout handler he believed could keep their mouth shut and their hands steady.
When he hit Confirm, the system responded with cold satisfaction.
RACE CREATED
REVEAL WINDOW: 60 MINUTES
IDENTITY: ANONYMOUS
CASH PIPELINE: ENABLED (HUMAN HANDLER)
Jacob stared at the confirmation and felt something heavy settle in his chest.
He'd been trying to stop the system from making things worse.
Now he was partnering with it—taking the wheel of the very machine that had been escalating the scene.
He didn't feel proud.
He felt responsible in a way that terrified him.
The office door creaked.
Jacob snapped his head up, heart jolting, instincts flaring.
Mia stepped in, hair pulled back, face tired but soft. She paused when she saw his expression—like she'd walked into a room mid-thought.
"Hey," she said quietly. "You okay?"
Jacob forced his hands away from the keyboard and shut the laptop halfway—not slamming it, just closing it like you closed a diary.
"Yeah," he said, voice too calm. "Just… working."
Mia walked closer, eyes searching him the way they always did now, like she could feel storms even when he hid the clouds.
"Dom's been tense," she said softly. "Everybody's tense."
Jacob swallowed. "Yeah."
Mia leaned against the edge of his desk, close enough to be real. "I didn't come to ask about racing," she murmured. "I just… wanted to see you."
The warmth in that sentence hit Jacob in the ribs.
He nodded once, throat tight. "I'm glad you did."
Mia watched him for a beat longer, then smiled faintly—tired, genuine. "Good," she said. "Because I don't like when people disappear on me."
Jacob's chest tightened at the honesty—at the echo of her earlier confession about her brother.
"I'm here," he said quietly.
Mia's hand touched his forearm lightly—one small grounding contact. "Okay," she whispered.
And Jacob—sitting in a dim office with a subsystem open behind a half-closed screen, having just decided the timing and place of a race he'd never physically attend—felt the sick irony of it:
He was taking control to protect everyone.
And the person who cared about him most had no idea how dangerous that control really was.
...
A few racers decided they didn't like being scheduled.
They didn't say it like rebellion. They said it like pride.
"If Dom's doing admission and some mystery number is moving times around, I'm not waiting," one of them said at a small lot near the river. "We run tonight. Real street."
They were the kind of guys who still thought the old rules applied: loud equals alive, reckless equals respected.
They picked a time—middle of the night—when they assumed the city would be tired.
They picked a stretch of road they'd used before.
And they never noticed how quiet the night had gotten until they were already in it.
They lined up under dead streetlights with engines revving too high, adrenaline loud in their throats. A handful of friends stood back with phones, excited, hungry to capture something that felt like the old days.
The starter dropped his arm.
The cars launched.
For eight seconds it felt like freedom.
Then the trap snapped shut.
Black Corvettes appeared first—not with sirens, not with chaotic floodlights, but with synchronized movement. Two slid in behind. One cut across an on-ramp ahead. Another ghosted into a parallel lane like it had been there the whole time.
Then the regular units lit up—Crown Vics and black-and-whites—stacking behind the Corvettes like a second wave.
It wasn't a pursuit.
It was a net.
The Corvettes didn't chase the racers' taillights. They took away options: a lane closed here, an exit swallowed there, a perfectly-timed angle that forced the racers to funnel into a single corridor.
You could see the panic bloom in the way the cars started to weave—sloppy now, desperate, trying to improvise out of a geometry designed by people who'd practiced.
One driver tried to break left through traffic.
A Corvette slid into his lane and held it like a wall.
Another tried to punch right and take a shoulder cut.
A second Corvette baited him into the move, then snapped in behind and nudged him just enough to make his rear end twitch—no crash, no spectacle, just control.
Within a minute, four cars were boxed into a dead stretch near a loading yard where cruisers had already been angled like jaws. Officers poured out behind doors, guns drawn, voices barking.
"Engines off!"
"Hands visible!"
"Out of the vehicle!"
Phones shook in hands. Somebody yelled "this is bulls—" and got cut off by a megaphone.
The racers didn't look legendary anymore.
They looked like kids who'd mistaken attention for power.
And the city watched a brutal lesson unfold: when you ran a "free" race now, you weren't escaping the hunt.
You were volunteering for it.
At almost the exact same time—across the city, on a completely different stretch of road—a controlled race rolled into motion the way a secret moves through a crowded room.
No loud gathering. No big lineup. No public countdown.
Just a small group of paid-in cars arriving within a tight window, spaced, quiet, eyes scanning. The start wasn't a launch. It was a rolling pace that became speed only after the route was confirmed clear.
No decoys needed—because the route itself was the safety measure.
It didn't live in one place long enough to be surrounded.
The racers held their spacing. They kept their lines clean. They didn't drift for cameras. They didn't race like they were trying to be myths.
They raced like they were trying to live.
And when they finished—smooth, controlled, disperse-and-vanish—there was no pile of sirens waiting.
No Corvettes sliding into formation.
No megaphone voice demanding hands.
Just empty road and the quiet relief of making it through a night without being turned into a lesson.
Word traveled faster than exhaust.
By dawn, the community had its conclusion.
The controlled races—the ones planned close to start time, filtered, paid, quiet—were the only reason anyone could still breathe.
The free-for-all races were dead.
Not because people lost appetite.
Because the task force had learned how to spring a trap so clean it didn't even look like luck.
At LAPD, the mood was split.
On one side: officers pleased, exhausted, telling themselves it was a win—multiple racers caught, cars impounded, a visible show of authority after weeks of humiliation.
On the other: the quiet fury of realizing they'd still been played.
A tech burst into the briefing room with a printout and a face that looked too pale under fluorescent light.
"Lieutenant," he said, handing it to Bilkins. "We've got footage from another run. Different location. Same night."
Bilkins stared at it, jaw tightening. "Another race?"
The tech nodded. "Yeah. Clean. Controlled. No IDs. No clear plates. They were gone before any units could even pivot."
For a moment, the room went silent with the weight of the implication:
They'd successfully trapped the "defiant" racers…
…while a second race slipped through untouched.
Sunny's face went hard.
He slammed his hand on the table once, sharp enough to make a couple people flinch. "How," he snapped. "How does a full race happen and we don't even smell it?"
A federal agent's expression stayed calm, but the calm looked strained now—powerlessness disguised as patience. "They're scheduling too late," she said. "They're controlling distribution. Invites are tight."
Sunny's eyes flashed. "So we're herding the dumb ones and the smart ones keep moving."
Bilkins' voice was rough. "That's what it looks like."
Sunny stared at the screen showing the trapped racers in cuffs, then at the second clip—grainy headlights and anonymous silhouettes—cars already disappearing into darkness.
His jaw clenched so hard the muscle jumped.
"They're doing this on purpose," Sunny said, voice low. "Someone is running the calendar."
Nobody said Wanted.
They didn't have to.
The lead agent's eyes narrowed. "We're losing visibility," she said.
Sunny's laugh was bitter. "No," he corrected. "We're losing control."
Because that was the real shift in the city:
Enforcement had built Corvettes to hunt a ghost.
But the street had answered by becoming smarter than a chase.
And there was nothing more infuriating—to Sunny, to the Bureau, to the whole machine—than realizing the night could still host races…
…only now the night decided who got to know they were happening.
..
Jacob spent the morning doing something that felt like both salvation and sin.
He sat at his office desk with the untraceable laptop open, the shop quiet except for the hum of the fluorescent light and the distant sound of a delivery truck groaning somewhere down the industrial block. The new subsystem—Race Organiser—glowed like a live wire behind his eyes, and the system's interface had turned scheduling into something almost too easy.
He didn't schedule one race.
He scheduled a week.
Seven days of moving targets spread across the entire state like scattered seeds—some close enough to the city that a runner could be home by midnight, others so far out that the roads stopped having streetlights and started having stars.
A tight sprint that looped through quiet suburbs with wide shoulders and predictable traffic lights—easy to disperse, easy to disappear.
A coastal run that never stayed on the same stretch of highway long enough to be boxed—start and finish changing like tides.
A canyon circuit that used elevation and emptiness to reduce collateral, forcing speed into places where there were fewer civilians to pay for it.
A desert-edge loop, far from LA, where the roads were long and the only witnesses were wind and tumbleweeds.
A wilderness route that cut into darkness and returned somewhere else entirely, the kind of run that felt more like a ritual than a race.
None of them repeated.
None of them stayed predictable.
And the most important part—Jacob's hands paused over the keyboard when he set it—was the timing.
Every race had a controlled reveal window: messages released by the system on a schedule that wasn't visible to anyone, with locations withheld until the last hour, sometimes the last thirty minutes. Enough notice to gather. Not enough notice to leak, brag, or snitch. A calendar made of fog.
He hated how much sense it made.
He hated that he was becoming the kind of person who thought in terms of "reveal windows" and "distribution control," like people were pieces that needed to be moved.
But he'd watched what happened when the street did whatever it wanted.
He'd watched the Corvettes shut down a reckless group like it was a training drill.
He'd watched a girl end up on a ventilator.
So Jacob made himself swallow the feeling and pressed Confirm again and again until the week was set.
WEEK ROSTER: ACTIVE
REVEAL WINDOWS: CONTROLLED
LOCATIONS: DYNAMIC
HANDLERS: ASSIGNED
IDENTITY: ANONYMOUS
He stared at the completed schedule and felt his stomach twist.
He wasn't saving the street scene.
He was just trying to keep it from bleeding out.
Mia had been lingering around the shop more lately.
Not in a way that felt clingy. In the way people did when they were quietly getting used to a place that felt safer than the rest of the city. She'd brought coffee once. Then she'd started showing up in the afternoons, leaning on a stool in the bay, asking questions about tools and parts like she was trying to learn the language of Jacob's world.
Jacob let her.
Because having her there made him feel less like a man hiding in a garage from the universe.
That day, she was in the workshop recess, sleeves rolled up, hair tied back, peering at a tray of sockets like it was a puzzle.
"These all look the same," she complained, amused.
Jacob smiled faintly. "They're not."
Mia shot him a look. "That's evil."
Jacob's smile softened. "It's mechanics."
She picked one up and read the stamp. "Okay, so… what's the difference between this one and this one?"
He started explaining, slow and patient, letting the conversation stay small and normal because normal felt precious.
Then the knock came.
Not a casual knock.
A firm, measured knock that landed like authority.
Jacob's whole body tightened.
Mia looked up. "You expecting someone?"
Jacob shook his head once, already moving toward the front office door. His pulse hammered, but his face stayed calm by force.
"Stay here," he murmured to Mia, low.
Mia's brows knit. "Jacob—"
"Just… give me a second," he said, trying to make it sound casual.
He opened the door.
Two people stood there, dressed like they didn't want to look like anything: plain clothes, clean posture, eyes that didn't wander. They weren't LAPD uniforms. They weren't neighborhood curious.
They were federal.
"Mr. Cooper?" the woman asked, voice polite, flat.
Jacob's throat went dry. "Yeah."
She flashed a badge quickly—FBI—then tucked it away like a knife disappearing back into a sheath.
"We'd like to speak with you," she said. "Somewhere private."
Jacob didn't move aside immediately.
He kept his body in the doorway, blocking the view into the bay.
"About what?" he asked, keeping his tone neutral.
The man beside her answered. "Your driving."
Jacob's chest tightened. "I don't know what you mean."
The woman's gaze stayed steady. "We traced an upload from the racing community platform. Username: NO-CHASE. Connected identity: Jacob Cooper."
Jacob didn't flinch—not outwardly. He'd expected this. He'd done it on purpose.
Still, hearing his name said like a lead made his stomach clench.
"I post clips," he said. "That's not a crime."
"Not by itself," the man replied. "But your skill is unusual. Your vehicle is unusual. And your influence… is growing."
Influence.
The word made Jacob feel sick. He hadn't asked to influence anyone. He'd been trying to scare them into safety.
The woman leaned slightly closer, lowering her voice. "We're forming a specialized task force," she said. "We want you on it."
Jacob's pulse spiked.
"No," he said immediately.
The man didn't react like he was offended. He reacted like he'd expected resistance. "Mr. Cooper," he said, calm, "you can help us stop the person known as Wanted."
Jacob kept his face blank. "I don't know Wanted."
The woman's eyes narrowed a fraction. "You're clearly adjacent to the culture. You're clearly capable. And we believe you care about casualties."
Jacob's jaw tightened. "I care about people not getting hurt," he said.
"Then help us," she replied, voice steady. "Because this ends one of two ways. Either we get ahead of it… or more civilians end up in hospitals."
The word hospitals landed like a punch.
Jacob's fists clenched out of reflex.
Behind him, in the workshop, Mia had gone still. He could feel her presence even without seeing her—like warmth near a fire. He didn't want her hearing this. He didn't want her dragged into any of it.
He swallowed and kept his voice cool. "I'm a mechanic," he said. "I build cars. I don't hunt people."
The man's gaze flicked past Jacob's shoulder, as if trying to see inside anyway. "You build more than cars," he said quietly. "You build capability."
Jacob held the doorway like a line in the sand. "I'm not interested."
The woman's expression didn't change. "We'll pay you," she said. "We'll protect you."
Jacob almost laughed.
Protect him? From who?
From the same machine standing on his doorstep?
He kept his face neutral. "I said no."
The man exhaled slowly, then softened his tone in a way that was supposed to feel human. "Think about it," he said. "This offer doesn't stay open forever."
Jacob stared at him. "Is that a threat?"
The woman answered evenly. "It's reality."
Jacob didn't move.
Finally, the woman nodded once, curt. "We'll be in touch."
They stepped away from the door with professional smoothness and walked back toward an unmarked car parked just out of view.
Jacob watched them go without letting his posture sag until their engine started and their vehicle slid away down the street.
Only then did he shut the door and exhale.
His hands trembled slightly.
Not from fear.
From rage he couldn't afford to show.
Mia appeared in the office doorway, eyes wide, voice soft. "Who was that?"
Jacob forced his face into calm. "Nobody," he lied gently.
Mia didn't buy it. She stepped closer, her worry visible. "Jacob…"
Jacob swallowed. He couldn't tell her the truth. Not the FBI. Not NO-CHASE. Not the way he'd intentionally put a target on his own back to pull heat away from something worse.
So he gave her the only safe truth he had.
"It's just… the city," he said quietly. "It's getting tighter."
Mia's expression softened, and she reached for his hand without thinking—an intimate, grounding touch right there in the office.
"Then let me be here," she said.
Jacob's throat tightened.
He nodded once, small. "Okay."
And inside his head, behind the calm he was performing, the week's race roster sat like a loaded gun: anonymous, controlled, and ready to move hundreds of people around the state on short notice.
Jacob had taken control to protect them.
Now the FBI was standing at his door asking him to weaponize that control for the hunt.
And Mia—kind, unknowing, close enough to steady him—had no idea how dangerous "being here" had just become.
...
Mia stayed at Cooper's Auto after the knock, not because Jacob asked her to, but because she could feel the tension in him the way you could feel thunder in the air before you heard it.
She didn't press. She didn't pry.
She just drifted into the bay where the Hoonicorn sat like a matte-black bruise under fluorescent light and watched Jacob do the one thing that always made him seem more real than his silences:
Work.
Jacob didn't wrench the way Dom and the guys did.
Dom worked like a force—hands sure, movements efficient, confidence carved into every reach for a tool. Jesse worked like a storm—fast, excited, constantly narrating his own thought process.
Jacob worked like someone trying not to be heard.
He measured twice. He touched components gently first, like he was listening with his fingertips. He laid tools out in precise rows and kept them there. He didn't talk while he worked unless he had to—his focus turned inward until even his breathing sounded quieter.
Mia leaned on a stool near the edge of the bay, chin resting on her hand, watching his process with a fascination she couldn't quite hide.
"You're different," she said softly.
Jacob didn't look up immediately. "Different than who?"
Mia smiled faintly. "Dom. Vince. Jesse. They work like they're… fighting the car."
Jacob's mouth twitched, almost amused. "Sometimes you are."
Mia shook her head. "You're not." She watched him adjust something in the engine bay with slow care. "You're… patient."
Jacob paused for half a second, then resumed. "I had to learn patience," he said quietly.
Mia's eyes softened. She didn't ask why. She just watched as Jacob leaned in closer, tightened a fitting, rechecked a line, ran his hand along a routed cable like he was confirming it wouldn't rub at speed.
"You treat it like it's alive," Mia murmured.
Jacob's fingers stilled.
For a heartbeat, the truth hovered in his throat like a dangerous bird.
Then he swallowed it down and gave her the safest version.
"I treat it like it can hurt people if I get careless," he said.
Mia nodded slowly, as if that made perfect sense. "That's… a good way to think."
Jacob didn't answer, because the real reason he was being careful had nothing to do with etiquette and everything to do with guilt.
Mia remained there anyway—quiet, present, the kind of presence that made Jacob feel less alone and more exposed at the same time. She asked small questions about parts. He answered without condescension. She handed him a rag when his hands got messy. He thanked her like gratitude mattered.
The shop felt almost normal for an hour.
Almost.
Across the city, Sunny started his own race like he was trying to shake the street scene until something valuable fell out.
He didn't call it bait. He didn't say the word Wanted out loud.
He framed it as community.
"Clean sprint," he told a small lineup of drivers who liked his smile and didn't yet know what it hid. "No drama. No crowd. Just a run."
He kept it tight. Five cars. No hangers-on. No obvious cameras.
He wanted to get close to the invisible hand that had been moving races around without leaving a face.
Because Sunny understood something now that anger had clarified for him: you didn't catch the ghost by chasing taillights.
You caught the ghost by catching the mechanism.
So he watched his phone. He watched the timing. He watched who received messages and who didn't. He listened for patterns in the way the location was revealed, in the way the instructions were phrased—anything that smelled like a "tell."
He even tried to provoke it.
He delayed arrival by five minutes, on purpose, just to see if the location would update.
He had one of his drivers ask openly in a text thread, "Is this the real spot?"
He had another driver post a decoy "we're here" message to a different channel.
Nothing changed.
No correction. No warning. No visible response.
The race ran anyway—short, fast, controlled.
Sunny drove hard, not reckless, but intent—testing, listening, trying to feel if something in the night would "react" to him.
It didn't.
If anything, the absence of reaction made his jaw tighten with frustration.
Because he wasn't just being outmaneuvered by street racers.
He was being managed by something that didn't care whether he felt clever.
When the sprint ended and everyone dispersed, Sunny sat in his car alone for a minute with the engine idling low and his hands tight on the wheel.
He stared at his phone like he wanted it to confess.
He didn't get a confession.
He got a deeper certainty:
Whoever was running the calendar wasn't just hiding from cops.
They were hiding from him.
Brian, meanwhile, gravitated toward Dom the way a drowning man gravitated toward something solid.
He showed up at the shop more often. He stayed later. He found reasons to be useful that didn't involve questions or suspicion—moving parts, sweeping floors, holding a light while Dom tightened a bolt.
It wasn't that Brian had stopped being undercover.
It was that the undercover life had started rotting in his mouth.
The feds' cold hunger. Sunny's aggression. The hospital rooms. The press conference pretending everything was "safe."
Brian couldn't stomach it.
Dom didn't talk much about feelings, but Dom understood when a man needed structure. He gave Brian work without calling it therapy. He gave him tasks without calling it trust.
One afternoon, Dom handed Brian a wrench and said, "Hold that."
Brian held it.
They worked in silence for several minutes, the only conversation the clink of metal and the low murmur of the radio. Then Dom spoke without looking up.
"You don't like what's happening," Dom said.
Brian's hands tightened around the wrench. "No."
Dom nodded once, like that was enough.
Brian hesitated, then said the thing he didn't say out loud often because it sounded like weakness.
"I don't trust them," Brian admitted.
Dom finally looked up at him—steady gaze, no surprise. "Good," Dom said. "Trust gets you killed when the city's hot."
Brian let out a breath that sounded almost like relief.
He wanted Dom's calm—not because Dom was naïve, but because Dom's calm came from choosing his own code and living by it. The feds had a code too, but it was flexible in all the worst ways.
Brian went quiet again, then asked, almost carefully, "How do you do it?"
Dom's mouth twitched. "Do what."
"Stay… steady," Brian said. "When everything's changing."
Dom wiped his hands on a rag and shrugged like it wasn't philosophy. "You decide what matters," he said. "Then you don't let the noise vote."
Brian swallowed.
Because the noise was loud in his head—Jacob's name on a report, Mia's smile shifting toward Jacob, Sunny's cold eyes, federal briefings, the idea of "hunters" being recruited.
And yet standing in Dom's shop, holding a wrench, Brian felt something he hadn't felt in weeks:
A line.
Not a law. Not a badge.
A line that said: I can still choose something.
He didn't know what choice he'd make when the task force called again.
But for the first time, he understood why Dom's calm was dangerous.
Because it wasn't passive.
It was defiance.
And across town, as Mia watched Jacob work with quiet precision on a car that didn't belong in 2001, Jacob felt the city tightening around all of them—feds searching for leverage, Sunny searching for a tell, Brian searching for a code to live by.
The streets were changing.
And everyone was trying to decide whether they'd change with them… or be broken by what came next.
...