The Apex Holdings Trilogy · Book 2
Throttle
She spent ten years racing where no one could see.
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Josie Reyes has ten years of seat time nobody ever witnessed. Regionals won at fifteen. A father who thinks she quit at thirteen. A used kart under a bedsheet in a Hialeah garage. She races frontage roads at one in the morning, because that is the only track that ever let her in.
Then Killian Steele's people put a real car under her hands and offer her the one thing she has never had: a program, in daylight, with her name on the list.
There is always a catch. He hands it to her on day one and lets her decide whether to use it.
The fastest way to quiet a room is a name. Hers is Reyes, and she is about to make them all say it.
A taste of Throttle
CHAPTER ONE: COOLDOWN LAP
Rule 1: Never mistake a small stage for a small talent.
— Killian —
The heat hadn't broken at one in the morning and it wasn't going to. Miami in July held its temperature the way a closed fist held a coin — the asphalt giving back everything the sun had spent twelve hours pouring into it, the air thick enough to drink, the whole industrial stretch shimmering faintly under the sodium lights like something viewed through moving water.
He rolled Godzilla back into the lot with the windows down and the engine loafing along at fifteen hundred RPM, which was as close to quiet as a car like that ever got, and did a slow circuit of the perimeter before he parked. Force of habit. Twenty-some years of walking into rooms and reading the exits first.
The meet had rebuilt itself in the hour he'd been gone, the way these things always did — a dozen cars scattered where there'd been thirty, engines ticking as they cooled, kids in folding chairs with coolers and phone cameras, somebody's Bluetooth speaker doing its best against the ambient roar of the interstate two blocks north. Nobody had been caught. He could tell by the mood. There was a specific loose, giddy quality to a crowd that had scattered from a patrol car and reassembled intact, and it was all over this one.
He shut the GTR down and sat a minute in the ringing silence afterward.
He hadn't needed to come back. That was the part worth being honest with himself about. He'd told himself it was to check that nobody he recognized had gotten swept up, which was true in the way a man's second reason is always true — technically accurate and entirely beside the point. The point was that something out here tonight had made his chest unclench for the first time in three days, and he wasn't finished with it yet, and forty-nine years old was more than old enough to know the difference between a reason and an excuse.
He got out. Leaned against the fender, forearms crossed, and let the lot come to him.
That was when he saw her.
She was maybe forty yards off, on the far side of the staging line, leaning against the front quarter panel of an R33 Skyline GTR — the middle child, the one that had spent thirty years being the cheap way into a name that had gotten expensive. Somebody had loved that car with more patience than money. He could see it from here: the paint was a respectable job and not a great one, the wheels were last-generation Volks that had been refinished rather than replaced, and the front-mount intercooler behind the bumper cut was hung on bracketry that had come out of a fabrication class or a stubborn weekend, not a catalog.
And she'd just won. He knew that before anyone told him. She had the specific stillness of somebody managing an adrenaline crash in public — shoulders down, weight easy, hands loose at her sides in a way that took active effort, the whole posture of a person who had decided that nobody in this lot was going to watch her shake.
[…continued in the book]