Virus's Vendetta

A chop shop turned her skills into a liability. A hungry young prospect from her old block decided she was done working for them.

Skyler Byrne kept Black Hawks flying in Afghanistan for four years as the only woman in her unit, outworking every man who assumed she couldn't do the job. She came home to the Ironbound with hard-won competence and a chip on her shoulder, and took the only mechanic job on the floor—outworking the doubt all over again. Then her shop gets quietly acquired, she comes in to find stolen cars, and when she tries to quit, the burns on her forearms start explaining what happens to mechanics who know too much.

She should have kept her head down. She's never backed down from anything.

She didn't expect the kid from two grades up wearing a prospect cut.

He runs so he doesn't have to remember. She was the first thing worth slowing down for.

Austin "Virus" Riley came home from the Marines wanting revenge on something he couldn't name and found brothers who'd already started the war. He's the youngest and most aggressive because youth doesn't know what it can't do—and because slowing down means thinking, and thinking means remembering the friends who died while he was overseas. When a chop network starts spreading through his old neighborhood, he goes to see who's being squeezed—and finds a girl from his block being forced to strip stolen cars.

But Skyler Byrne doesn't need rescuing, and accepting help feels like admitting she's not as strong as she's spent her whole life proving. She wants someone who matches her instead of doubting her—and Virus discovers that the mechanic who never stops moving is the first thing that makes stopping feel survivable.

As Malone's network comes apart under Creeping Death's assault, Virus realizes protecting Skyler isn't enough. He wants to claim her—in front of the brothers watching his choice, in front of a man who thought he could own mechanics like replaceable parts. And Skyler's learning that letting someone match her pace isn't weakness, and the kid who grew up on her streets is the reason she's not proving everything alone anymore.

In Newark's industrial heart, where stolen steel moves through the ports and refinery air buries the people who breathe it longest, one woman will discover that never backing down was never the same as never resting—and one fast, dangerous young man will finally find something worth learning to brake for.