The city didn't settle after the canyon.
It reoriented.
Like a compass needle snapping toward a new north.
In the days that followed, "Wanted" stopped being a headline and became a possibility people carried in their pockets. The talk didn't sound like it had after the first freeway chase—back then it had been awe and jokes and copycat bravado.
Now it sounded quieter.
Sharper.
People spoke with the kind of caution they used when they were talking about something that might actually be listening.
The story that spread wasn't even the big one—the televised violence, the rockface climb, the vanishing into wilderness.
It was the smaller, stranger rumor that traveled fastest through street crews:
He had joined a run.
Not a meet.
Not a race line with a crowd.
A late-night crew drive—four cars moving in loose formation, no showboating, just motion—and then the blue-and-silver ghost had appeared beside them like it had always been there. No rev. No honk. No provocation.
Just a smooth slide into formation.
Then it had taken the lead without asking.
And the whole crew had followed like they'd been hypnotized.
That detail did something to people.
It turned "Wanted" from a thing you watched on TV into a thing that could show up in your mirrors.
It made every empty stretch of road feel haunted.
At a warehouse lot off the river, a group of regulars leaned on hoods and spoke in low voices, eyes darting around even though they were surrounded by friends.
"He didn't race 'em," one guy said, voice hushed. "He led 'em."
A girl with hoop earrings and a cigarette between her fingers shook her head. "That's worse."
"Worse how?" someone asked.
She exhaled smoke slowly. "Because that means he's not just running. He's… choosing."
That word—choosing—hung in the air like exhaust.
Hector heard it the next night, not from some random kid trying to impress him, but from a guy who didn't exaggerate because exaggeration got you laughed out of real circles.
Hector didn't laugh.
He smiled too hard and drank too slow, and when his friend leaned in and murmured, "He might show up on runs now," Hector's smile thinned into something that wasn't amusement at all.
"That's a problem," Hector said quietly.
"Or a blessing," the friend countered.
Hector stared out toward the streetlights. "Blessings don't come with police helicopters."
Word spread through the important pockets—tuners, parts guys, organizers. People who didn't have to raise their voices to be heard.
Some were thrilled, because they mistook myth for opportunity.
Some were terrified, because they understood how quickly opportunity turned into a raid when the LAPD got embarrassed.
And some—older heads, survivors—heard one detail and went cold:
He took the lead.
He set the pace.
He didn't ask.
Because that wasn't just skill.
That was dominance.
And dominance drew hunters.
The enthusiasts reacted the way enthusiasts always reacted to a miracle.
They tried to buy it.
BMW dealerships across L.A. started seeing a strange kind of customer—young guys with too much excitement in their eyes, arriving in groups, asking about M3s like they'd just discovered religion.
"I want something that can do what that car did," one kid told a salesman, voice vibrating with belief.
The salesman laughed awkwardly. "Sir, the M3 is a performance vehicle, but—"
"No, like Wanted," the kid insisted, leaning in. "Like the ghost car. The blue one."
The salesman's smile turned into something strained. "That's… not a thing."
"It is a thing," the kid snapped. "I saw it."
Within a week, forums filled with threads titled things like "What BMW is Wanted?" and "Can an E46 do that?" and "M3 GTR build???"
People posted screenshots. They zoomed. They circled hood lines with red arrows like they were solving a murder.
Someone claimed they'd found the exact paint code.
Someone else swore it had to be a race shell.
A few tried to be the voice of reason and got shouted down by people who didn't want reason—they wanted magic they could purchase.
Used BMW listings spiked. Old E46 coupes vanished from lots overnight. Guys who couldn't afford them bought beat-up shells anyway, convinced that if they started with the right badge, the rest would follow.
Shops got flooded with desperate questions.
"Can you make it durable like that?"
"Can you tune it to keep pulling?"
"Can you make it climb?"
Mechanics laughed at first.
Then they stopped laughing when a couple of those customers came back angry—when a cheap tune didn't turn their car into a legend, when a reinforced bumper didn't make them immortal, when they realized the myth wasn't available in a parts catalog.
One shop owner in Inglewood told a friend, "They're gonna get somebody killed trying to chase that feeling."
His friend replied, "They already did."
In the real scene—the one that didn't live on internet threads—the talk stayed lower and more dangerous.
Dom heard pieces of it without asking.
He heard it at his shop in the pauses between customers. In the way Letty's eyes tightened when someone mentioned "that ghost joined a run." In the way Vince got restless, pacing like a dog that could smell threat.
He heard it when Leon came back from a quick parts run and said quietly, "People are talking like he's gonna start showing up."
Dom didn't answer right away.
Mia was behind the counter, pretending she wasn't listening while her hands moved through paperwork. Jesse was nearby, trying not to look like he was hanging on every word.
Letty wiped her hands on a rag and said, "If he shows up at one of our runs, we don't chase him."
Vince scoffed. "Why not? We could see him up close."
Dom's gaze slid to Vince, heavy. Vince shut his mouth halfway.
"You see him up close," Dom said, voice calm, "and you bring that heat back to us."
Vince bristled. "So what, we just let the ghost do whatever he wants?"
Dom's jaw tightened. "You don't control ghosts."
Mia finally spoke, voice quiet. "Maybe he doesn't want to be a ghost."
Letty glanced at her. "You feeling sorry for him?"
Mia's eyes flicked toward the hallway where Jacob had sat on their couch a few nights ago, tired and too polite, pretending he wasn't carrying something heavy. "I'm feeling… worried," she said.
Dom didn't comment on that.
He didn't say Jacob's name.
But he felt the shape of it: the new guy in their orbit, the impossible Supra, the way Jacob had been on the bystander clip, the way he'd looked genuinely terrified.
And now the rumor that Wanted was joining crews—silently, smoothly, taking the lead.
Dom didn't like coincidences that repeated.
Across town, other important racers said the same thing in different words.
At a quieter meet behind a closed warehouse—no loud music, no open betting—two men spoke in low voices near the trunk of a car.
"Cops are gonna kill somebody if this keeps up," one said.
"Cops already tried," the other replied.
"Not the ghost," the first man said. "Us. Anybody near him. They don't care who they hit if they think they're ending the story."
The second man leaned closer. "You hear about that crew run?"
The first man nodded. "He took point."
The second man's mouth tightened. "That's not a racer. That's a warning."
They went quiet, both of them watching the street beyond the fence, as if expecting blue-and-silver paint to glide past at any moment.
And the strangest part—the part Jacob couldn't have predicted even if he'd tried—was that the city started behaving like it wanted the ghost to return.
Not everyone.
But enough.
Some crews began doing runs differently, choosing emptier roads, stretching their formations, keeping their radios quiet—just in case. Like they were leaving a space open in the convoy for something that might slip in without asking.
Some did it out of fear.
Some did it out of worship.
And some did it because deep down they wanted to see it for themselves—the way people wanted to stand near a fire even when they knew it could burn them.
Los Angeles had always loved legends.
The problem was that this legend didn't stay on posters.
It showed up in mirrors.
And now everyone in the scene—Dom, Hector, the quiet organizers, the hungry kids buying BMW shells they couldn't afford—understood the same uneasy truth:
Sooner or later, Wanted wasn't going to just be a story people repeated.
He was going to be a presence people had to plan around.
A ghost you couldn't summon… but might invite, just by driving at night and leaving an empty space at the front of the line.
...
The city hunted for stitches.
After the televised wreckage, after the dust and sparks and the impossible resurrection, the LAPD stopped treating "Wanted" like just a driver. They treated him like a supply chain.
Because cars didn't come back from that kind of damage without leaving fingerprints somewhere—parts ordered, panels replaced, glass sourced, a shop floor stained with coolant and blood. Even if the driver was a ghost, the rebuilding shouldn't have been.
So detectives started doing what detectives did when they couldn't catch the man:
They chased the work.
They hit body shops first—quiet visits that turned into tense interviews, photos slid across counters, still frames of the blue-and-silver hood and the scarred front end from the broadcast. They asked the same questions until the questions sounded like threats.
"Anybody come in with damage like this?"
"Anybody pay cash?"
"Anybody ask for weird reinforcement?"
Then they moved to parts suppliers. Tow yards. Small garages with late-night lights. Back-alley welders who didn't ask for paperwork. They pulled invoices and looked for anomalies—bulk orders, unusual materials, "rush" requests that didn't fit a normal rebuild.
BMW's people were out there too, quieter but sharper—private investigators in clean shoes walking into greasy shops like the grease might stain them just by proximity. They asked about "ALMS-style" components like normal people asked about brake pads. They wrote down names. They looked at hands. They watched reactions the way predators watched prey.
Even the street scene felt it—like the air had changed and started recording.
One shop owner told Dom quietly, "They're asking about who can rebuild a car that should've died."
Letty replied, "They're asking about ghosts."
And in the same breath the city used to whisper about Wanted, it started whispering about the thing a myth always needed:
A mechanic.
A place.
A hidden bay somewhere in the industrial dark where a monster could be put back together.
But the streets gave them nothing.
No one had seen a shattered blue BMW limping into a shop.
No one had heard the sound of a rebuild.
No one could find the scar that should've existed in the ecosystem.
The absence made everyone more nervous than any evidence would've.
Because an absence meant one of two things:
Either they weren't looking in the right places…
…or the rules had never applied in the first place.
Dom's world tightened under the pressure.
Not because Dom was afraid of the cops—Dom had lived with cops his whole life in one form or another. But because pressure changed math. It made people careless. It made friends turn into liabilities.
And money—money was the thing that made bad decisions feel like necessities.
A week of extra patrols around known racing spots. A week of people keeping their heads down, skipping runs, avoiding attention. A week of shop business slowing because nobody wanted to be on any list.
The bills didn't slow.
The rent didn't slow.
The mouths didn't slow.
One night, Dom stood in the garage with Letty and Leon, Jesse hovering nearby like he was trying not to listen and failing.
Vince was there too, pacing, restless, angry at the city for squeezing them.
"We're running short," Leon said, voice low.
Dom didn't argue. He didn't need to. He could feel it in the way the crew's energy had shifted—less playful, more sharp.
Letty crossed her arms. "We wait, we fall behind."
Jesse swallowed. "Cops are everywhere."
Dom's gaze stayed steady. "Cops are everywhere anyway."
Vince leaned in, eyes bright with the kind of excitement that always came when danger got justified. "We can use this," Vince said. "Everybody's looking for the ghost. Everybody's running around chasing Wanted. They'll be spread thin."
Letty's eyes narrowed. "You want to use the hunt as cover."
Vince shrugged like it was obvious. "Why not? They're distracted. They want a myth. Let 'em chase it."
Dom didn't like hearing the plan framed like a trick, but he understood the logic. In a city whipped into a frenzy by one impossible car, everyone else got a fraction of invisibility—as long as they didn't get stupid.
And the crew didn't do stupid when Dom was in charge.
Not on purpose.
Dom made the call with the kind of calm that always made it more dangerous.
"One job," he said. "Clean. Fast. No fireworks."
Letty nodded once, already focused.
Jesse looked pale.
Vince grinned like the night had finally given him permission to breathe.
They moved late, when the city's eyes were tired.
The streets around the docks were still alive—trucks rolling through, forklifts humming in distant yards, the kind of industrial motion that never fully slept. Patrol cars cruised more often now, lights off but presence heavy. Everyone knew the cops were hunting a ghost.
Dom's crew used that.
They drove with the discipline of people who understood timing and silence. No loud revs. No peacocking. Just a shadow sliding through the city's working veins.
They found the truck they wanted—big, heavy, moving steady along a route that had become predictable because predictability paid.
They didn't rush it. Dom never rushed.
They waited for the right stretch—one where the road opened and the traffic thinned, where a mistake wouldn't immediately become a pileup. Where there was room to commit and room to abort if needed.
Mia wasn't there. She'd argued, Dom had refused, and for once the refusal had been final. Dom wasn't going to let his sister get swallowed by a crackdown just because pride wanted to pretend they were invincible.
So it was Dom, Letty, Vince, Leon, Jesse.
Three cars moving like a thought.
And still—still Dom felt it in his bones: the city was too awake tonight.
Not with people.
With attention.
Like every shadow had learned how to look.
They closed distance. They positioned. They started the move.
And then the world twisted.
Because down the opposite side of the road—coming toward them, moving against the flow like it didn't care about lanes or logic—headlights appeared.
At first it was just light.
Then the light caught paint.
Blue and silver.
Razor-edged livery that the street had started to see in its sleep.
The BMW M3 GTR.
Whole.
Perfect.
As if the head-on collision had been a lie.
As if the canyon climb had been a rumor.
As if the car hadn't limped into death on camera and then crawled back out.
It was just there—gliding the opposite direction, smooth and predatory, engine note clean again, no smoke, no sparks, no scars.
Jesse's voice broke over the radio, tight and disbelieving.
"Dom… that's—"
Letty didn't breathe for a second. "No way."
Vince's laugh came out wrong—half thrill, half fear. "That's him."
Dom's hands tightened on the wheel.
He watched the BMW approach and felt something cold move through him—not awe, not worship.
A calculation snapping into place.
Because this wasn't just the ghost being seen.
This was the ghost being seen impossibly intact.
Dom knew what a rebuild looked like. He knew the time it took. The parts. The labor. The evidence it left behind.
And this car had none of it.
The BMW passed them in the opposing lane like a blade sliding past skin—close enough for Dom to see the black helmet through the side window, visor down, face erased.
Wanted didn't look at them.
Or maybe he did, and the visor made it impossible to tell.
The car just kept going, taking the dark road like it owned it.
For a heartbeat, the crew froze in motion—five people caught between a job in progress and a myth passing inches away.
The truck kept rolling, oblivious.
Dom's radio crackled with Leon's voice, strained. "How is it fixed?"
Jesse sounded shaken. "We just saw it die on TV."
Letty's tone went low, almost angry. "It shouldn't be clean."
Vince's excitement sharpened into something greedy. "You see that? That's what I'm talking about. That's what people are chasing. That car—"
Dom cut him off, voice quiet but hard. "Focus."
But Dom couldn't deny what the moment had done.
Because the BMW's presence wasn't just surreal—it was strategic. It created a ripple in the night. A distraction. A pull. The kind of thing cops would pivot toward if they caught even a whisper of it.
A ghost moving the opposite way could drag half the city's attention off a real job.
Dom felt it like fate mocking him.
They were using the hunt for Wanted as cover…
…and Wanted had just driven by like he was using them as cover too.
Dom swallowed hard.
He looked ahead at the truck they were in the middle of taking.
Then he looked in the mirror, where the blue-and-silver taillights had already vanished into darkness like they'd never been there.
And for the first time, Dom felt something new enter the equation:
Not suspicion of Jacob.
Not fear of cops.
Not even hunger for money.
A deep, unsettled certainty that the ghost wasn't just a story running through the city anymore.
It was a moving variable.
And it had just crossed their path at exactly the wrong moment—whole and untouched—like the laws of rebuilding, evidence, and time no longer applied.
The job kept unfolding.
But Dom's mind stayed on the impossible car disappearing into the dark, and one thought settled in him like a weight he couldn't shake:
If Wanted could be destroyed on camera and still show up perfect days later…
…then whatever they were dealing with wasn't something you could plan around using normal rules.
...
Jesse couldn't keep it in.
He tried—at least he told himself he tried—but the story was too hot, too insane, too valuable to sit quietly in his chest. By the time Dom's crew got the truck settled and everyone scattered back into their separate corners of the night, Jesse's hands still trembled on his steering wheel from what he'd seen.
Because it wasn't just that the ghost had shown up.
It was that the ghost had shown up clean.
No smoke. No limp. No twisted front end. No taped-up headlight. Nothing to suggest the head-on collision, the gun circle, the canyon madness had ever happened.
As if the city had hallucinated the damage.
As if the footage had been a dream.
So Jesse did what people did when they saw something too impossible to hold alone.
He talked.
He told one guy at a lot off Sepulveda, voice low but eyes bright, and that guy told two more. Jesse told Hector's cousin and swore him to secrecy, and the cousin nodded solemnly and then told three people before sunrise. Jesse told a girl who knew a guy who ran a message board, and by afternoon the rumor was wearing new clothes and running on its own legs.
WANTED IS BACK.NO DAMAGE.LIKE IT NEVER HAPPENED.
In racing circles it spread fast because it didn't feel like gossip—it felt like a tectonic shift. It changed how people understood the rules.
If a ghost car could take a head-on on live TV and show up pristine days later, then the myth wasn't just fast.
It was untouchable.
And that did two things to the scene at the same time:
It made the hungry kids worship harder.
And it made the serious racers go quiet.
At a late-night gathering behind a closed warehouse, two men stood near a trunk with a handheld scanner resting on the bumper. The scanner hissed with distant police chatter—routine stops, minor calls, nothing that mattered.
One of the men said quietly, "Jesse Toretto's boy said it was clean."
The other replied, "Jesse talks."
"Yeah," the first said, "but he sounded scared."
That was what made the rumor stick. Not the excitement. The fear.
Even people who didn't like Jesse believed fear more than hype.
Soon, "clean" became the word. People said it like a curse.
"He was clean.""No scars.""No limp.""Like he reset."
And once the rumor had a shape, it got a spine: if you couldn't explain the repair, you explained it by multiplying the ghost.
Maybe there was more than one.
Maybe the city wasn't chasing a single myth.
Maybe it was chasing a pair.
Or a crew.
Or a whole pipeline of blue-and-silver monsters.
The LAPD heard the rumor the same way they heard everything about street life: through noise, through informants, through the nervous over-sharing of people who wanted to feel useful.
It showed up in a memo as an offhand line: street chatter indicates suspect vehicle observed again; appears undamaged.
Bilkins read it twice and felt his blood pressure rise.
Undamaged.
After what they'd watched on the broadcast, "undamaged" didn't just mean the car had been repaired.
It meant the department had missed something fundamental.
In the evidence room, Brian stood with Bilkins and Tanner while a tech rewound footage, pausing on frames that showed the BMW's crushed front end, the spiderweb windshield, the smoke.
Then they pulled up stills from the more recent sightings—grainy, partial, but the shape and paint consistent.
Clean.
Brian's jaw tightened.
Bilkins slapped the file onto the table. "There's no shop in this city that fixes that overnight."
Tanner muttered, "Unless it's not the same car."
The sentence hung there.
Brian felt it land in his gut like a stone.
Bilkins' eyes narrowed. "You're thinking two cars."
Tanner shrugged. "Or a clone. Or a shell swap. Something."
Brian stared at the still frames until his eyes burned. The idea made sense in a procedural way. It was the kind of explanation you reached for when the alternative was admitting reality had bent.
And yet—
Brian couldn't shake the feeling that multiplying the car was comforting because it kept the world normal. It kept the case solvable. Two cars meant parts, shops, money, conspiracies that fit inside a file folder.
One car that "reset" meant something else entirely.
Bilkins exhaled hard. "Fine. Assume two. Assume a crew. Assume whatever you need to assume."
He leaned forward, voice sharp. "But the next time someone sees that livery, I want it boxed before it hits the freeway."
Brian nodded, but his thoughts stayed on a different thread—the human one.
Jacob Cooper's face on the bystander clip.
Jacob's calm at Dom's.
Jacob's "I opened a shop" story.
Brian couldn't prove anything.
But he couldn't un-feel the pattern either.
And the new rumor—clean again—didn't make him relax.
It made him more certain that somebody out there was controlling the narrative with intent.
Jacob tried to do something normal to stop the shaking in his head.
He joined a gym.
It was a small place in a strip mall with flickering fluorescent lights and a front desk that smelled like disinfectant and old sweat. Nothing glamorous. Weight racks. Heavy bags. The dull slap of gloves on leather. Men and women moving through pain like it was a language they'd learned to speak fluently.
The first time he walked in, he felt exposed.
Not because anyone recognized him.
Because nobody did.
He realized how rare it was now, how precious: being a face in a crowd with no myth attached.
He signed the paper. Paid cash. Kept his head down.
The guy at the desk didn't care. That was the best part.
Jacob wrapped his hands at the lockers with slow care. The ritual grounded him—cloth around knuckles, around wrists, tight enough to feel supported, not tight enough to cut blood flow. He stared at his hands while he did it, remembering what those hands had done through a broken window, the way they'd reached out and grabbed a gun like the world had narrowed to one violent option.
He wanted to hit something that wasn't a steering wheel.
He wanted to burn the adrenaline somewhere that didn't involve civilians and sirens.
So he stepped up to a heavy bag, gloves on, feet set.
The first punch landed wrong.
Not weak—just wrong. His shoulder wasn't aligned. His wrist angle wasn't perfect. The bag swung anyway, but the impact sent a jolt up his forearm that made him wince.
Good.
Pain meant he was still in his body.
He hit it again. Cleaner.
Again.
The bag began to swing in a slow rhythm, and Jacob found himself breathing with it—inhale, strike, exhale, reset. For the first time in days, his mind stopped trying to solve the city and just focused on the simple truth of contact.
His knuckles thudded against leather.
His shoulders burned.
His lungs opened.
He felt human.
He felt angry.
He felt alive in a way that didn't require a chase.
For ten minutes, he believed he might actually build a life that wasn't made of running.
Then the system ruined it.
The HUD flickered into view at the edge of his vision—clean white text, faint blue accent—intrusive as a mosquito.
NEW ACTIVITY DETECTED: COMBAT TRAINING (BOXING)OPTIMIZATION AVAILABLEGIFT:BEGINNER BOXING PROFICIENCYSTATUS: INSTALLED
Jacob froze mid-breath.
The bag swung back toward him, and he caught it with his glove like he was stopping a door from closing.
His stomach turned.
He could feel the change immediately, and that was the worst part.
It wasn't like learning slowly. It wasn't muscle memory built over months. It was knowledge poured into him like liquid—stance adjustment snapping into place, hips turning the way they should, shoulders relaxing into correct mechanics.
His next punch landed with a crispness that didn't feel earned.
The bag snapped away harder than before.
Jacob stared at his glove like it belonged to someone else.
"No," he whispered.
The system didn't apologize.
BENEFIT: Improved survivabilityNOTE: Skill progression increases Control
Control.
Always Control.
Always the system framing his life as a set of stats it could tweak.
Jacob's throat tightened with something that wasn't fear—it was grief.
He had come here to suffer honestly. To sweat, to ache, to earn a little peace the normal way.
And the system had stolen even that, turning it into another upgrade, another optimization, another slippery step away from being simply human.
He hit the bag again—harder than necessary.
The technique was perfect.
It made him angrier.
He hit it again, and again, until his shoulders burned and his breath turned ragged and his vision blurred—not from pain, but from the humiliation of realizing the system could colonize anything he tried to claim for himself.
A guy on the next bag glanced over, impressed. "Yo," the guy said, nodding. "You trained before?"
Jacob almost laughed.
He swallowed it down and shook his head. "No," he said, voice tight. "Just… figuring it out."
The lie tasted familiar.
Jacob stepped back, hands shaking inside his gloves.
He stared at the swinging bag and felt the weight of the last few days settle onto him all at once—the rumors, the chase, the city calling him something he hadn't chosen, the way "clean again" had made the myth bigger instead of smaller.
He had tried to find a place where he could be Jacob Cooper.
Even here, the system followed.
Even here, it tried to turn him into something else.
Jacob peeled his gloves off slowly, fingers trembling, and looked up at the gym's mirrored wall. His reflection stared back—sharp face, pale eyes, too young and too tired.
He didn't look like a monster.
He didn't look like a ghost.
He looked like a man trying to outrun the feeling that his own life had become a controlled experiment.
And somewhere in the city, as the rumor of "no damage" spread and the LAPD started believing in multiple cars, Jacob felt the trap tighten in a new way:
They were hunting a fleet now.
But there was still only one driver losing himself in the mirror.
..
Brian showed up at Cooper's Auto because his gut wouldn't shut up.
He told himself it was procedure. A follow-up. A wellness check on the guy who'd "almost died" on a viral clip. Something harmless he could justify if anyone asked.
But the truth was messier: he couldn't stop seeing Jacob's face on the sidewalk—wide-eyed, flinching away from the blue-and-silver blur—and he couldn't stop hearing Jacob's voice from that night in the garage, calm and maddening:
You're undercover.
Jacob already knew.
That changed the rules.
Brian couldn't walk in pretending he was just a random racer anymore—not with Jacob. Not after the way Jacob had pulled him out of Dom's yard and sat with him while he was too drunk to keep his own secrets straight.
So Brian did something more dangerous than lying cleanly.
He walked in half-honest.
He drove his Mitsubishi over late evening, kept the headlights low, parked at the curb like he belonged there. The neighborhood was quiet in that industrial way—warehouses holding their breath, chain-link fences catching streetlight in dull glints.
He sat for a second with his hands on the wheel, feeling the weight of what he was about to do.
Not because he was scared Jacob would punch him.
Because he was scared Jacob would look at him and see exactly how conflicted he was.
Brian got out and knocked.
The door opened after a beat. Jacob stood in the gap with that same sharp, too-young face and pale eyes that always looked like they'd been awake longer than they should've been. There was no helmet. No myth. Just a guy in a plain shirt, posture controlled, calm worn like armor.
"Brian," Jacob said.
Brian tried to make his voice light. "Hey."
Jacob's gaze flicked briefly to the Mitsubishi, then returned. "You're late."
Brian gave a small, awkward shrug. "Yeah. I… didn't want to show up in the middle of the day."
Jacob studied him a second longer than comfortable, then opened the door wider. "Come in."
The shop smelled like old oil and dust—real, familiar, almost comforting in its honesty. One overhead light hummed. The main bay was tidy in a way that didn't quite match the building's age, like someone was trying to keep chaos from gaining ground.
Brian stepped inside, hands loose at his sides, forcing himself to look like he wasn't scanning.
Jacob closed the door behind him. "So," Jacob said quietly, "are you here as Brian… or as LAPD?"
Brian swallowed.
He didn't have room to pretend. Not with Jacob.
"As Brian," he said, and meant it more than he expected.
Jacob's expression didn't soften, but something in his eyes shifted—like he'd been braced for a different answer. "Okay."
Brian took a breath and let the concern lead, because it was the only part of this that felt clean.
"I saw the new video," Brian said, voice lower. "The one where… you're on the sidewalk."
Jacob's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "Yeah."
"You alright?" Brian asked.
It wasn't a cop question. It wasn't trying to pin him down. It was a human question, the kind you asked when you'd watched someone almost die and couldn't make your brain accept how casually the world moved on.
Jacob's eyes held Brian's. "I'm fine."
Brian exhaled through his nose. "You don't look fine."
Jacob's mouth twitched—barely. "I look tired."
Brian nodded. "Yeah. So do I."
Silence sat between them for a moment, filled with the hum of the light and the distant, ordinary sound of a truck passing somewhere far off.
Then Brian did what he came to do—he let the worry become a doorway to questions.
"Look," Brian said carefully, "I'm not here to mess up your life. I'm not here to drag you into something." He hesitated, then added, more honestly than he meant to, "I'm here because my gut keeps saying you're closer to this than you should be."
Jacob didn't react. No flinch, no denial. Just that steady watchfulness that made Brian feel like he was talking in front of a mirror.
Brian tried to keep it soft. "How'd you end up near that chase?"
Jacob's eyes narrowed slightly. "You think the video is real."
"I think it's out there," Brian said. "And I think people are getting hurt because of it."
Jacob's throat bobbed as he swallowed. "Yeah."
Brian stepped a little deeper into the bay, pretending the movement was casual. "You ever do repairs for… bad hits?"
Jacob's gaze sharpened. "Why?"
Brian forced a small smile, like he was embarrassed to even ask. "Because I watched a car fold in half on live TV and then show up clean days later. And now everyone—LAPD, BMW, the feds—are tearing through shops looking for someone rebuilding a ghost." He paused, letting the concern show. "And you're the only mechanic I know who popped up in the middle of this story."
Jacob's eyes stayed on him. The silence was heavy enough to make Brian's skin prickle.
Finally Jacob said, "I'm a small shop."
"That's not an answer," Brian replied, gentle but firm.
Jacob's voice remained even. "It's the truth."
Brian nodded slowly, as if accepting it, while his instincts kept crawling over details: the neatness, the lack of clutter where there should've been clutter, the way the back of the shop seemed… deeper.
He glanced toward the shadowed recess, the part of the building that always felt like it didn't quite match the outside.
Jacob noticed the glance immediately.
"Storage," Jacob said before Brian could ask.
Brian let himself act a little sheepish. "Can I see?"
Jacob's expression tightened for a fraction of a second. Then he sighed like a man who'd given up on privacy being real.
"Sure," Jacob said. "But it's not exciting."
Jacob walked back and pulled aside the heavy tarp that partitioned the rear space.
Brian stepped through—and felt the air change.
Not colder. Not warmer.
Just… quieter. Like sound got absorbed differently. Like the space was wrapped in a thin layer of wrongness that his body registered before his brain could label it.
A hidden bay.
A bench laid out with careful trays. Cleaner concrete. Faint scuff marks on the floor that suggested something heavy had been moved recently.
Brian's heart kicked.
This was where he expected the answer to live.
He imagined it before he saw it: blue and silver paint catching the work light, the aggressive stance, the myth parked like an animal at rest.
But the bay was empty.
Just open concrete and silence.
Brian stood there for a beat, forcing his face to remain neutral.
The disappointment was real—and more revealing than he liked, because it meant he'd wanted proof badly enough to feel loss when he didn't get it.
Jacob watched him watch.
"Happy?" Jacob asked quietly.
Brian forced a small laugh. "Yeah. I guess."
Jacob's eyes didn't buy it.
Brian ran a hand over the back of his neck, trying to turn the moment into something normal. "You've got a nice setup."
"It works," Jacob said.
Brian took a few slow steps, scanning without looking like scanning. He saw the scuff again, the faint rubber smear, the way the bay felt prepared—as if something belonged here, even if it wasn't here now.
He turned back to Jacob. "You move stuff around a lot?"
Jacob shrugged, too casual. "Depends."
Brian's mouth went dry. "You knew I was coming."
Jacob's gaze stayed steady. "I didn't."
Brian didn't press. He didn't have proof, and pushing would only make Jacob shut down.
So Brian pivoted back to the thing that had brought him here—the concern he could safely hold on his face.
"Listen," Brian said quietly, "whatever's going on out there… it's getting bigger. The FBI's involved now. BMW's involved. Everyone wants the same thing—an explanation. And when they don't get one, they start inventing one."
Jacob's jaw tightened. "I know."
Brian's voice softened. "If you're in danger—if you're closer than you want to be—don't try to eat it alone."
Jacob's expression flickered—just a shadow of something human.
"I won't," Jacob said.
Brian nodded slowly. He didn't fully believe it, but he also didn't know what else to do.
He stepped back toward the main bay. Jacob followed, staying close but not crowding, like he was escorting a guest and guarding his own boundaries at the same time.
At the door, Brian paused.
He looked at Jacob's face—really looked—and let the truth sit there: Jacob seemed tired in a way that didn't come from long work hours. He seemed tired like a man carrying a storm in his chest.
"I'm not here to hurt you," Brian said, and it came out rougher than he intended.
Jacob's eyes held his. "I know."
Brian swallowed. "Do you need anything?"
Jacob's mouth twitched faintly. "Sleep."
Brian almost smiled. "Yeah."
He stepped out into the night, got into his Mitsubishi, and sat with the engine off, staring at the shop's closed door.
The hidden bay had been empty.
And somehow, that made his gut louder.
Because empty didn't mean innocent.
Empty meant prepared.
Empty meant Jacob anticipated attention and moved valuable things before they could be seen.
Brian's mind started assembling a picture he didn't want to assemble: money, foresight, a place to stash something big.
And Jacob's "starting mechanic" story suddenly felt less like a lie and more like a cover story built by someone who had learned how to survive.
Jacob had moved the BMW because the shop couldn't hold both his lives safely anymore.
After the rumor spread that Wanted was back with no damage, Jacob had felt the city's attention tilt. He couldn't see it from inside the shop, but he could feel it—like pressure in the air. Like footsteps that hadn't arrived yet.
The system had been blunt about it, as always.
SECURITY RISK: INCREASING
RECOMMENDATION: OFFSITE CONCEALMENT
OPTION: PRIVATE STORAGE LOT — SHIPPING CONTAINER
COST: HIGH
VISIBILITY: LOW
Jacob had hated the relief that washed through him at the suggestion.
He'd paid anyway.
A private lot with high fencing and cameras and the kind of security that came from expensive indifference. A steel shipping container under a leased number, accessible through a gate code and a key that felt too heavy in his pocket.
He'd driven the M3 GTR there before dawn—helmet on, no drama—slid it into the container's dark belly, and locked it away like he was burying a piece of himself.
It cost him more than money.
It cost him the comfort of knowing the car was close.
But it bought him one thing he needed more than comfort:
Time.
So when Brian stepped into the hidden bay and found only emptiness, it wasn't because Jacob had nothing to hide.
It was because Jacob had started hiding like someone who understood the hunt was no longer just cops.
It was the whole city.