Page 52 of Reckless Heir
In the morning I make coffee and she comes down and I pour her cup without deciding to — the movement happens before the thought does, hand already reaching for the second cup while my back is to her, and I've poured it and I'm not going to pretendI haven't — and I look out the window immediately after, at the November campus, the bare trees, the gargoyles watching the grounds the way they always have.
She sits at the other end of the kitchen.
The silence between us is different from yesterday's silence and from the silence of the past weeks. It has a third quality now — something that knows there's a thing in the room with us and has decided not to name it. That's not nothing. That's the specific silence of two people who have arrived at a place that requires them to decide something.
I drink my coffee.
She drinks hers.
She doesn't mention the garage. I don't mention the garage. The words I said are still in the room, because words said in a garage at 1 AM don't disappear with the sunrise. They sit in the fabric of every subsequent interaction, present, doing what they do.
She leaves without saying anything when the hour comes.
I refill my cup.
This is, I understand, no longer a sustainable structure.
I don't yet know what I intend to do about it.
16
SOFIA
Singapore at night is a fever you choose.
The city doesn't sleep — that's not news, Singapore never sleeps — but during race week it achieves a specific kind of wakefulness that operates above the usual register. The circuit runs along Marina Bay, through the financial district, past the hotel towers and the casino and the promenade where the harbor lights double themselves in the water. Everything is lit. The buildings, the track, the grandstands, the yachts moored along the waterfront — all of it blazing in the thirty-degree dark, the kind of heat that exists after midnight here and shows no signs of relenting.
A night race is a different animal from a day race.
I know this now. I've been in Aleksei's world for a month and I've been learning its language, and one of the things I've learned is that F1 is not one thing — it's many things wearing the same name, and the specific thing it is changes with the conditions. Miami in October afternoon heat was immediate and loud, the asphalt shimmering, everything exposed. This is different. The dark gives the circuit a quality of theater that the daylight doesn't — the cars running lit, the crash barriersfloodlit, the corners arriving out of blackness. More beautiful. More dangerous.
He's been on pole since qualifying yesterday.
I watched qualifying from the garage. Not the pit wall this time — he specifically did not put me on the pit wall this time, which is the closest he's come to acknowledging what happened in Miami without saying anything. He put me in the garage with the performance engineers, which is still inside the operation, still close enough to read the faces, just not directly visible from the cockpit.
He drives better when he can't see me.
I'm still deciding how I feel about that.
The Obsidian hospitality suite at Singapore is on the forty-first floor of a tower that has a view of the entire circuit — the full sweep of it, the lights tracing the layout through the city's heart.
I've been here for two hours.
Two hours of the specific work of circulating in a room where everyone is watching everyone else and trying to look like they're not. I've gotten better at this. I know the rhythm of Obsidian events: the entrance that should be timed, the conversation that should be brief, the glass that should be held but not drunk. I know which clusters of people are worth fifteen minutes and which are performing their own calculations that I'm not relevant to. I know how to move through a room without appearing to be going anywhere.
The suite is extraordinary — floor-to-ceiling glass on the circuit side, the whole city laid out below and the track scoring through it, everything lit gold and white against the tropical dark. I stand at the window for a moment before I start circulating, just to have the view. The installation lap is under way — the cars moving in a slow procession around the circuit, headlights forward, the field spread out through the city streets.From here they look small. Jewels moving through a grid. It's easy to forget, from this height, how fast they're actually going.
It's not easy to forget when you're watching from track level.
I know which car is his. I could find it from twice this distance.
Niko Drakos finds me near the window.
"You look different than you did at the penthouse," he says, handing me a drink without being asked.
"Two months," I say.
"A year at St. Gabriel usually does more than that. You've been in it for sixty days and you're—" He considers. "Steadier. Less like someone expecting to be hit."
