Page 46 of Reckless Heir
I knew this. I filed it. I've been running on the anger about it and the anger has been useful — the anger is clean, it has edges, it tells me what things are.
What the anger is not accounting for is this:when you exist.
He has been watching me for eighteen months. He engineered the conditions that brought me here. He built a file around me and annotated it and arranged the world so that I would walk through a specific gate at a specific time and belong to him.
And in a paddock corridor with his race suit half-off and his hair still damp from the helmet, with the adrenaline of a near-miss still somewhere in the room between us, what came out of him wasn't satisfaction. Wasn't possession. Wasn't any of the vocabulary of acquisition that defines the formal terms of this whole situation.
When you exist. I can't stop noticing.
The thing underneath all of it. The thing that wasn't in the contract language.
I don't know what to do with that. I don't know if it changes anything — the contract is real, the blood oath is real, the specific structure of what I am to him in the official register is real and signed. One unguarded sentence in a paddock corridor doesn't undo any of that. I know this.
I also know that a man who controls everything he shows doesn't fail to control it by accident.
The dinner tray arrives. I eat mechanically, watching the city lights stripe across the ceiling as the traffic moves below. Tomorrow is the race. Tomorrow he'll be in that car again, through turn seven, and I'll be at the pit wall where I've already decided I'm going to be regardless of what he told me.
Don't stand at the pit wall again,he said.
I'm going to stand at the pit wall again.
The only question is what either of us intends to do about the rest of it, and I don't have an answer to that yet. But I'm starting to understand that the answer is coming regardless of whether I'm ready for it.
14
SOFIA
Ishouldn't go down.
I have this thought approximately fourteen times between 12:04 and 12:47 AM, lying in the Tower bed with Miami breathing outside the window that doesn't open. The ceiling is the same every night — white plaster, a hairline crack in the northeast corner that I've been watching for three days like it's going to tell me something, a single recessed light that I turned off an hour ago and that still glows orange in the back of my eyes.
The race is tomorrow. He needs to be reviewing data or sleeping or whatever Aleksei Romanov does the night before a race that performs the function of sleep without requiring actual rest. He has a ritual — I've learned this from three months of proximity. The night before a race he's not available to the social obligations of wherever he is. He's in a different mode: internal, more contained than usual, processing something the rest of us can't see. Sometimes he reviews telemetry data for hours. Sometimes he does mechanical work on the car that doesn't technically need doing.
He'll be in the garage.
I know this the way I've started knowing other things about him — not because he told me, but because I've been mapping the negative space around him for weeks. The hours he's absent. The rooms he avoids when something is unresolved. The version of him that appears when the performance drops and the actual person is operating.
He'll be in the garage, and I'll be lying here studying the ceiling crack, and the corridor conversation will sit between us unresolved until Miami ends and the team packs up and we fly back and it disappears into the Tower routine as if it never happened.
I shouldn't go down.
I go down.
The service elevator opens onto the underground level and the smell finds me first.
Rubber and engine oil and the particular metallic sweetness that I've started to associate with him, which tells me something I'm not ready to say out loud — that the garage and the man have become the same thing in my sensory memory, that I can't smell one without thinking of the other. This is either an interesting psychological development or evidence of mild damage. Probably both.
The bay is lit with work lamps only — warm amber pools over the carbon fibre of the car, the surrounding dark making the lit area feel close and specific. He's at the front right corner, crouched, in a t-shirt with the sleeves pushed up and his hands moving with the slow precision of someone whose hands are occupied and whose mind is somewhere else entirely.
He doesn't look up.
"You should be asleep," he says.
"So should you."
"I don't need as much—" He adjusts something with a small tool. Pauses. "Sleep is inefficient before a race."
"Right." I come to stand at the edge of the light, arms crossed, studying the car the way I've been studying his world for three months — looking for the shape of it, what the shape says. "Because lying here manually servicing a car you've already run perfectly for three months is very efficient."
