Page 54 of Reckless Heir
The post-race is in a private club two streets from the circuit — Obsidian Singapore, which has its own version of the gathering I've seen in New York and Miami and which operates, I've come to understand, as a traveling institution. Wherever the season goes, the Obsidian follows. The Heirs who race bring their worlds with them. It's a useful reminder that F1 is not separate from what Aleksei is; it's an extension of it, another room in the same building.
I circulate. I talk to two people I recognize from the New York event, one person I don't recognize who asks me careful questions that I answer with careful answers, and Niko briefly, who hands me a water because it's midnight and hot and I've forgotten to drink anything since the suite.
I'm on the terrace when he finds me.
He comes out through the glass doors — not looking for me specifically, I don't think, just coming out, needing air, needing the outside of the inside — and then he sees me and stops, and the thirty feet of terrace between us has the specific charge that's been building since Miami.
He crosses it.
He doesn't say anything when he reaches me. He comes to stand beside me at the railing, shoulder to shoulder, and we look at the city — the harbor, the reflected lights, the circuit dark now, the grandstands emptying.
"Niko told you something," he says.
"Is it that obvious?"
"You have a specific expression for new information you're integrating." He looks at the water. "You've had it since you came back inside."
I look at his profile. The hard lines of it. The jaw that's been clean-shaved for the Obsidian events and is now starting to showthe end of a race day. "Dimitri. The Regent vote. The position I represent."
He's quiet for a moment.
"You knew," I say.
"Yes."
"And you weren't going to tell me."
He turns to look at me. His eyes in the Singapore dark are very steady. "I was deciding when."
"That's a more honest answer than I expected."
"I've been practicing." The corner of his mouth moves. "You asked me once to explain things rather than manage them. I'm trying."
I look back at the harbor.
The boats are lit along the waterfront, their reflections breaking and reforming on the dark water. The Regent vote. The spring. Whatever Dimitri is building and has been building since October. I am the crack he's looking for, Niko said. The variable Aleksei didn't plan for, the human element that doesn't file neatly.
His shoulder against mine.
He doesn't move.
Neither do I.
"The Regent vote," I say. "What happens if you win it?"
"The Romanov seat is consolidated for ten years. No challenges."
"And if Dimitri gets what he's looking for."
"Then he gets leverage. And leverage?—"
"Becomes the game." I look at him. "I know. I've been learning."
Something shifts in his expression. Not the barely-there flicker I'm used to — more than that. Something that sits long enough to be read.
"I know you have," he says.
We stand on the terrace until the last of the circuit lights go dark, and the harbor settles, and Singapore breathes its particular warm night around us, and neither of us says the things that the shoulder-to-shoulder says instead.
