Page 91 of Reckless Heir
I am not fine.
I've stopped pretending I'm fine about the races. I understand now that I never was — not in Miami, not in Singapore, not anywhere I've watched him climb into a machine that goes fast enough to kill him if the variables shift wrong on a single corner of a single lap. I understand the math. Iunderstand, from three months of watching engineers' faces and learning what the lap delta means and knowing which corner worried them at practice, that the edge he drives at is real and close and not metaphorical.
On the screen, the lap counter turns.
Final lap.
He wins.
Not cleanly — there's a late Safety Car, a chaotic restart, two laps where the gap closes to nothing and I stop breathing entirely. But he wins, in the end, the way he does everything: by finding the edge of what's possible and living there long enough for everyone else to run out of nerve.
The crowd detonates.
The Obsidian suite erupts in the careful way of people who have decided not to look excited at things. Champagne is opened. Calls are made. I stand at the window with my glass and watch the cars circle back to the finish line and feel something in my chest that I really wish wasn't there.
He's fine,I think.He won. He's fine.
I've been thinking this at the end of every race.
I'm starting to notice a pattern.
The post-race event is held in a penthouse three floors above the suite — the Obsidian version of a victory party, which means subdued lighting and expensive spirits and the specific performance of celebration by people who have been taught that visible enthusiasm is a vulnerability.
I circulate. I smile at the right people and say the correct things and eat something small from a passing tray and generally perform the function I was acquired for with the professionalism it deserves.
It doesn't help that I'm trying to locate him in the room with the part of my attention I can't turn off, the part that's been tracking his position since October.
He doesn't come up.
For an hour he doesn't come up, and I assume he's in the paddock — debrief, engineers, the post-race ritual of a team processing a win. I make myself stop looking. I have a conversation with one of the Obsidian associates about the Regent vote in the spring — which I now understand the shape of, though I don't say so — and I take notes in the file I keep in my head about who has which allegiance and why.
When I stop looking, he finds me.
He's changed out of the race suit into dark trousers and a black shirt, the cuffs undone, and he stands at the edge of the room watching me with an expression I haven't seen before. Not the assessment. Not the possession. Something quieter and more unsettling, like a man who has been running for a very long time and has just stood still and is trying to remember what that feels like.
The race is still in him. It does something to him, finishing a race — I've learned this from watching the after-events across three cities. He comes out of it in a different mode for a few hours, slightly less sealed, something closer to the surface than his usual register allows. Like the speed burns off a layer of what he holds.
He doesn't join the room.
He waits at the edge of it.
I go to him.
I don't plan it — my feet simply decide, and I cross the party and come to stand in front of him, and we look at each other in the middle of all that noise and light.
"You won," I say.
"Yes." He's not looking at the room. He's looking at me. "I always win."
"You almost didn't. Turn twelve, lap fifty-eight."
"I had it."
"You always say that."
"Because it's always true." Something moves through his expression. "You were watching."
"I'm always watching. That's my function, isn't it? To watch and attend and?—"
