Read Chapter 9: Sponsor's Secret

The garage smelled of hot rubber and solvent, the kind of acrid mix that clung to your clothes for hours no matter how many showers you took. Jules was under the McLaren's front suspension, torque wrench in hand, when the sponsor placard caught his eye.

It was propped against the pit wall, waiting to be mounted on the nose cone for Sunday's race. Glossy carbon fiber backing, embossed lettering: *Meridian Holdings*. Clean, anonymous, the kind of name designed to mean nothing.

Too clean. Too anonymous.

Jules slid out from under the car, wiping his hands on a rag that was already black with grease. He stared at the placard for a long moment, then pulled out his phone and snapped a photo. Two taps later, he was running the company through every financial database Zoe had given him access to. Shell companies had a signature, a kind of structural DNA—registered in Delaware, no physical address, a law firm as registered agent. Meridian hit every marker within thirty seconds.

Then he cross-referenced the directors. One name surfaced like a shark breaking water.

Viktor Marchetti.

Jules felt the heat rise up his neck. He pocketed the phone and stormed through the paddock, past the hospitality suites with their champagne flutes and pastel dresses, past the engineers arguing over telemetry in rapid-fire Italian. He found Alex in the team's transport truck, hunched over a laptop, the glow of the screen carving deep shadows into his face.

"You want to explain this?" Jules shoved the phone at him.

Alex glanced at the screen. His expression didn't change. He studied the image of the placard, then the director's filing, then slowly closed the laptop.

"I had a feeling," he said.

"A feeling." Jules's voice came out tight, barely controlled. "That's it? Viktor's been our sponsor this whole time. He's been inside the garage, inside the pit wall, inside—" He gestured wildly at the McLaren visible through the truck's open door. "Inside that car. The one we're about to use to jam the casino's settlement system."

Alex stood, rolling his shoulders. He moved past Jules to the doorway, scanning the paddock with the practiced caution of a man who'd spent years learning which corners had eyes. "I didn't know for certain. Not until now."

"You didn't know for *certain*? What did you think, that Meridian was just a random holding company with a hard-on for Formula One sponsorship?"

"I thought it was a possibility." Alex turned back to face him. "Viktor likes control. Every layer of this job, he's wanted his hands on it. The location, the timing, the crew—" He paused. "The funding. It made sense he'd want to be close enough to watch."

Jules laughed, bitter and short. "So you let him buy the team. You let him walk into our operations, our communications, our *everything*—just to see what he'd do?"

"I let him think he had leverage." Alex's voice dropped, the softness of it somehow harder than a shout. "A man who believes he owns the ground you walk on gets careless. Viktor's been feeding us plans with traps in them. He's been betting on our failure. He wants the insurance payout, Jules, not the score. I needed to know how deep his involvement went before I made my move."

"And this—" Jules jabbed a finger at the phone still in his hand. "This tells you?"

Alex nodded slowly. "It tells me he's not just the financer anymore. He's embedded. And embedded men make mistakes." He paused, scratching at the stubble along his jaw. "But what I don't understand is why he'd let me find out."

Jules blinked. "What do you mean?"

"He's meticulous. Paranoid, even. A shell company would be enough. But Meridian Holdings is a holding company for multiple smaller entities. It's not buried deep—it's one layer off the surface. Zoe could've found it in a day. I found it in two minutes." Alex's eyes narrowed. "That's not a secret. That's a breadcrumb."

"You think he *wanted* you to know?"

"Or he wants someone else to." Alex walked back to the laptop, opening it with a flick of his wrist. "The third party. The one leaving notes and feeding us corrections. If they're tracking Viktor's assets, Meridian would light up like a flare. It'd tell them exactly who's funding this operation."

Jules watched him, the anger slowly cooling into something more calculating. "So what—Viktor's using the sponsorship to smoke out the competition? Draw them into the open?"

"Maybe." Alex's fingers moved across the keyboard, pulling up the McLaren's telemetry stream. "Or he's setting the stage for the moment he turns on us. When the heist goes wrong—and it will go wrong, Jules, we both know that—the trail will lead from the casino to the team, and from the team to Meridian. Viktor's not just a sponsor. He's a kill switch. We fail, and he cuts us loose with nothing left to trace back to him."

"Then we cut him first."

Alex shook his head. "We can't. Not yet. We still need his money, his access, his connection to the casino's network. If we sever that now, the whole job collapses."

"Then what do we do?" Jules's voice was raw, the frustration bleeding through. "Just let him sit here with us? Let him watch us prep a car he's going to use to screw us over?"

"We use him back." Alex met his gaze, steady. "He wanted to be close. Fine. That means when the moment comes, he'll be right where we want him. We just have to make sure he doesn't realize it until it's too late."

Jules stood there, the weight of the revelation settling into his bones. He'd known the job was dangerous. He'd known Viktor was a snake. But this—being sponsored by the man who planned to watch them burn—it changed the texture of everything. Every tool in the garage, every component on that car, they were all paid for with Viktor's money. Tainted, somehow.

"What about the jammer?" Jules asked quietly. "It's in the McLaren. Tested, ready. But if Viktor knows the car's been modified—"

"He doesn't." Alex's voice was firm. "I made sure of that. The inspection was real, but the FIA scrutineer was looking for performance violations, not comms disruption. The jammer's clean. As long as no one gives him a reason to dig deeper, we're safe."

"For now."

"For now," Alex agreed. He looked past Jules, out the truck's open door, toward the paddock's gleaming surfaces and hidden corners. "But I need you to do something for me. Carefully. Quietly."

Jules waited.

"Find out where Viktor goes when he's not here. Who he meets. What he drinks. The kind of man who sponsors a team to watch his victims work is also the kind of man who has a second plan already in motion. I need to know what it is before he springs it."

Jules nodded slowly. The anger was still there, simmering beneath the surface, but it had found direction. Purpose. "And when I find it?"

Alex's smile was thin, sharp as a blade. "Then we decide whether we're robbing a casino or robbing a robber."

Jules pocketed his phone, the image of the sponsor placard burning against his thigh. He turned to leave, then stopped at the doorway.

"Alex."

"Yeah?"

"Next time you have a feeling about something—" Jules looked back over his shoulder. "Tell me before it blows up in our faces. Not after."

Alex held his gaze for a long moment, then gave a single, quiet nod.

Jules stepped out into the paddock's noise and heat, the sponsor placard still fresh in his mind. Meridian Holdings. Viktor's holding company. But as he walked, he turned over Alex's words, and a new thought surfaced.

If Viktor had left that breadcrumb deliberately, then who was meant to follow it? Alex had assumed the third party. But there was another possibility—one he didn't want to voice aloud.

Maybe the breadcrumb was for them. Maybe Viktor was daring them to find it, to realize how deep they were in his web, to panic and make the wrong move at the worst possible moment.

Jules reached the garage and stood before the McLaren, its sleek black body gleaming under the fluorescent lights. Inside that carbon shell sat a jammer that could bring Monaco's settlement system to its knees. And beneath that, a sponsor's logo that tied them all to a man who wanted them dead.

He pulled out his phone and typed a message to Alex.

*Meridian's Delaware filing lists a second director. Name is sealed, but the row of the filing document matches a casino lawyer's signature block I saw in Zoe's paperwork. Check your trap.*

He hit send and looked up at the camera mounted in the corner of the garage. The little red light blinked steadily. Recording.

For how long, he couldn't say. But he suspected Viktor had been watching far longer than any of them knew.