Read Chapter 3: The Glove

The seat was a carbon-fibre coffin, and Jack loved it.

That was the problem. He was supposed to hate sitting in Luca Moreau’s car. He was supposed to feel the ghost pressing against his shoulders, whispering that this seat had been shaped for a dead man. Instead, all he felt was the familiar squeeze of precision engineering around his ribs, the snug cradle of a machine built to kill at two hundred miles an hour and call it art.

The Fenice garage in Monaco was a cathedral of white light and black carbon. Mechanics moved around him in silent ballet, plugging cables into the car’s flanks, their faces lit by laptop screens. Jack sat low in the cockpit, hands on the wheel, while a technician named Enzo knelt beside him with a laser scanner, tracing the contours of his hips and spine.

“You’re wider than Luca in the shoulders,” Enzo said, his Italian accent flattening the words. “Maybe two centimetres. We’ll need new side padding. The pedals will go forward. You want that?”

“I want to reach them,” Jack said.

Enzo grunted and made a note. Jack flexed his fingers around the steering wheel. The leather was worn in two spots—thumb grooves, polished by habits that belonged to a man who no longer had pulse. Jack tried not to think about that. He pictured the race on Sunday instead. The tunnel. The harbour. The noise of eighty thousand people screaming his name.

He hadn’t earned that yet. But he would.

“Sit still,” Enzo said. He reached down beneath the dashboard, feeling for the pedal mounting bracket. The scanner whined. Jack shifted his left foot, pressing the clutch—then stopped.

Something was under the pedal.

Not a cable. Not a bolt. Something softer. He pressed his boot down again, deliberately this time, and felt the resistance shift. A cloth edge, maybe. He slid his foot sideways, hooking the object toward him.

“You are moving,” Enzo said.

“Sorry. Cramp.”

Jack waited until Enzo turned to adjust the scanner’s calibration, then reached down with his right hand. His fingers brushed leather. He worked it free from its wedge against the pedal housing and brought it up into the low light of the cockpit.

A racing glove.

Red. Fenice red. It was crumpled, creased at the knuckles like a hand had been clenched inside it when it was pulled off. The palm was worn smooth, the fingertips darkened with old sweat. Jack turned it over. There, on the cuff, in faded black marker: *MOREAU*.

A glove that should have been buried with its owner. Or burned. Or locked away in an evidence box by the FIA’s safety investigators. Instead it had been shoved beneath the pedals of a car that had been rebuilt after a fatal crash.

And the FIA had signed off on that car. They had inspected every weld, every bolt, every suspension component. They had certified it safe. But they had missed a black-and-red glove jammed under the brake pedal?

Jack’s throat went dry. He glanced around. No one was looking. The mechanics were focused on their screens, Enzo was still fiddling with the scanner. Jack slid the glove into the waistband of his race suit, flattening it against his hip. The leather was cool against his skin.

“Okay,” Enzo said. “The design will be ready in two hours. You want me to hold the suit fitting until after lunch?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Fine.”

He climbed out of the car. His legs felt faintly unsteady, but he made himself walk normally to the back of the garage, past the tyre racks and the tool chests, until he reached the small locker room used by the reserve drivers. He locked the door and pulled out the glove.

It was a left-hand glove. He held it up to his own left hand. The fingers were longer than his by half an inch. The leather had stretched with use, moulded to a hand that had gripped a wheel for thousands of miles.

Jack thought of Luca Moreau. The crash had happened at the exit of the swimming pool complex, four months ago. The car had speared into the barrier at a hundred and forty miles per hour. The official report said suspension failure. The official report said no evidence of foul play. The official report said the injuries were unsurvivable.

But Sebastian, his engineer, had said something different. *The investigation may not tell the full story.*

And now this. A glove hidden beneath the dead man’s pedals. Why would anyone hide a glove in a race car? It wasn’t a weapon. It wasn’t evidence of tampering. It was just… leather. And blood, perhaps, if you looked closely enough.

Jack folded the glove and put it back in his waistband. He needed someone he could trust. Someone who knew cars well enough to read what the leather was telling him.

Sophie answered on the second ring.

“You’re supposed to be pretending to be professional,” she said. Her voice was tinny through the phone speaker, but warm. “I can see you on the feed. The garage cameras. They gave you the full media tour.”

“I need you to come to the paddock,” Jack said. “Don’t tell anyone. Use the service entrance.”

There was a pause. Then: “This sounds like trouble.”

“It is.”

“Good. I’m on my way.”

Sophie Beaumont had known Jack since he was sixteen, painting his own sponsor logos on a Formula Ford with a spray can and a dream. She had rebuilt his gearbox in a gravel pit in Spa while rain hammered down and the race steward threatened to disqualify them both. She was the smartest mechanic Jack had ever met, and she was not employed by Scuderia Fenice. She worked for a struggling Formula Two team that borrowed tools from the bigger garages and returned them late.

She met Jack behind the paddock’s maintenance block, away from the cameras. She was wearing a grease-stained polo and carrying a toolbox, her dark hair pulled back in a practical knot. Her eyes went immediately to the bulge in his waistband.

“You’re hiding something. That’s either a weapon or a very sad sandwich.”

Jack pulled out the glove and handed it to her.

Sophie took it. Her fingers moved over the leather with professional care, turning it over, pressing the palm. She frowned.

“This is a left-hand glove.”

“I noticed.”

“No—you don’t get it. Look at the wear pattern.” She held it up, pointing at the knuckles. “The abrasion here is on the outer side. That’s consistent with gripping a wheel. But the fingertips are compressed, not shredded. That’s from pulling, not sliding.”

“Pulling what?”

She looked at him. “A hand brake. But these cars don’t have one. So why is the wear here?”

Jack took the glove back. He hadn’t noticed that. He had only noticed the name and the wrongness of its hiding place.

“There’s more,” he said. “I found it under the pedal assembly.”

Sophie’s frown deepened. “In the footwell?”

“Wedged. Like someone pushed it down there deliberately.”

She was silent for a long moment. Then she said, quietly: “Luca Moreau’s left hand was crushed in the crash. That’s what I heard. The medical reports—they never released the full details, but someone who worked in the trauma unit said the hand was nearly severed.”

“So he couldn’t have taken the glove off himself.”

“Not after the impact, no. So whoever put that glove under the pedal did it either before the crash, or after, when the car was in the rebuild shop.”

The implications hung between them in the warm Monaco air. Jack had been telling himself the glove was a mistake. A forgotten spare, misplaced by a crew member in the chaos of dismantling the wreck. But a glove that had been worn during the crash—a glove that had crushed a man’s hand inside it—should not have survived the event. It should have been cut off Luca’s body in the medical centre. Or thrown away. Or kept as a memorial by his family.

Instead, it had been hidden in the rebuilt car.

“Someone wanted this found,” Jack said slowly. “Or someone wanted it lost forever and made a mistake.”

Sophie shook her head. “No one makes a mistake like that. You don’t accidentally feed a glove into a rebuild. You handle every part. You catalogue every scrap.” She met his eyes. “Someone on Fenice’s crew put this there on purpose. The question is whether they were helping you or setting you up.”

Jack slipped the glove back into his waistband. He could feel it pressing against his skin, as if Luca Moreau’s ghost was trying to speak to him through fifteen ounces of worn red leather.

“I have a race in five days,” he said. “I’m driving the dead man’s car. And someone is watching me, waiting to see what I do with this.”

Sophie smiled, but there was no warmth in it. “So what are you going to do?”

Jack looked past her, toward the glittering towers of Monaco rising above the paddock. Somewhere up there, in one of those glass palaces, someone had decided that Luca Moreau needed to die. And they had been clever enough to make it look like an accident.

But they had left a glove behind. And gloves, like men, could not stay silent forever.

“I’m going to race,” he said. “And I’m going to find out who put that glove in my car.” He looked at Sophie. “You know the crash investigator for the Monegasque race federation?”

“I know someone who knows someone.”

“Start asking questions. Quietly. Don’t use my name.”

Sophie nodded, then turned to walk away. She stopped after three steps and looked back.

“Jack.”

“Yeah?”

“Whoever put that glove there wanted you to find it. That means they trust you. Or they fear you. Either way, you now have an enemy and an ally in the same garage, and you don’t know which is which.”

She left him standing there, the dead man’s glove burning against his hip like a promise he had not yet agreed to keep.