Read Chapter 30: The Enmity

The Monaco dawn was the color of a bruise, a grey-purple smear bleeding across the rooftops. Jack lay on a pile of old tires in the abandoned Fenice garage, the reek of rubber and stale fuel coating his tongue, and listened to the city begin to stir. Somewhere out there, a description of his face was being broadcast from every streetlight and speeding Fiat. He’d stopped counting the sirens an hour ago.

Emile was in a corner, wrapped in a filthy mechanics' blanket, his breathing a shallow, rattling rasp that spoke of lungs flooding and time running out. Jack had given him the last of the water an hour before dawn. The kid needed a hospital, not another firefight.

But hospitals were checkpoints and ID checks. Here, two hundred meters from the circuit’s service road, they were ghosts.

A soft footstep clicked on the concrete outside. Not a guard's stride—that would be heavy, uniformed. This was deliberate, the step of a man who knew exactly where to place his weight.

Jack was on his feet before his conscious mind caught up, a rusted spanner in his fist. He pressed himself against the corrugated wall beside the door. The bolt was rusted; if it grated now, he was dead before he blinked. Silence. The step came again, closer.

The door swung open on oiled hinges, a sliver of grey light cutting across the floor.

Viktor Astier stepped into the garage, dressed like a dockworker from a filmset—flat cap pulled low, canvas jacket, not a trace of Ferrari red. He kicked the door shut behind him, plunging them back into a gloom. His eyes found Jack in the dark with the predatory accuracy of a man who reads velocity at 300 km/h.

"You're slower than I expected, Turner," Viktor said, voice flat, arms loose. "I thought you'd be at the tunnel, where the sound of your own heartbeat wouldn't give you away."

Jack hefted the spanner. "You got a quick way to die, Astier. What is it, a reward? They promise you the seat for the whole season if you hand me over in a bag?"

Viktor took a step forward, then stopped. His jaw worked, a visible tension in the muscle. "I threw a race. Brazil, last year. I knew the car was a shitbox chassis-wise. The setup was wrong, but Philippe came to me with a printout of my bank accounts and a picture of my sister—she was in a clinic in Barcelona, none of your business why. He said, 'Lose ground in the last ten laps. Don't win. Do that, and she stays healthy and private.'"

Jack’s grip loosened a fraction. He’d heard the rumors about Brazil, about Viktor’s uncharacteristic fade into P7 from a pole position. The press had called it a tire gamble gone wrong. No one called it what it was.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because Luca found out." Viktor’s voice cracked on the name. "He found out before the shutters came down. He told me he had proof that would put Philippe and Aethel in a holding cell for the rest of their lives. He said I'd never have to throw another race. Two days later, he's a smear of carbon and entrails in the swimming pool chicane."

"Luca confronted him," Jack said, testing the ground. "He refused the bribe."

Viktor shook his head. "That's what Emile thinks. Emile knows the data, not the man. Luca was past the bribe stage. He was going to make them bleed in public. He wanted the spotlight of the championship, but only because it gave him a bigger stage to torch them on. He knew every race he won was another blade in their backs. Aethel knew it too. That's why the crash wasn't a malfunction. It was a firing squad."

The spanner lowered in Jack’s hand. Viktor wasn't here to fight. But trust was a currency Jack had spent, stolen, and burned. He wasn't about to open the vault again for a quick withdrawal.

"Australia next week," Viktor said, stepping closer. "I qualify first, you know I can. But I can't win. If I win, Aethel controls the media cycle. He'll spin it, use it to drown out whatever noise you're making. He'll say, 'The team is strong, the driver is fast, this is what matters,' and the world will move on. Luca's death becomes a footnote to a championship."

"So you want to lose on purpose again?" Jack's lip curled. "To what end?"

"I want to sabotage the telemetry," Viktor said, the words coming quick and low. "The car I drive isn't the car you'll see in the data. I'll run the race with a corrupted mapping system—it'll mimic a mechanical failure, nothing I could have avoided. My car dies in the pit lane on lap forty. The rear aero fails, I crawl to the garage. Publicly, it's a disaster. Privately, the FIA starts asking why a car that flew through scrutineering collapses in a straight line. They send in engineers. They start sniffing around the garage. Aethel's whole house of cards gets a draft."

Jack shook his head. "You'd sacrifice your own race, your own championship lead, for that?"

Viktor locked eyes with him. "I have a daughter, Jack. She's three years old. I've been throwing races to keep her safe, and I've been drowning in a silence that makes me want to put my helmet on and drive into a wall at full speed. I want off this ride. But I need a promise."

Jack felt the weight of the USB drive in his pocket, the SIM card, the recorder with the already-betrayed confession. He had nothing left that was clean.

"What promise?"

"If this goes sideways, if Aethel comes for me before the garage doors close on Sunday, you take my family to that lawyer in Zurich. Luca's lawyer, the one you know about. He's the kind of man who makes problems disappear. You get my wife and my daughter onto a plane and you don't let them look back."

Jack looked at Viktor in the half-light of the shuttered garage. He saw a man wearing a mask of privilege that was actually a cell. He saw a whole grid of men driving for their lives while pretending it was for glory.

"What happens to you, then?" Jack asked.

"Whatever happens. I was dead the day I signed with Fenice. I'm just choosing how I spend the years I have left."

A rattling cough came from the corner. Emile stirred, eyelids fluttering, his skin waxy against the grey blanket. He wasn't heavy enough to have a soul in him, Jack thought.

"There's one thing you haven't considered," Jack said. "Aethel has recordings. He recorded my voice in the casino. If he plays that for the FIA, it doesn't matter how much telemetry you corrupt. They'll claim it's a driver disgruntled by sabotage, an excuse fabricated by a criminal."

Viktor's frown deepened. "He told you that? He showed you a recording?"

"He didn't show me anything. He had his detective tell me. Said they had my voice on tape."

Viktor let out a low, flat laugh—a sound with no joy in it. "That's his favorite trick. The ghost tape. He makes them think they're compromised, so they run. You running confirmed you were guilty. But there is no recording, Jack. He bluffed, because panic plays into his timing. You ran, so he got exactly what he wanted—a fugitive narrative for the press."

Jack’s heart hit the floor of his chest. The entire weight of his flight, the stolen hours, the scramble through the dark—it had all been a shadowplay. He’d been outrun by a man who’d never even left his office.

"Do you know how I know?" Viktor said, his voice dropping to barely a whisper. "Because I'm the one who deleted his surveillance storage two days ago, right before Philippe fired him. He told me about the recording, begged to show me, but there was nothing on the hard drives. Aethel is loud, Jack. He doesn't have proof of anything. He's been constructing his castle out of air, and you've been filling in the rooms with your own fear."

The spanner clattered to the concrete. Jack breathed out a lungful of air he didn't know he was holding.

"Sunday," Jack said. "You sabotage the telemetry. I take your family to Zurich. But I need you to stall. Keep Alain and Philippe together, in the open, where the cameras can see them. I have a video of Luca that will end them."

Viktor nodded once, the movement sharp as a knife cut. He pulled his cap lower and turned for the door.

"Viktor," Jack called. The driver froze. "For what it's worth... I believe you."

Viktor didn't turn. "Then get a better plan than hiding in my dead teammate's garage," he said. "Aethel's not the one who's known to hold a grudge. Alain is. And he's just realized someone's been walking around with his keycard."

The door creaked open, and Viktor vanished into the grey morning.

Jack looked down at Emile, whose eyes were open but unfocused, fighting to stay in the world.

"Aethel has no recording," Jack whispered, as much to himself as to the ailing engineer. "That means nothing I said has been heard. Not by the police, not by the press."

He pulled the USB from his pocket. The one piece of evidence that had never been compromised. The one thing left that was real.

Sunday had just become a countdown.