Read Chapter 12: Missing Colleague

The scent of stale coffee and ozone hit Elise as she pushed into the engineering office at the Monaco paddock, and she stopped cold. Pierre’s laptop was gone. His desk—always a fortress of cables and thermal charts—was stripped bare except for a single, half-filled duffel bag lying open on the floor.

“Pierre?” Her voice echoed off the prefab walls. No answer. The air-conditioning hummed, sterile and indifferent.

She crossed to the bag, crouching. A rumpled Apollon polo, a cracked tablet, his spare racing headphones. The clothes were packed in a hurry—shirts half-folded, a toothbrush jammed into the side pocket. A man who was running, not packing.

Her phone buzzed. Julien: *Press briefing in twenty. Where are you?*

She ignored it. Her fingers found a scrap of paper tucked beneath the tablet, folded into a tight, deliberate square. She opened it. The handwriting was Pierre’s—tight, angular, the pen marks pressed so hard they’d nearly torn the paper.

*Security audit complete. It’s not the tires. It’s the system. Someone with access to everything. Crosschecked the telemetry logs against the pit-wall camera feeds. There’s a gap. 14 min, Monza. 11 min, Bahrain. Every race. I asked Carmine for the backup server keys. He said no. He said leave it alone.*

Underneath, a single word, underlined twice.

*Run.*

Elise’s blood turned to ice water. Carmine—Apollon’s head of operations, the man who controlled every access credential, every protocol. The man who had personally approved her hiring.

She read the note again, and the pattern snapped into focus like a camera lens clicking shut. The brake flaw on Madeleine’s car. The tire signatures. Pierre’s missing hours in the data. All of it whispered the same name, and she’d never once looked his way because Carmine had always been *kind* to her.

The duffel bag. Pierre’s half-packed, frantic escape. He hadn’t just found a mole. He’d found a monster, and the monster knew he was hunting.

Elise’s phone buzzed again, insistent. She stood, her legs unsteady, and that’s when she saw the second scrap of paper caught in the zipper of the bag—smaller, barely legible, written in a different hand. A different ink. Sharp red pen.

*Elise. Stop asking questions about Bahrain. Or Pierre won’t be the only one who disappears.*

She went cold to her core. It was addressed to her. They knew she was involved, and they had Pierre, and the threat wasn’t a promise—it was a deadline.

She turned to leave, to find Julien, to tell him everything about the sabotage, the mole, the whole rotten truth—when the door opened.

Marco Tessaro stood in the doorway, his Red Bull polo crisp, a practiced smile on his face. “Elise. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Wrong paddock for that, Marco.” She slid the notes into her pocket, her movements fluid, casual. “Did you need something?”

“Just checking on an old friend.” He stepped inside, glancing around Pierre’s stripped office. “Your security analyst seems to have packed up shop. Leaving us so soon?”

Elise forced a shrug. “He got a better offer. It happens.”

“Does it?” Marco’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Funny. I heard he was asking questions about Bahrain. The 2018 race. That was a strange weekend, wasn’t it? Bad brakes. Worse luck.” He tilted his head, studying her like a specimen. “You’d know all about that, though, wouldn’t you, Elise? The way you keep showing up where the accidents are.”

She didn’t flinch. She couldn’t let him see her flinch. “If you have something to say, Marco, say it.”

“I’m saying the paddock is a small place. And secrets have a way of surfacing when you least expect them.” He glanced at his watch. “Shouldn’t you be at the briefing? The press loves you now—after Spain. A pretty face and a good strategy call, and suddenly everyone forgets you disappeared for three years.”

He was baiting her. Trying to shake her before a race weekend. But his words aligned too neatly with the threat, with Pierre’s warning, and the pattern was undeniable. Marco wasn’t just a rival engineer with a grudge. He was a messenger.

“I don’t know what you think you know,” Elise said, keeping her voice low, steady. “But if anything happens to me—if anything happens to Pierre—there are people who will come looking.”

“Pierre?” Marco laughed, a bright, hollow sound. “He was already gone when I got here. I just thought I’d help you clean up the mess.” He backed toward the door, his eyes lingering on her pocket, where the notes sat crumpled and hidden. “Good luck this weekend, Elise. You’ll need it.”

The door clicked shut, and Elise stood alone in the empty office, Pierre’s warning burning in her pocket. The mole wasn’t just someone with access. It was Carmine—the man who had signed her contract. And Marco Tessaro was the outside contact, the link between Red Bull’s sabotage and Apollon’s internal rot.

But the anti-tampering file was on Pierre’s laptop, and Pierre was gone.

Her phone buzzed a third time. Julien: *Elise. Now.*

She was out of time. The briefing started in minutes, with Tom Okafor waiting like a trap, and the only person who might believe her—the only person she had data to prove her innocence to—was the same driver she’d lied to for weeks.

Elise made a decision she never thought she’d make. She walked out of the office and headed toward the media center, not toward the paddock, not toward the safety of her engineers. She pulled out her phone and typed a single message to Julien.

*The sabotage is real. The mole is Carmine. Meet me after the briefing. I’ll tell you everything.*

She hit send, and for the first time in years, she let herself hope that the truth might save more than it destroyed. The press room doors loomed ahead, gleaming glass and noise. Somewhere behind them, Okafor was sharpening his questions.

And somewhere else, Pierre was running.

Elise pushed through the doors, ready to lie through her teeth for one more hour—not to save herself, but to give herself a chance to find the man who had tried to warn her.

The lights blinded her, and the cameras clicked like rifles, and she smiled like she didn’t have a target painted on her back.