Read Chapter 17: Pit Lane Betrayal

The air in the pit garage tasted of rubber dust and hot carbon, the kind of thick, mechanical breath Elise had learned to read before she could read words. Montréal in June meant humidity that clung to everything, and the Apollon garage was no different—sweat-slicked carbon fiber, the low thrum of generators, the distant scream of engines out on the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.

Elise stood at the back of the garage, arms crossed, watching the timing screens like a wounded general watching a battle she could no longer command. The FIA audit had stripped her of primary engineer duties, but nobody had stripped her of her eyes. And her eyes were doing what they always did: finding the flaw.

Julien was P4, running a quiet, efficient race. The car felt good—she could hear it in the gear changes, see it in the sector times. And that was the problem. The car felt *too* good. Someone had tuned it to perfection before she'd been sidelined, and that someone had not been on her team.

"Elise." Marco Tessaro's voice arrived before his body did, sliding up beside her with the oily ease of a man who had never once in his life been caught holding something he shouldn't. "Enjoying the view?"

She didn't turn. "Enjoying the race, Marco. You should try watching it instead of me."

His laugh was practiced, hollow. "I always watch you, Elise. You're the most interesting thing in this paddock."

She felt his eyes on her like a hand on her spine. The threat he'd delivered in Monaco hadn't been subtle—it had been a promise wrapped in cordiality. And now he stood beside her in the garage as if they were old friends, as if he hadn't signed a report that cleared a brake flaw that had killed her sister.

"Lap 28," she said, to no one in particular. "Julien's on hards. Watch the undercut."

The pit crew snapped into motion. The tire change would take 2.6 seconds if everything went perfectly. Elise watched the mechanic on the front-left wheel—a new hire, a kid named Danny, brought in from the junior program to replace the man who'd "left unexpectedly" after Pierre vanished.

Danny was nervous. That was normal. What wasn't normal was the way he kept patting his pocket. Not his glove pocket—his racing suit pocket. A mechanic who pats his pocket during a pit stop is not thinking about the stop.

Elise moved before she could think.

She crossed the garage floor in six steps, slipping past the barrier and into the hot zone just as the crew began their final checks. Danny's hand was on the wheel gun, but his eyes weren't on the wheel nut. They were fixed on the front-left corner, where the air wrench sat slightly angled—just enough to strip the thread, just enough to leave the nut a half-turn loose.

A half-turn loose at 300 kilometers per hour on the back straight of the Canadian GP was not an accident. It was a sentence.

"Danny." Her voice was calm, flat, the voice she used when a driver was over-driving into turn one. "Step back from the wheel."

He froze. His hand tightened on the gun.

"You're not on this stop," she said, moving closer. "You're on the rear. James has the front."

For a second, she saw it in his eyes—the calculation. Could he get the gun on the nut before she reached him? Could he make it look like an accident? Could he run?

The answer to the last question was yes.

He dropped the wheel gun. It clattered against the concrete with a sound that made half the crew turn. Then he was gone—through the back of the garage, between the equipment trolleys, out through the fire door that led to the paddock loading area.

Elise was already at the wheel. She crouched, checked the nut. It was on. Tight. Not sabotaged yet. The air wrench had been angled, but he hadn't fired it. She'd been fast enough.

Barely.

"Elise." Julien's voice crackled through the garage speakers, tinny and urgent. "What's happening? My stop's in two laps."

She grabbed the radio before anyone could stop her. "Julien, listen to me. Your front-left was nearly compromised. I caught it. You're clear. Box normally."

A pause. Then, softer: "You caught it."

"I caught it."

Another pause, longer. When Julien spoke again, his voice had changed—the guard dropped, just for a second. "Then you're back on my car, Elise. I don't care what the audit says. You're on my car."

The team principal, Alain Voss, appeared at her elbow, face flushed. "What the hell was that?"

She turned, holding up the item she'd grabbed from the ground just before Danny disappeared. A burner phone. Cheap, plastic, the kind you bought in a gas station and threw away in a river.

"He was going to compromise the nut," she said. "He ran. He dropped this."

Alain stared at the phone, then at her, then at the fire door swinging shut at the far end of the garage. His jaw worked. "Danny? The junior kid? He's been with us for six months."

"Six months is enough time for someone to get to him." She held the phone out. "Check the call history. Check the last number he dialed. I guarantee you'll find a connection to Carmine's office."

Alain took the phone like it might burn him. "Carmine? Operations head Carmine?"

"Carmine," she said, "or someone who reports to him. Someone who wants Julien out of this race. Someone who wants me gone."

The timing screens flickered. Julien was entering the pits. The crew scrambled, replacing the front-left mechanic with Danny's supervisor, a grizzled veteran named Okafor who was supposed to be on the right side. But Elise couldn't shake the feeling that the wrong side had more players than she knew.

She watched the stop from the barrier. The tires changed in 2.4 seconds. Clean. Perfect. No sabotage.

Julien pulled away, and his voice came over the radio again, just for her. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," she said. "Don't make a habit of almost dying."

His laugh was short, warm. "I'll try. But with you on my side, I'm starting to think I don't have to be so careful."

Elise felt something shift in her chest—a recalibration she didn't have time for. She turned back to Alain, who was already on his phone, barking orders about security footage, about Danny's apartment, about the last number dialed on the burner.

"He'll be gone by the time you find him," she said quietly. "But the phone will have a trail. Someone paid him. Someone told him when to act. And that someone is still here, in this paddock, watching us."

Alain's eyes met hers. "You think it's Carmine."

"I know it's Carmine." She lowered her voice further. "And I know that Marco Tessaro is the reason Carmine has the confidence to act. They're working together, Alain. They were working together before I ever came to this team. The question is how deep it goes."

Alain was silent for a long moment. Then he said, "You were supposed to be sidelined today. You weren't on the pit wall. You weren't in the engineering booth. But you saw what nobody else saw. How?"

Elise almost told him the truth. Almost. But the words stuck in her throat, heavy with her sister's name, heavy with the report she'd uncovered at Ferretti, heavy with the years of being told she was too suspicious, too paranoid, too difficult.

"I see patterns," she said instead. "And I saw Danny patting his pocket when he should have been watching the wheels." She looked past Alain to the timing screens, where Julien was carving through traffic, gaining on P3. "You want to know the real question? Who told Danny Elise Moreau wouldn't be watching? Because I wasn't supposed to be in that garage. I was supposed to be in a meeting with auditors, all the way across the circuit."

Alain's face went pale.

"Somebody wanted Julien to crash," she said. "Somebody who knew exactly where I wouldn't be. And that somebody is inside this team."

She looked at the burner phone in Alain's hand. Then she looked at the fire door Danny had vanished through.

"Find him," she said. "And tell me what he says before you tell anyone else."

She turned and walked toward the paddock, leaving Alain to stare at the phone. The race was still running. Julien was still alive. But somewhere in the labyrinth of the circuit, Danny was running, and the phone in Alain's hand was a thread that led straight to the heart of everything she'd been hiding from.

And now Julien knew enough to ask harder questions.

She pulled out her own phone and typed a message: *We need to talk after the race. Not about the pit stop. About everything.*

She sent it before she could lose her nerve.