“Always.”
We said our goodbyes and I hung up, letting the screen fade to black before slipping the phone away. I stayed there for a moment longer, phone tucked away, but my mind still lingered with my parents’ voices. Their love, their pride—it settled into my chest, warm and heavy. I exhaled slowly, letting the ambient roar of engines echo through the pit lane, grounding me like a tether.
The world hummed around me. Technicians calling out times, tires screeching during last-minute checks and the smell of fuel and heat rising in the air like static.Race day.
I sat down against the wall of the garage helmet in my lap, and stared at it like it held all the answers I couldn’t find in myself. My thumb ran over the Moretti emblem—the name, the legacy. I didn’t take it lightly. Not the name. Not the team. Not the weight of everyone who counted on me.
Truth is, I was used to being the one people relied on. The guy with the jokes. The lightness. The buffer between tension and breakdown. I was the one who talked Lucia down from a panic spiral at 2:00 a.m. when she thought she was failing as a mom. The guy who kept morale up in the garage aftera rough qualifying. The guy who pulled Alexander back from overthinking and reminded him to breathe.
And I liked being that guy. I liked being needed. If me being a little chaotic, a little loud, a little annoying—okay, a lot annoying—made it easier for people to breathe, then I’d do it a hundred times over. It was easy to slip into. It was safer, even, than sitting too long with the things I couldn’t fix. Like the way Lucia looked at Alexander when she thought no one noticed. Or how Alexander looked back at her like she was the sun and he was starving for light.
Alexander had told me he cared for her and I wanted to trust him—Ididtrust him. But she was my little sister. The one I used to walk home from school. The one who used to curl up in my room when the world got too loud. And she’d already been hurt enough. She didn’t need another man burning her to ash just because he didn’t know how to hold on.
I scrubbed a hand down my face and glanced up.
Nicola was on the other side of the garage, clipboard in hand, phone pressed to her ear. She was all business and grace, her heels clicking against concrete as she multitasked like she owned the place—which, to be fair, she kind of did. She must have felt my gaze because she looked over. We locked eyes for a second before she arched a brow and mouthed,Focus, DeLuca.
I flipped her off subtly and she smirked like she had already won.
That was the thing about Nicola. She called me a pain in the ass, butshewas the one who drovemecompletely insane. In those red lips and razor-sharp one-liners, there was something that made my pulse stutter.
“Alright, Teo,” one of the engineers called out, snapping me back to the moment. “Time to get in.”
I nodded once, shook out my hands, and pushed off the wall.
Balaclava up.
Helmet on.
All of it—worries about Lucia, whatever the hell Nicola did to me just by existing, the pressure of legacy—it faded the second I slid into the cockpit. In there, I knew who I was. The noise was different. Louder, but clearer.
I buckled in, fingers flying over the wheel. I saw the lights ahead, and pulled into position, only one spot behind my teammate, Carlos.
Adrenaline surged through my veins as I took the inside line on Turn 12, hugging it like a second skin. I was in third. Fuckingthird. The car was responding like it was born for this track—tight, aggressive, alive.
“Nice move, Teo,” my engineer’s voice crackled in my ear, calm but charged. “Eyes forward. Two laps to go on these tires.”
Copy.
I barely registered the crowd, the blur of grandstands, the roar of engines around me. It was all instinct now—pressure on the brake, feather the throttle, feel the grip bite beneath me. My pulse was synced with the engine’s rhythm, the world narrowing down to one singular goal:
Podium.
I shifted, leaning into the next turn—too fast.
The moment it happened, I felt it in my gut.
Wheels locked.
The car jerked, grip vanished, and I was spinning.
“Shit, shit, shit?—”
The world blurred. My rear tires screamed against the asphalt, smoke billowing, and then gravel. The violent bounce as my car hit the run-off jolted every bone in my body. I slammed the brakes, but it was too late. I was out of control.
Metal screeched.
A loudcrackbehind me.
