“No and I won’t be looking. Elena, come on, you know better than to look at the comments section.”
I let out a petulant huff and leaned back in my seat.
The last leg of the journey was mercifully short, just a two hour flight to Heathrow. Without my phone to obsess over, I dozed a bit. I awoke with a start as we began the descent and hit a pocket of turbulence.
“You all right?” Graham asked.
I nodded and fastened my seatbelt. I wasn’t normally a nervous flyer. But I was exhausted and had plenty to be nervous about besides the flight. We landed safely and eventually made our way through customs and luggage reclaim.
“Look,” Graham said at the taxi rank. “Take the week off. You’ve earned it.”
“What about follow up? Fallout? I should be around to deal with it.”
“No, there’s plenty of people who can do additional work on this. You’ve been travelling for over a month without a break. You’re a nervous wreck. Take the time and come back fresh nextweek. Then I want you in Bahrain next Thursday.” There was a wicked glint in his eye. “Whatever the consequences are, I want you at the next race to cover that. Deal?”
I managed a weak smile. “Fine.”
Graham handed me my phone. The battery had died. I rolled my eyes and tucked it into my bag. I leaned in and gave my editor a quick, one-armed hug. He patted my back in a fatherly way and we went our separate ways.
It was nearly 10pm when I finally got to my building in Islington. I’d been travelling for nearly twenty hours and was so done. I stepped out of the lift onto my floor, dragging my small suitcase behind me on its battered wheels. I turned the corner and came to a halt.
Sitting on the floor in front of my flat door, forearms resting on his knees, sunglasses over his eyes, was Aleks.
He looked up and took off the glasses. His eyes were red, his jaw locked, his hair unkempt.
I heaved a sigh and dropped my head, shaking it slightly. I walked slowly towards him and stopped in front of him before either of us said a word.
It was him to break the tension, with that oh so simple greeting: “Hi.”
Aleksandr Volkov – Monday, Seoul to London
The flight home should have felt like a victory lap.
It didn’t.
I sat by the window, eyes fixed on the clouds drifting past like ghosts, my noise-cancelling headphones doing nothing to quiet the chaos in my head. The cabin around me buzzedwith quiet satisfaction—soft laughter, the clink of glasses, the afterglow of a job well done.
I’d won. I was back on top of the championship. I’d put Rivers behind me, buried Moretti down in fourth in the championship, and reasserted my dominance in a car the world had started to question. The stats were clean. The headlines, glowing.
But all I could think about was Elena.
Her voice still echoed in my skull.
“Don’t you want to remove any doubt about that and know that you earned every title without your team breaking the rules? Fair and square?”
And then mine. Louder. Crueller.
“This is about more than your career.”
I scrubbed a hand across my jaw and exhaled, long and slow.
The seat next to me was empty—Callum had taken a spot further back with the engineers, happily chatting with two of the junior mechanics. Across the aisle, Mac was asleep with his cap pulled low. I should have slept too. I was exhausted. Physically wiped. But the adrenaline from the race hadn’t settled. Not really. Not when the win had felt so… hollow.
Not performance-wise. No. That had been one of the cleanest, fiercest drives of my life. The car had obeyed every command. Every apex was mine. Every sector green.
But when the helmet came off, when the roar of the crowd died down…
She wasn’t there.
