I turned for the door, then paused.
“Do it right,” I said. “Own every piece. No more games.”
“I will.”
I left him in that dim, quiet room—his cap in his hands, the weight of everything he’d built breaking across his shoulders.
The building still felt hollow.
But for the first time all week, it wasn’t just me holding the guilt.
Aleksandr Volkov – Obsidian HQ, Saturday Morning
I’d lost count of how many times I’d been followed this week.
Reporters outside my flat. Drones outside the gym. A photographer jumped out at me outside a bloody supermarket, and he nearly got a fist in the jaw for his trouble.
And ever since Elena had quoted me in her follow-up piece—‘I’m grateful to my fans, my friends, and especially my girlfriend…’—the internet had lost its god damn mind.
TikTok was ablaze.
Every woman I’d so much as stood next to in the last six months had become a suspect.
Was it the PR girl from Nova Dynamics? That blonde interviewer from Austria? Some wild thread tried to argue I was secretly dating Sofia Vega based on a single laugh we’d shared in the paddock.
No one had guessed the truth.
Elena’s name hadn’t come up once.
Which meant she was still safe. Hidden. And mine.
That was the only thing keeping me sane.
The rest of it—the endless attention, the headlines, the slow-motion implosion of the team—was dragging me under.
When I pulled up to HQ on Saturday morning, I half-expected another swarm. But the long, tree-lined driveway was blissfully clear.
Security had finally clamped down, it seemed. The press were now barricaded back at the main road, where a row of parked vans sat like vultures. A handful of unmarked vehicles were closer to the building, though. Blacked-out windows. Official plates.
FIA.
I pulled into my usual spot and sat there for a moment, gripping the steering wheel like it might stop me from unravelling.
Then I got out.
The atrium was quiet, but not in the hollow way it had been before. It was too still. Too clinical.
Inside, I saw them—FIA officials moving in pairs, scanning tablets, inspecting every inch of the place like it might hide a bomb.
The cars were up on stands. Software teams hovered like ghosts, nervous to even breathe wrong.
Ross was in the operations office, surrounded. He stood behind his desk, arms folded, jaw locked, glaring daggers at the two officials seated across from him. A third stood by the door, watching him like a prison guard.
He looked up, met my eye.
Didn’t say a word.
I didn’t go in.
