The cherry blossoms mocked me.
They fluttered across the pavement like confetti, delicate and stupidly picturesque as I dragged my battered suitcase up the narrow road toward the shoebox hotel I’d booked on a discount site that screamed ‘you’ll regret this’.
The air smelled like spring—floral, clean, annoyingly hopeful. I wanted to punch it.
Everything about Japan was beautiful, precise, immaculate. My hotel room simple, efficient.
The check-in clerk barely looked at me as he handed over the keycard. Room 406. No elevator. No apology. No soul.
It took everything in me not to groan aloud as I opened the door to a room the size of a particularly generous coffin. A single bed pressed against one wall, a desk barely wider than my laptop against the other, and a bathroom pod that looked like a spaceship toilet.
I sat on the edge of the bed and opened my banking app.
The balance stared back at me like a death sentence.
No more room service. No more taxis. No more screw-ups.
This was it.
One race. One story. Or it was game over.
I pulled out my laptop and tried to work at the tiny desk, but I could barely breathe in the space. The walls pressed in. The silence buzzed. The hum of the minibar fridge was louder than my thoughts.
Nope.
I slammed the lid shut, grabbed my phone and notebook, and stuffed them into my bag. If I was going to find the truth, it wasn’t going to be in this glorified closet.
I needed names. Whispers. A sliver of real proof. Something I could wave in Graham’s smug face that said I told you so.
Out on the street, the city moved like a dream. Polite footsteps. Quiet voices. Trees blooming like hope. I hated how beautiful everything was while my career circled the drain.
I caught a bus to the circuit and headed toward the media centre near the paddock, half-hoping I’d trip over a whistleblower on the way.
Instead, I’d have to earn it. Charm, lie, manipulate, investigate — whatever it took.
Because this story wasn’t going to write itself.
And if I didn’t crack it by Sunday, I’d be on the first flight home.
Aleksandr Volkov – Suzuka Practice Session
Suzuka wasn’t cooperating. Neither was the car. Neither was my brain.
The lap times on the screen were an insult. Sector two was loose. My braking? Late. Correction? Indecisive. I was second-guessing myself into every turn, and by the time I tried to correct, it was already too late. I could feel it in the grip—tiny hesitations that added up to tenths, to headlines. Every lap I ran was more tense, more calculated, more fucking wrong.
Back in the garage, I pulled off my helmet. Mac was already at the telemetry wall, arms folded, his face unreadable. Ross stood beside him, whispering something under his breath to one of the engineers. No one looked at me. Not properly.
I stripped off my gloves and balaclava, sweat clinging to the back of my neck. My throat was dry. My pulse too high for someone who’d been out of the car for five minutes.
“You’re not yourself. Want to talk about it?” Mac asked, not looking away from the screen.
“No.”
“You’re braking late. Overshooting corner exits. Oversteer into 130R.”
I said nothing.
Ross turned, finally. “You haven’t had numbers like that since Bahrain last year. What’s going on?”
