Chapter 3 Puzzle

MAYA POV

For the past two years, I'd been convinced Nico had forced me off the track at Turn Six.

Now I was starting to realize there might have been more to it.

So the second I saw him the next day, I cornered him.

“You’re going to tell me what you meant,” I said. “Right now. No more cryptic comments. No more walking away. What really happened that day?”

Nico turned slowly. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

“Not here,” he said.

“Then where? Because I’ve spent two years thinking you put me in the wall on purpose, and yesterday you stood there and acted like there’s some secret version of the story I never got. So start talking.”

He set the phone down on the desk. “I’m not playing games with you, Maya.”

“Then stop acting like you are. You said someone needs to tell me the truth. You’re the one who said it. So tell me.”

He was quiet for a long moment, the way he always went quiet when he was deciding how much damage the next sentence would do.

Finally he shook his head once.

"People walk past this office every few minutes.If you really want to know, I'll tell you. Just not standing here."

Every stupid response I'd prepared suddenly died in my throat.

For the first time, I realized he wasn't refusing to tell me. He was deciding whether this was something that could safely be said here.

If all he wanted was to clear his own name, he wouldn't have waited two years. And he definitely wouldn't be this careful now.

Once that thought settled in, I stopped pushing. Because suddenly, I wasn't sure I wanted the truth as badly as I thought I did.

A part of me wanted him to tell me it had just been a normal racing accident.

Nico made a bad call. I got unlucky, and got hurt. End of story.

At least then I could keep hating him without feeling guilty about it.

So I left without saying anything else.

But from that moment on, the crash from two years ago started looking different in my head.

For two years the story in my head had been clean: Nico defended too hard into Turn Six, our wheels touched, my car snapped sideways, and the barrier did the rest. Everyone had told me the same version. Stewards. Media. My own team. I had built an entire personality out of hating him for it. But now a small, wrong detail kept rising to the surface.

Right before the collision, his radio had said something. I couldn’t remember the words, only the tone—urgent, almost panicked. And the way his car had moved a fraction earlier than it should have, like he was reacting to information I never heard.

I hated that the memory was changing. It felt like the ground shifting under my feet.

.....

Evelyn found me in the data room later, staring at nothing.

"You're about to overthink yourself into a hole and then tell me you're fine in half an hour, aren't you?"

I took the cup just to have something to do with my hands. “Evelyn, do you remember the race? The one from two years ago, where I crashed.”

She went still for half a second. So brief I almost missed it.

“Of course I remember. I was on the pit wall.”

"What about before Nico caught me? Did anyone radio his team with information about my car? Tires, pace, anything like that?"

Evelyn’s fingers tightened around her own cup. She smiled too quickly.

“Maya, it was two years ago. Everything was chaos that day. Radios were overlapping, people were shouting. I don’t remember every single transmission.”

I watched her face. “And you’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” She reached over and squeezed my wrist the way she always did when she wanted to ground me. “Why are you suddenly asking about this now? Did Nico say something?”

“No,” I lied. “Just… thinking.”

She stayed another few minutes, talking about setup changes for the next test, normal things, warm things.

Nico was waiting for me at the back of the garage after the debrief, holding a slim black hard drive.

“Come with me,” he said.

We ended up in one of the unused engineering rooms. He plugged the drive into a laptop and turned the screen toward me without ceremony.

“Old telemetry,” he said. “Both cars. The official files were cleaned. These weren’t.”

I sat down. He didn’t hover. Just stood a few feet away and let me look.

At first it was just numbers and lines. Then I saw it.

His car had changed strategy seven-tenths of a second before the impact. Not a defensive move. A specific instruction to hold position aggressively, as if someone had told him I was about to become a hazard.

I scrolled to my own data. My tire temperatures were high but stable. Wear was within expected range. Nothing that should have triggered a warning.

Yet the radio transcript attached to the file showed a clear message sent to Nico’s engineer: laire's tires critical. Defend.

I sat back slowly. “Who told you my tires were gone?”

Nico’s voice was quiet. “Your team.”

The words landed like a physical blow. “Why would they do that?”

He looked at me for a long time before answering. “That’s what I’ve spent two years trying to find out.”

I stared at the screen until the lines blurred. Everything I had believed, every night I had replayed the crash, every time I had used his name like a curse that was built on something that might not have been true.

“You knew,” I said. My voice came out thinner than I wanted. “You knew the report was wrong and you still let me hate you.”

“I tried to say something,” he answered. “Right after. They shut it down. Said the data supported the official story. Said if I kept pushing, it would look like I was trying to shift blame.”

“You let me hate you for two years.”

He didn’t defend himself. He just stood there, still while the silence stretched. Then he said something that cracked the floor open.

“I let you hate me because the person who gave me that order was the same person who could end your career if the truth came out.”

I stood up so fast the chair scraped. “Who?”

Nico’s eyes flicked once toward the main garage, where engineers were still moving around the cars, then back to me.

He held my gaze and spoke the two words that changed everything.

“Ask Evelyn.”

For a second, my brain didn't process the words.

Evelyn knew the truth too?