Chapter 4 Chapter 4

Mac

From the window, I watched her cross the lot to the car she'd raced on Harbor Road, the forty-seven still painted on its door. She stood beside it with her head bowed, and for a moment I thought she was crying.

Then she kicked her front tire.

I smiled.

I preferred the temper. It gave me something solid to push against.

Julian came in a minute later, his ears still pink. “Sir, I’d like it on record that the woman is rude.”

“You survived.” I kept my gaze on the lot. “Book her on the simulator at five tomorrow, before the track. I want to see what she can do.”

“Yes, sir.”

He left. I kept watching until the forty-seven coughed to life and sped through the gates in a cloud of exhaust.

Three months ago, development put a scouting report on my desk with Isolde Smith’s name at the top. I saw the surname and dropped it into the trash without reading another word.

They brought it back twice.

By the third time, the board had attached a note about the value of a woman driver in the street-to-track division. Isolde was beating men with five times her budget in a car held together with ductape, and the board wanted the media to take note. A woman in Crown colors would make us look progressive. It would sell sponsors.

I finally read the report last week.

Her numbers were impossible to ignore. She had an instinct for control at the edge of a car’s limits, enough to make an experienced driver look slow. Crown needed someone who could push a car until it revealed every weakness to the engineers. Red could do that.

It gave me a clean reason to bring Bobby Smith’s daughter inside Crown. Nobody would question it.

No one in development knew why I had changed my mind. They believed I’d finally seen a driver worth the risk. The board believed I’d agreed to their publicity plan. Both explanations served me. Isolde would have a place on the team, a reason to be near me, and nowhere to hide what she knew from me every day.

Last night, I went to Harbor Road to see her for myself. I watched her take Pruitt at the cannery dogleg with two wheels in the gravel, a move I’d made a hundred times back when I had a knee to make it with. Nobody on that street had taught her that. Bobby had.

Talent and a temper. The first I could sell. The second I could break.

She thought she’d come here to do the hunting. I’d seen her eyes linger on my filing cabinet while she pretended to read the contract. Let her look. She wasn’t going to find what she wanted in this building.

She also hadn’t known the office glass was tinted. With the lights on, it threw her reflection back at her like a mirror. I’d watched her look me over while she thought I was busy with the track. Her gaze caught on my arms and stayed there. Then she bit the inside of her cheek and looked away, angry with herself for noticing.

The knowledge should have been useful. Instead, it had followed me all morning.

I rubbed my jaw where she’d hit me and had to admit she packed a punch. Nobody had hit me in six years. People saw the leg and decided I was someone to fear or pity, but Isolde had looked straight at the weakness and used it against me.

Rather than angering me, it had left me impressed.

In daylight, I’d noticed more freckles than I’d seen under the streetlights, and a thin white scar beneath her lower lip. I found myself wondering who had put it there or how it would feel underneath my fingertips.

I swore under my breath and turned away from the window.

She spoke of her father’s innocence like it was fact. Bobby Smith had confessed to sabotaging my brakes, and the evidence against him had been clear as day.

Either she was delusional, or she had something to hide.

Rain came in that night, and my knee felt it hours before the first drops struck the glass. Most nights, I went down to the gym and worked through the ache. That night, I barely made it to the couch.

Six years ago, I’d been leading the Midnight Grand with four laps to go. I was twenty-six, with five Grand wins behind me and a sixth close enough to taste.

Then the brake pedal went soft at the end of the back straight.

The wall filled my windshield.

I woke days later with steel pins holding my left leg together and a surgeon promising I’d walk again, as if walking had ever been the point.

Four surgeries and months of painful rehab. By then, someone else had taken my place and my career was firmly over.

The circuit had called me Ruin long before the crash. Back then, it was the name for a driver who took corners too hard and pushed too far. Afterward, people said it the way they spoke about a building after a fire, damaged beyond repair and waiting to come down.

Bobby Smith stood before a judge, said guilty, and took the blame for my brakes. I left that courtroom determined to build a new life and forget my past

Eight days ago, sleep wouldn’t come. I poured a scotch and walked the house until I reached the east hall.

The trophy room waited at the end of it.

I hadn’t opened that door in over a year. It held photographs from podiums, old helmets, and the life I had spent six years trying to outrun. For a year, I’d taken the longer route through the house rather than pass it.

That night, I went in anyway.

I forced myself to look at the trophies until the ache in my chest grew sharper than the one in my knee. Then I saw the file, half-hidden behind the championship cups. Dust coated the box so heavily it came away on my fingers.

My lawyers had run their own investigation while I was in the hospital.

I remembered them bringing the file after Bobby’s arrest. I remembered telling them to leave it somewhere. Bobby had pleaded guilty. He had given the judge what everyone needed from him.

I had never cared enough to read the rest.

Until that night.

I sat on the floor with my bad leg stretched in front of me and opened the box.

I read every page. Then I read them again.

By the time the sky began to pale outside the windows, one thing had become clear.

Bobby Smith hadn’t acted alone.

I called my lawyer.

“Bobby Smith’s debt,” I said. “Find out who holds it.”

“Victor Kane, last I heard.” He sounded half asleep. “Why?”

“Because I want it.”

Whatever Bobby Smith had taken to his grave, his daughter was going to lead me to it.

Whether she meant to or not.