His voice held an edge I hadn't heard before—a crack in the porcelain. He didn't wait for a reply, instead slicing through the water with a clean, powerful stroke. When he reached the edge, his right hand didn't grip the tile immediately. He hoisted it from the water, fingers curled into a stiff, useless claw, and gave it a sharp, frantic snap.
He hauled himself out in one motion, muscle and sunlight, and didn't look back once. He just ran his fingers through his dripping hair and vanished into the crowd of laughing people, the superstar restored to his throne.
I scrambled to the ladder, my waterlogged shoes squelching with every step as I hauled myself onto the tile. I didn't look at the crowd, didn't look at the female in the sarong, and I certainly didn't look at the back of Dominic’s head. I just marched toward the pool house, leaving a trail of chlorinated grease and salt in my wake.
I shoved the door open, the sudden air conditioning sending a violent shiver through my frame.
My father was there, slumped in the armchair by the window. Dominic was right, the bottle on the side table was significantly lighter. A ceramic mug sat beside it, the steam long gone and a dark film skinned the surface of the untouched coffee. He turned his head slowly, his eyes glassy and unfocused as they traveled from my dripping hair down to my soaked shirt.
He let out a short, wet bark of a laugh.
“Look at you,” he muttered, the words thick and sliding into each other. “Going for a swim... in your clothes. That’s... that’s a new look for a Hayes. Practical.”
He chuckled again, a tired sound that made my chest tighten until it hurt to breathe.
I didn't say a word. I didn't even look at the bottle. I just walked past him, my shoes leaving heavy, wet prints on the floor, and slammed my bedroom door shut.
I leaned against the wood, the distant rhythm of Dominic’s party still vibrating through the walls and closed my eyes. I was freezing, I was exhausted, and I still smelled like a fryer—but all I could feel was the presence of a hand that shouldn't have been there, and the crushing weight of a house that would never be my home.
Chapter nine
Dominic
The power unit screamed like it wanted blood.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally.
The vibration climbed through the bucket, a rough hum that traveled up my spine and rattled my teeth. On my steering wheel, the shift lights were a frantic, blinding blur of rotating colors, signaling that I was deep into the over-rev. The sound changed there—the smooth roar of the vehicle sharpening into a thin, staccato mechanical wail as the car bounced off the limiter. It sounded like metal being dared to betray itself.
“Dom,” Landon’s voice crackled through my earpiece. It was calm, professional, but underpinned by that vibrating embarrassment I’d seen in him all weekend. “We’re seeing a spike in the temps and you’re clipping the limiter in every gear. Bring it down a notch. We’re not chasing a pole lap today.”
I didn’t answer. I leaned into the throttle instead, my eyes fixed on the apex.
I’d expected Landon to be gone. After the party, after the noise, after I’d effectively reminded him that he was a guest in a house he couldn't afford, I thought he’d finally leave and his daughter would disappear right beside him. But no. Here he was at the start of the week, headset on, standing on the pit wall like he hadn't spent Sunday evening drowning in a bottle. He looked fine—functional—which only made me want to push the car until something actually snapped.
“Dominic,” Landon’s voice crackled through my earpiece. “The telemetry is lighting up like a Christmas tree. You’re bouncing off the limiter. Shift up or you’ll cook the block.”
Or worse.I smiled inside the helmet. Redline wasn’t a warning to me; it was the title of the only song I suddenly cared about. It was the point where the machine stopped promising it could handle things and started begging you to stop.
On my steering wheel, the shift lights flashed a blinding, frantic white—the final signal that the engine had reached its limit. I stayed in the gear, letting the car scream, the staccatopop-pop-popof the rev-limiter vibrating through my skull. I knew exactly where the edge was.
I teased crossing it anyway.
There was a moment there, right before the mechanical failure became inevitable—a suspended second where the car felt limitless. That moment was addictive. People think F1 is about control. It’s not. It’s about the illusion that nothing can reach you if you’re already outrunning it.
The checkered flag waved at the start-finish line, signaling the end of the session, but I didn’t lift. I took the in-lap harder than my qualifying run, throwing the car into the corners with a violence that made the tires protest. I squeezed everything out of it until the vibration turned angry, until the scream of the enginehit a pitch that meant Marco was probably throwing his headset across the garage.
I didn't care about the recharge procedure. I didn't care about the harvesting.
I rolled into the pit lane with the engine ticking in agony, heart hammering, hands perfectly steady. The silence when I finally cut the power was almost violent. It reminded me too much of other silences—the kind that arrived suddenly and stayed.
The garage was a wall of professional silence. No one on the crew was smiling. Marco didn’t even look up from his monitor as he directed the mechanics to hook up the cooling fans and data umbilicals, his movements jerky—angry. He was already scrolling through the engine data, his mouth a thin line as he saw exactly how much I’d overstressed the components. They thought I didn’t notice the tension, the way the front-jack person stepped back just a bit too quickly as I climbed out. I noticed everything; I just didn't care to fix it.
Landon was waiting by the halo, his posture stiff across the cockpit.
“What the fuck was that?” he snapped, his hand gripping the edge of the airbox. He looked steady, but the garage lights caught the slight puffiness around his eyes—the only tax left over from his weekend bender. “I told you to back off. We have a limited pool of power units for the season, Dominic. You do that again, you’re going to take grid penalty before the first corner of the next race. Or worse, you’ll wreck the car.”
I hopped down onto the concrete, my boots ringing against the polished floor. I met him eye to eye, making sure he felt every inch of the height advantage I held over him.
