Page 61 of Redline Communion

“I’m great.”

Her eyes stay on mine while I smile wider.

“Okay,” she says, turning back to the engine.

She lets it go. I should know that doesn’t mean she believes me.

By the time the official show winds down, someone has already decided the night isn’t over, probably Zaconia, possibly one of the drivers with more money than sense. Within twenty minutes, half the paddock has relocated to an old service road half a mile away. Headlights line both sides of the makeshift strip, and someone has connected a phone to a speaker that was never meant to compete with engines and is losing badly.

The first two bikes pull up side by side. There are no officials, no qualifying order, no Alistair deciding whose talent belongs to which branch. A woman drops her arm, the bikes launch, and the crowd loses its mind. I feel the sound in my teeth while engines scream down the road, people climb onto car hoods for a better view, and somebody spills a drink down my arm and apologizes by handing me the rest of it.

I take it.

Talia appears beside me while the next drivers line up.

“Better?” she asks.

“A little.”

“Not enough?”

I look at her.

She already knows the answer.

We end up at a villa an hour later. Whose villa, I don’t ask. The music is loud, the lighting low, and nobody is swimming in the pool despite at least three people already losing parts of their clothing.

Somewhere between the service road and the living room, Talia takes my hand. She doesn’t let go until we reach the bathroom.

“You look like you need this,” she says, locking the door.

I don’t ask what this means because I already know.

The first line burns clean. I’ve done this enough now that I don’t cough or complain, just wait through the sting and the drip, through one bright second when the room becomes too clear, until the rush catches up.

Marcus’s name doesn’t come with it.

That is the point.

Talia cuts another line while I check my nose in the mirror.

“You good?”

“Everyone needs to stop asking me that.”

“Noted.”

I do the second.

By the time we leave the bathroom, the villa has sharpened around me. The bass lands exactly where it should, every conversation seems worth joining, and everyone is funnier than they were ten minutes ago, including me.

Zaconia is laughing across the room. Kiwi stands in the kitchen with a cup she hasn’t touched, watching me over its rim.

I look away.

My pulse runs too fast, but at least it’s moving. Since the annex, everything inside me has felt stuck beneath candle wax and other people’s hands, and now I can breathe all the way down. I feel light, not empty and definitely not healed, just fast enough that none of it can settle.

“To new beginnings,” I announce, raising a cup I don’t remember filling.