Chapter 75

[ 1,037 words ]

Katia’s POV

I ran my hand along the seat the way I always did before a race. Not superstition. Just the physical act of making contact, of saying to the machine: I know you, you know me, let’s do this properly.

The starter raised the flag.

I found the line in my head the geometry of the three blocks, the camber of the road on the second turn, and the slight compression at the far end that most riders didn’t account for until they’d done it twice. I had done it nine times. I knew where the road breathed and where it held its breath.

The flag dropped.

Under four minutes. That was the target I had set myself in the car on the way over, which meant I needed to take the second turn wider than felt comfortable and trust the compression on the exit. Most people didn’t trust the compression. They braked before it, which killed their speed on the back straight, which was where this race was won or lost.

I trusted the compression.

I won by a margin that made the crowd do something between a scream and a silence—that particular stunned beat before the noise caught up with what had just happened. I felt it even through the helmet, even at the speed I was moving when I crossed the line.

I didn’t stop. That was the rule I had made for myself years ago and had never broken. You crossed the line; you kept moving. You were gone before the crowd finished reacting. Catwoman didn’t take bows. Catwoman didn’t give interviews. Catwoman existed in the gap between the flag dropping and the noise arriving and nowhere else.

I was already turning onto the service road when I saw him.

He was standing at the far end of the chain-link, slightly back from the crowd, and he wasn’t filming the race. He was filming me. The camera, a proper one, not a phone, was pointed directly at where I was and had been pointed at where I was for what looked like the entire race. Not the start line, not the action, not the other riders. Me.

I clocked the position. The angle. The fact that he had placed himself at the exit point specifically.

I took the service road at speed, turned left instead of right at the first junction, cut through the logistics park access route, and came out on a street that ran parallel to Sam’s position. By the time anyone following my expected exit route reached the road I was supposed to be on, I was two blocks away and moving in the wrong direction for them to matter.

I pulled over after three blocks and sat on the bike in the dark for a moment.

Someone was watching Catwoman specifically. Not the race. Not the other riders. Me.

I thought about Julian’s intelligence analyst. The one Gail had mentioned. Spent twelve years tracking financial criminals; now applies the same methodology to racing aliases. I thought about Julian in the boardroom, sitting very still with his folder, and the other breach, Katia. I thought about the drone grid on the bridge and the heat signature and the man in the crowd tonight with a proper camera pointed at my exit line.

Then I stopped thinking about it, because thinking about it in the dark on a street in the Bronx at midnight was not useful, and I had a six-year-old asleep at home.

I texted Sam: Change of route. Give me ten.

She responded in four seconds: Clocked. Moving.

Back home I scrubbed the suit in the bathroom sink the way I always did, cold water, no soap, thirty seconds, and hang in the cavity behind the coats to dry overnight. The helmet went in its case. The case went under the false floor. The floor went back. The coats went back. I stood in front of my wardrobe looking exactly like a wardrobe.

Aiden was still asleep. I stood in his doorway for another thirty seconds, the cool-down version of the pre-race check, making sure everything was exactly as I had left it.

It was.

I poured wine I probably didn’t need and stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows with the Manhattan skyline doing what it always did at this hour glittering, indifferent, enormous. I had stood at this window more times than I could count, at all hours, in all states, and the city had never once offered me an opinion about any of it. I found that useful.

I should stop racing. I knew that. The rational case for stopping was overwhelming: I was a public figure now, I had a son, I had a company, I had a contract with the most powerful private conglomerate in the country, and there was a man with a proper camera standing at my exit line in the Bronx at midnight.

I knew all of that.

I turned the wine glass slowly in my hand and looked at the skyline and thought about the way the road felt under the tyres at the compression point, the way the bike responded when you trusted it, and the specific quality of silence that existed in the half second before the flag dropped when the whole world contracted to a single point and everything else—the company, the contract, the boardroom, Julian Windsor and his almost-smiles and his intelligence analysts and his drone grids—disappeared completely.

I thought about that half second.

I finished the wine.

I couldn’t stop. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Racing was the one thing in my life that had been entirely mine since I was eighteen years old, the one thing I had never shared, never explained, never asked anyone’s permission for. It had kept me sane when everything else was falling apart. It had funded Harvard. It had given me Catwoman, which had given me something to be when I had nothing else to be.

I wasn’t ready to give that to anyone.

I rinsed the glass, turned off the kitchen light, and went to bed.

The man with the camera was a problem I would handle tomorrow.

Tonight I had won. And for now, that was enough.

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