Chapter 125

[ 1,208 words ]

Katia’s POV

I was back in my suite by three AM.

The race suit went into the bag immediately. False lining down, everything flat, nothing visible. I had done this routine so many times it took under two minutes. Then I stood in the shower for ten minutes and let the hot water do what hot water does after a race — bring the body back down from wherever it had been.

My pulse was still high.

Not from the race. The race was done. I had won, and I had left, and the circuit was already being dismantled behind me. My pulse was high because of the four seconds. Because of the way The Anonymous Racer had held alongside me on the back straight and refused to move. Because tonight had been different from every other time I had raced him, and I did not yet fully understand why.

I wrapped myself in the hotel robe and went to the balcony.

Dubai at three in the morning was something else. The city did not sleep — it just changed its pace. The towers still blazed. The Gulf was black and flat. Somewhere to the south the industrial port was quiet now, the circuit dismantled, the access road empty. No evidence that anything had happened there tonight.

I stood on the balcony and breathed the warm salt air and thought about nothing for a while.

My phone lit up.

Unknown number.

I picked it up.

The message read: You left a tyre mark. Rookie mistake.

I stared at the screen.

My heart did something it had no business doing at three in the morning after a race I had just won. It kicked. Hard. Once.

I sat down on the balcony chair.

He had been there. He had gone to the exit point and found the mark. He had stood in the port road at two in the morning in — what, a suit? Julian Windsor did not own casual clothes for midnight port visits. He had gone himself, not just sent his security team, and he had found the one thing I had left behind, and he had texted me about it.

I looked at the message for a long time.

Then I typed ’Goodnight, Julian p>

I sent it.

Then I turned the phone face down on the balcony table and looked at the city and thought about what had just happened.

He knew, but he did not have proof — the tyre mark was not proof of anything except that a car had turned sharply on a port road — but he knew. I had felt it in the text. The specific confidence of a man who had stopped searching and started arriving. The tyre mark message was not a question. It was a statement. He was telling me he had been there. He was telling me he had been close.

He was telling me he knew. But I wasn’t about to agree, not after his wife just claimed to be me.

I should have been scared. Six years of protecting this identity, six years of early exits and false keycards and no face on any circuit anywhere, and the man who had been hunting me had just texted me from a port road at two in the morning about a tyre mark.

I was not scared.

I was something else entirely, and I was not going to examine it at three in the morning on a balcony in Dubai, so I picked up my phone and went inside and got into bed.

I dreamed.

I had not dreamt properly in years — not the kind of dreams that left a residue, that stayed with you when you opened your eyes. I usually slept like someone who had made peace with their subconscious through sheer exhaustion. Tonight was different.

I dreamed of a face.

Not clearly — it was the way faces appeared in dreams, assembled from suggestion rather than detail. Dark. Sharp jaw. Something familiar about the way it looked at me, a quality of attention that I recognised from somewhere I could not locate in the dream. The face was trying to come into focus. I was trying to let it.

I woke up before it did.

Three seconds of lying in the dark, heart going, reaching for the image. It dissolved the way dreams always dissolved — completely, instantly, leaving only the feeling of it.

I lay on my back in the dark hotel room and stared at the ceiling.

The race. The tyre mark. The text. The dream.

My phone on the nightstand showed six AM. Two missed calls from Sam. One text from Aiden via Gail’s phone: Did you win? Gail made pancakes. They were okay.

I smiled at the ceiling.

I called him back.

He answered immediately, which meant he had been awake for a while. “Mum p>

“Hey baby p>

“Did you win p>

“Yes p>

He didn’t answer immediately. I could hear him processing this with the focused satisfaction of someone whose expectations had been met. “Good,” he said. “I knew you would p>

“Did you p>

“Yes. You always win.” He said it the way he said things he considered obvious facts. “Gail’s pancakes were okay. She used the wrong syrup p>

“The good syrup is in the left cupboard p>

“I told her. She used the other one anyway p>

“I’ll be home tomorrow p>

“I know.” He paused. “Mum. Are you okay p>

I looked at the ceiling. At the Dubai morning light beginning at the edges of the curtains. At the room that smelt faintly of the warm night air from the balcony.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m really okay p>

“Good.” He sounded satisfied. “Come home p>

“Tomorrow,” I said. “I promise p>

I hung up.

I lay there for another minute. Then I got up, got dressed, and went down to breakfast.

Julian was already at the corner table. The one he had apparently asked for specifically because it was where we had sat every morning this week. He was drinking coffee and reading something on his phone, and he looked up when I walked in, and for a moment neither of us moved.

Then he said, “Rookie mistake p>

I sat down across from him. “Good morning, Julian p>

“You should have taken the second exit. The tyre mark was inevitable on that turn radius p>

I poured myself coffee. “I don’t know what you’re talking about p>

He looked at me. I looked back. We both knew exactly what we were talking about.

“Delia is going to have to prove she is Catwoman tonight,” he said. Changing the subject and not changing the subject at all.

“At the 24 Hour Race,” I said.

“Yes p>

“She won’t be able to,” I said.

“No,” he agreed. “She won’t p>

We sat with that for a moment. The breakfast room was quiet around us. Outside, Dubai was waking up, doing what it did every morning — deciding to be extraordinary again.

“After tonight,” Julian said. “We talk. Properly p>

I looked at my coffee.

“After tonight,” I agreed.

We had breakfast.

Neither of us said another word about tyre marks or port roads or unknown numbers texting at three in the morning.

We did not need to.

We both already knew everything that mattered.

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