Chapter 243

[ 920 words ]

Katia’s POV

The Brooklyn Grand Prix exhibition had been in the calendar for six months.

IG Technologies was a headline sponsor—Sam had negotiated the deal before the Victor situation exploded, and I had not cancelled it because cancelling would have looked like weakness, and I did not do weakness, not publicly, not where the press could see it. So I was here in a black dress and heels at an event that smelled of engine oil and champagne and the excitement of a city that had decided for one weekend that Brooklyn was the center of the motorsport world.

The venue was a converted warehouse on the waterfront. Exhibition cars on raised platforms and GT machines and Formula prototypes gleaming under lights that had been designed to make everything look like it was already going two hundred miles per hour. The kind of event where the racing world and the money world tried very hard to look like they belonged together.

They did not always succeed.

I had arrived with Sam and immediately been separated from her by a VP from one of our partner companies who had a question that could not wait. I had answered the question and found a glass of water and was standing near one of the cars—a McLaren Senna, matte black, the kind of machine that made your hands want to touch it—when Julian appeared beside me.

He did not announce himself. He just appeared, the way he did, and stood close enough that I could feel the warmth of him and far enough that nobody watching could say it meant anything.

“You look exhausted,” he said quietly.

“I feel fine,” I said.

“You were in a cell yesterday p>

“And now I am at an exhibition,” I said. “I am fine, Julian p>

He looked at the McLaren.

“Marcus has the IP trail narrowed to three possible nodes,” he said. “We will have a name by tomorrow p>

“Good,” I said.

We stood in the comfortable silence that had become its own language between us—not empty, not awkward, just two people who had stopped needing to fill space with words.

Then Delia appeared.

She had been working the room—I had seen her from across the space, moving between clusters of people with the focused social energy of a woman who needed to be seen being the wife in public tonight. She came to stand on Julian’s other side and slid her hand into the crook of his arm with the ease of someone who had rehearsed the gesture.

Julian did not pull away. He also did not respond to it. He simply continued looking at the McLaren like it was more interesting than anything else in the room.

Which, for Julian, it probably was.

I turned slightly, looking at the crowd.

That was when I felt it.

Not seen, but felt. The shift in the room. The drop in ambient noise that happened when someone walked in who commanded attention without asking for it. Conversations did not stop, but they slowed, heads turning with the unconscious pull of a crowd recognizing something worth looking at.

I turned.

She came through the main entrance like she had timed it.

Tall. Athletic in the way that people who spent their lives in a cockpit were athletic—lean muscle, nothing wasted. She was in a gown that was simultaneously the most elegant thing in the room and the most dangerous: deep gold, open-back, the kind of dress that said, “I know exactly what I am doing in it.” Her hair was dark, cut sharp, framing a face that magazines had put on their covers and racing circuits had put on their starting grids.

Tessa Sterling.

I knew the name. Everyone in any room that intersected with motorsport knew the name. Sterling Motorsports had been building race cars since before I was born. Tessa had been driving them since she was sixteen. She had podiums on four continents and a reputation that preceded her by about three rooms in every direction.

She paused just inside the entrance. Not because she had lost her bearings — she knew exactly where she was. She paused because she understood the value of a pause. Of letting a room absorb her arrival before she decided what to do with it.

Her eyes moved across the space.

And then they found Julian.

Something shifted in her expression. Not dramatically — she was too controlled for that. But something moved, a warmth and a certainty, the look of a woman who had arrived somewhere and found exactly what she had come to find.

She moved through the crowd.

People stepped aside. Not because she pushed them — she did not need to push. She simply moved with the certainty of someone who expected space to be made, and space was made.

Julian had gone very still beside me.

Not the relaxed stillness he usually carried. Something different. The stillness of a man who had just registered something he had not expected and was deciding in real time how to manage it.

Delia had noticed too. Her hand tightened slightly on Julian’s arm.

Tessa stopped in front of us.

She looked at Julian with a smile that had nothing polite in it. It was the smile of a woman greeting someone she considered hers.

“Julian Windsor,” she said. Her voice was low and deliberate, the kind that carried without being loud. “Five years. Monaco. You left without saying goodbye p>

“Tessa,” Julian said. His voice was even. Giving nothing.

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