Chapter 263

[ 1,013 words ]

Julian’s POV

IG Technologies logos on every barrier, every screen, every piece of branded architecture along the circuit. Katia’s company was everywhere you looked.

Katia was not on the official grid.

She was not supposed to be here as a driver.

I had seen the Valkyrie arrive at the service entrance at six forty-five AM, three hours before the gates opened, brought in under a logistics van cover that would have fooled anyone who was not specifically looking for it. I had not said anything. I had simply noted it and adjusted my position in the suite accordingly.

Tessa Sterling’s car arrived on the official transporter at seven fifteen. Her team had managed to secure her a late exhibition entry through a motorsport federation connection—the kind of move that cost money and favors—and told me she had been planning this since the circuit announced its driver list.

She wanted to be on the same grid as Catwoman.

She just did not know Catwoman was going to be there.

The race started at ten.

Twenty-two cars, twelve laps, the Brooklyn waterfront circuit with its tight technical sections and the long straight along the river where the cars hit speeds that made the crowd go very quiet and then very loud.

Tessa qualified third. She was fast—I had watched her qualifying run, and she was genuinely fast; the Sterling family had not produced a mediocre racing driver, whatever else they had produced. She had the car and the skill and the aggressive confidence of a professional who had been underestimated today and intended to make that clear.

The Valkyrie qualified seventh.

Seventh was deliberate. You did not qualify a car like that seventh unless you had decided seventh was strategic.

Lights out.

By lap three Catwoman had moved to fourth. She had done it the way she did everything on a circuit—not with aggression but with precision. Finding the lines that nobody else was using; taking the corners at angles that looked wrong until they were suddenly clearly right; being exactly where she needed to be at exactly the moment she needed to be there.

Tessa was holding second. She had passed the pole sitter on lap two and was managing the gap behind the leader with the controlled aggression of a professional who understood race management.

By lap five Catwoman was second.

I watched from the suite and felt something I had no clean name for—not pride exactly, something older and more complicated than pride. The Valkyrie was extraordinary on this circuit. The way she was threading it through the technical section was something I had only seen a handful of drivers do in fifteen years of watching and competing.

Lap seven. Turn Nine. The tight left-hander that fed onto the river straight.

Tessa and Catwoman were side by side.

Tessa did not yield. She was a professional, and she had not gotten to where she was by yielding, and she was not going to start now. She held her line, the Sterling GT holding the outside and the Valkyrie on the inside, two machines separated by inches at a hundred and seventy miles per hour.

The crowd had gone completely silent.

Catwoman took the corner.

She took it to the absolute limit—the kind of limit that was either genius or disaster with nothing in between—and she came out of it two car lengths ahead, and the crowd erupted—forty thousand people who had just witnessed something they would be talking about for years.

Tessa was third by the end of that lap.

She never recovered.

Catwoman won by eight seconds. Eight seconds in GT racing was not a gap—it was a statement. It was the racing equivalent of walking out of a room and closing the door so quietly that the silence was louder than a slam.

The circuit was still erupting when Catwoman crossed the line.

She did a single, controlled lap of celebration. No theatrics. No burnout. Just a measured, deliberate circuit that says, “I have done this before, and I will do it again, and you are welcome p>

She pulled into the service exit.

That was when I saw them.

Three cars. Blocking the exit. Positioned — not parked, positioned. Men on foot already moving toward the Valkyrie.

I had parked the McLaren, the same make, same matte black, and same profile as the Valkyrie, in the lower service bay two hours before the race. Not by accident.

I drove it hard into the service exit from the other direction.

Three black cars now. The men stopped. They looked at mine. They looked at the Valkyrie. They looked at mine again. Forty thousand people making noise above us, security cameras everywhere, and they had no certainty.

They got back in their vehicles.

They left.

I slowed.

The Valkyrie came alongside me.

The blacked-out visor turned toward my window.

I looked at her.

She looked at me.

That was all.

She went.

I watched her cross the car park and disappear through the north gate door and stood in the quiet of the service level while forty thousand people made noise above me.

From here I could see the circuit screens. The victory replay was running—Catwoman’s final lap, the eight-second gap, and Turn Nine, where she had put Tessa into third and kept her there.

The commentary was asking the question that the crowd had been asking since the chequered flag.

Is Tessa Sterling the real deal, or is Catwoman simply on another level?

I looked at the screen.

I thought about the answer to that question.

Then I walked back to the elevator and went up to find Jude Wolfe.

He had arrived at the Grand Prix at nine forty-five. I had clocked him in the paddock—different suite, different credentials, the unhurried presence of a man who had decided to make himself visible and was comfortable with what that meant.

We had not spoken yet.

That was about to change. But at least not for now. I want to know what his deal is; claiming a woman he knows isn’t his.

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