[Soren’s POV]
The bar is called something I can't read—Portuguese words in neon that blur when I stare too long, which is fitting because I've been blurring for three hours and I have no intention of stopping.
I chose it for distance. Forty minutes from Interlagos, deep enough into the city that no one recognizes the face currently pressed against a glass of cachaça that's lost count of its predecessors.
We moved from the Almeida family home to the team hotel a few days ago—the visit with Nico's parents for only two days, a brief pocket of domesticity I can still feel lodged between my ribs like shrapnel.
And now I'm here, methodically poisoning myself because Nico slept with Julien Marchand and I have no right to care and I care so much it's eating me alive.
The anger isn't about Julien. The anger is about everything.
About the fact that I care, which means the rules are already broken.
About the Almeida house and the way Nico laughed in Camila's kitchen—head tipped back, unguarded, domestic in a way that made something in my chest crack open and flood.
About my father's voice, steady as a metronome in the back of my skull: svaghet. Weakness.
What you're feeling is sickness, something to be cut out before it metastasizes. Erik Lindqvist didn't raise a son who falls apart over another man's laughter. Erik Lindqvist raised a machine, and machines don't ache like this.
I see two men leave the bar holding hands—young, relaxed, one of them laughing at something on his phone. They pass the table next to mine, where four guys in football jerseys have been getting louder and louder for the past hour.
One of them makes a comment. Crude, Portuguese, but the word viado—fag—cuts through the noise with ugly precision, and the laughter that follows is designed to carry—meant to be heard, meant to land.
The couple keeps walking. They don't react. Probably learned not to.
And I should let it go. I'm drunk, spiraling, and picking fights with strangers the week before a Grand Prix ends careers.
But my father's voice collides with the memory of a locker room eleven years ago—a letter being read aloud, a seventeen-year-old boy standing frozen while the room laughed—and I stood with the wolves because silence was easier than courage.
"Shut the fuck up," I say, in English, loud enough to cut through their table.
The confrontation escalates with the speed of alcohol and testosterone.
One stands, then two more, then the fourth. They're stocky, thick-necked, the build of men who settle things with their fists. I'm taller, faster, trained—but seven drinks deep and outnumbered four to one, and the math doesn't care about my reflexes.
I get a solid right cross into the first one's jaw, feel the satisfying crack of contact. Catch the second in the ribs with an elbow.
For two seconds I'm winning, adrenaline cutting through the alcohol. Then the third connects with my left eye—a sledgehammer blow that whites out my vision—and the fourth drives a fist into my ribs that folds me in half.
I go down on the pavement, the concrete warm against my back, tasting copper and cachaça. Someone kicks me in the side before they leave and the bouncer watches from the doorway without moving.
I lie there bleeding onto my shirt, staring at the São Paulo sky through one eye because the other is swelling shut. Split lip. Bruised ribs screaming with every breath. Knuckles scraped raw, skin hanging in pale strips.
Ring Maren. She'd come. No questions, no judgment, just her sharp competence and a first aid kit.
I could call Karina—she'd dispatch a car and file it under "driver management" without a second thought. There's a long list of people paid to handle this kind of catastrophe.
I get in a taxi instead. Give the hotel name. Blood smears the backseat window where I rest my head.
The hotel corridor is quiet. The separate room I insisted on this time is four doors to the left. I walk past it without slowing, feet carrying me to the door at the end of the hall, and I knock before I can think—because Nico is the first person who came to mind.
Not the last resort. The first instinct, immediate and undeniable, and I'm too beaten and too drunk to examine what that means.
The door opens and Nico stands there in a t-shirt and sweatpants, hair disheveled, eyes tracking down my face—the swollen eye, the split lip still leaking, blood drying brown on my collar.
"I didn't know where else to go…" I say, and my voice comes out wrecked—scraped raw, barely holding together.
He doesn't ask questions. His hand closes around my arm, pulling me inside, and guides me to the bathroom where he lifts me effortlessly onto the counter. The fluorescent light is merciless—I catch my reflection and look away.
Nico turns the faucet, tests the water against his wrist, and begins cleaning blood from my face with a washcloth, his hands so careful and steady that something behind my sternum starts to fracture.
Warm water. Antiseptic that stings and makes me hiss through my teeth. Butterfly bandages applied with the precision of someone who's learned first aid beyond the basics.
His fingers trace the edge of the cut above my eyebrow, featherlight, and I sit there and let myself be taken care of because I'm too exhausted and too broken open to perform anything.
The tenderness is devastating in its silence—no questions, no accusations, just Nico's hands gentle against my battered face, steady as a surgeon and warm as something I don't have a word for in any of my languages.
The quiet stretches until Nico asks softly, "What happened?"
"Some guys were saying shit about a couple. Two men leaving the bar together." I swallow, tasting blood. "I couldn't listen to it. Couldn't be someone who stays silent. Not anymore."
His hands pause on my face as something shifts in his expression—pain, recognition, the shared weight of a history we've never spoken about directly.
He resumes cleaning the cut on my lip, touch impossibly gentle.
"And I'm sorry," I say, because the walls are down and the pain has stripped away every deflection I own. "About Julien. Not that you slept with him—you had every right, I have no claim on you, I know that."
My voice cracks and I let it before I continue.
"I'm sorry for how I reacted. For the jealousy I had no right to feel and felt anyway. Because the fury…"
I stop, breathing through the ache in my ribs, through the larger ache beneath them.
"The fury scared me, Nico. It scared me because it means this has become something the rules were supposed to prevent. It means I care. About you. About us. And I don't know how to survive that."
Here. I finally said it.
He sets the washcloth down. The bathroom is small enough that his body fills my entire field of vision—the one working eye focused on his face, on the careful, open, devastating patience in his expression.
His hands come up slowly, cupping my bruised face with tenderness that makes my breath hitch. Palms warm against battered skin, thumbs resting below my cheekbones, holding me like something worth being gentle with.
"What are you so afraid of?" he asks, very softly.
The answer rises from somewhere deeper than thought, deeper than defense. From the place where I've been keeping it locked since I was seventeen years old and chose the wrong side of a room.
"Everything…" I whisper.