[Soren’s POV]
The world disappears at two hundred and ten kilometers per hour.
Not poetically—literally. The spray from the cars ahead erases the track into a grey wall, each rooster tail a curtain that parts just long enough to show asphalt before the next wave swallows it.
My wipers are useless. Everything beyond fifty meters exists as suggestion rather than fact, and the standing water transforms the car from a precision instrument into something negotiating its own survival.
I am driving like shit.
Karina knows it. Her voice has migrated from its usual calm cadence into something clipped and urgent, the engineer's equivalent of shouting.
"Braking point, Soren. You're two meters late." Then, three corners later: "You're aquaplaning through seven, lift earlier. Are you hearing me?"
I'm hearing her fucking clear. I'm just not listening.
Because half my brain is standing in a hotel corridor while the word 'coward' lands like a fist against my sternum. Nico's face when he said it. Not angry. Worse. Certain. The expression of someone stating an observable fact.
Coward. Present tense. Permanent condition.
I brake late into turn four and the rear steps out, a lazy slide that I catch on instinct while my conscious mind is still replaying the way his voice didn't waver. The correction costs me three tenths and Karina's silence is louder than instruction.
Ahead of me, four car lengths through the murk, Nico's chassis cuts through the water like it's been told the rain is irrelevant.
He's driving with a precision that borders on violence—braking later than the conditions allow, carrying more speed through standing water than the setup should survive, converting fury into lap time the way he always does. Not reckless. Surgical.
Every tenth extracted like a personal vendetta against the tarmac.
I'm close enough to see the spray pattern change when he shifts. Close enough to count the laps he's not spoken to me.
Lap forty-two. Turn eleven. The kerb at eleven is nothing in the dry—a standard exit, a slight rise that loads the rear and slingshots you onto the back straight. In the rain, it becomes something else.
The standing water pools against the raised concrete, creating a film that turns painted kerbing into polished glass. And Nico's rear tire clips it at the wrong angle.
I see it happen the way you see a crash in a dream—every microsecond dilated, hyper-real, my brain recording details I'll never forget.
The snap oversteer is instantaneous. The car rotates clockwise with a violence that defies physics—two hundred kilometers per hour of lateral force meeting zero grip, the rear overtaking the front in a motion that's less spin and more detonation.
He hits the barrier sideways.
The impact flips the car—an impossible, terrible cartwheel of carbon fiber and sparks, the chassis landing on its back and sliding across the waterlogged gravel with a sound I can hear through my helmet, through the engine noise, through everything. It comes to rest upside down against the tyre barrier with a finality that stops my heart.
Then the fire starts.
Bright and wrong against the rain. Flames licking up from the engine bay despite the water, orange and chemical-blue, and my entire existence collapses to that single burning point.
The race director's voice fills my helmet. Red flag. All cars slow down. Karina overlaps, urgent: "Soren, slow down! Come in. Red flag. Acknowledge!"
I don't acknowledge a shit. I pull the car to the right side of the track, stamp the brakes, kill the engine.
My hands are shaking so badly that the harness buckle takes three attempts—fingers fumbling against the release mechanism, gloves slippery with rain, the buckle finally giving with a click that sounds like a gunshot. I rip the steering wheel free, lever myself from the cockpit, and run.
The gravel is deep and waterlogged and tries to swallow my boots with every step. I tear the helmet off mid-stride because I can't see, can't breathe, the flames getting closer with every meter.
Marshals are converging from both ends—fire extinguishers, medical car still fifty meters out. Too far.
I am not trained for this. I am running on something older and more desperate than training, and when I reach the wreck I don't stop.
The car is inverted, the halo device the only reason the survival cell hasn't been crushed flat against the ground. Flames lick through the gaps in the bodywork, and I grab the nearest composite panel with bare hands.
The carbon fiber sears through my glove linings—a bright, screaming pain I process and discard in the same breath. I wrench until the panel splinters and gives.
Nico's body hangs limp in the harness, suspended upside down, helmet visor smeared with blood, arms dangling like a marionette with severed strings.
"Nico!" The name rips out of me raw, stripped of every pretence I've ever worn. "Open your fucking eyes. Talk to me!"
Nothing. I fumble for the harness release—inverted, jammed, my burned fingers slipping while heat shoves against my back.
The buckle gives and his body drops and I catch him badly, two hundred pounds of dead weight collapsing into my arms. We go down together into the gravel, and I drag him away from the fire, boots carving trenches through the stones until the heat recedes and only rain touches us.
I lower him onto his back and tear his visor up. Blood runs from a gash above his eyebrow and his face is the colour of wet concrete. I press my fingers to his throat and find nothing—just my own heartbeat hammering so violently I can't separate his life from my panic.
His chest isn't moving. I stare at it, willing it to rise, and the world collapses to a silence so total it swallows the rain and the sirens and everything except the stillness beneath my hands.
"Breathe." My voice is cracked, begging. "Come on, you stubborn fucking—breathe."
Nothing. The thought lands like a building collapse: he's gone. I pull him against me, his head lolling against my shoulder, blood soaking into my race suit, and I hold him the way I should have a thousand times before—when he was awake and asking and I was too much of a coward to answer.
Then the medical team is there. Hands on my shoulders, voices firm, telling me to let go. I can't. My arms have locked around him with a rigidity that has everything to do with the certainty that if I release him, he'll stop existing entirely.
It takes two of them to pry me open, and they take him from me—lower him to the stretcher, surround him with equipment and urgency—and I am left kneeling in the gravel with his blood on my race suit and nothing in my arms.
The shapeless thing that's been gnawing at me all morning—through the grid, through forty-two laps, through every corridor and argument and silence—finally has a name.
It hits like a crash of my own. Not a slow realization. Not something I've been sitting on, turning over, examining from safe angles.
A detonation. Total and instantaneous and so devastating it empties my lungs.
I love him.
I'm in love with Nico Almeida. Maybe have been for longer than I can calculate.
Weeks. Months. Maybe longer. Buried so deep under denial and rules and self-preservation that I didn't recognize it.
Couldn't. Because recognizing it would mean admitting that every fight was fear, every hookup was hunger. Every retreat was the same cowardice from a locker room eleven years ago, just wearing a different mask.
I was never protecting myself from feelings. I was protecting myself from this feeling, for this person.