Page 120 of Close Contact
Because my foot had been stuck, jammed on the throttle. And when the throttle’s pinned, the engine doesn’t stop. It keeps screaming, redlining, generating more and more heat until it ignites. That’s why the fire started. That’s why it spread so fast. The car didn’t just crash. It cooked itself from the inside out.
If the marshals hadn’t gotten there when they did, I’d have burned alive.
It was a rude fucking awakening. A grim reminder of just how fine the line between winning and dying really was. The car had recorded forty-eight Gs on impact. My body weight multiplied by that force was the equivalent of being hit by several thousand pounds. The fact that I wasn’t going to wind up in traction or dead was a miracle.
And then, by some divine force looking out for me, the feeling came back to my legs after being loaded into the ambulance. It started in my toes, and when I was able to curl them in my race boots, I literally choked on my emotions. The relief that had coursed through me was palpable.
By the time we’d arrived at the medical center, full mobility had returned, and they rushed to strip my race suit off to treat the gash on my ribs.
They kept trying to make me lie down—one of the nurses had even put a hand on my tender chest to keep me there—but I couldn’t. I got the stitches, and now I needed to sit up, needed to feel normal for a moment, needed to not feel like my whole life had almost been ripped away from me.
I couldn’t stop replaying it all. The crash. The spin. The pain. Aurélie.
The doctor’s voice broke through my thoughts. “You’re lucky to be alive, Fraser.”
“Yeah,” I muttered, running a hand over my face. My fingers stopped at my temple, where the dull throb of a migraine kept reminding me of just how severe this crash really was. No wonder my head felt like it had been through a meat grinder.
I shouldn’t be alive. Not really. That much was obvious.
I’d been in plenty of crashes over the years, but nothing like this.
“Mild concussion, bruised ribs, possible soft tissue damage,” the doctor continued, rattling off my injuries like he was reading a shopping list. “You got thirteen stitches on the laceration on your ribs, and you’ll need scans to rule out?—”
“I’m fine,” I interrupted, sharper than I intended, even though I really wasn’t. “No hospital until the race is over.”
The doctor frowned but didn’t argue. Not yet, at least. I could feel Dominic’s presence, my team principal, looming in the corner with his arms crossed. His usual stern expression was somehow more severe. No doubt he was waiting to jump in with a lecture about how reckless I’d been or how the team couldn’t afford another incident like this.
But I wasn’t reckless. I’d done everything right.
It didn’t matter. Morel had made sure of that.
I glanced at the monitor on the wall, where footage of the crash looped on mute. Morel’s car stood out, and my chest tightened as I watched the moment everything had gone to hell. The swerve, the clip, the spin. It was all there, a mechanical autopsy of my failure to avoid him.
My failure.
“Play it again,” I said, my voice low. The medic hovered uncertainly, but Dominic gave a curt nod, and the footage restarted.
The screen showed my car approaching Morel’s, the gap closing as I lined up the overtake, DRS activated. I remembered it vividly—how clean it had felt, how perfect. It was perfect froma bird’s eye view, too. And then Morel moved. His car jerked, just enough to force me wide. I swerved, reacting instinctively, but it was too late. The footage slowed, frame by frame, capturing the exact moment my front wing clipped his rear tire.
The spin was violent, even on replay. My car was a blur of red and black as it tumbled, sparks flying in slow motion, the way it disintegrated, metal screeching as the halo held and the chassis crumpled. I barely registered the debris scattering across the track until I saw it—a chunk of my front wing colliding with Aurélie’s halo.
My stomach churned. She’d spun out, her car veering off into the grass on the other side of the track and narrowly missing Schreiber closing in behind her. The camera cut to her, still and silent in the cockpit. For a brief moment, she didn’t move, and I held my breath as I watched.
But then she did.
Her hands moved quickly, yanking at her harness. I watched as she scrambled out of the car, her movements frantic but precise. She had no regard for anything but one thing—me. She was out of the car before the commentary even caught up. Her feet hit the ground, and she sprinted across the gravel and track like the devil himself was chasing her. Marshals shouted after her, trying to block her path, but she dodged them.
Untouchable, unstoppable. That was my Aurélie.
And then she screamed.
“CALLUM!”
Even in the replay, I could hear it. Raw and wild, so much pain and panic laced in her voice that my heart shattered. It was a sound I’d never forget even if I lived to be a hundred. That scream would live in my DNA. It would haunt me.
I watched her climb the barrier and crawl across the tires, weaving through the crowd of safety workers gathering around my wrecked car. One man grabbed her arm, but she threw himoff. Another wrapped his arms around her waist from behind. She twisted and kicked, fighting even as a second worker gripped her shoulders.
It took three of them to finally drag her back, and even once she was back on the ground, she kept fighting to get to me.
