Page 65 of Flat Out
A murmur swept the room like a current. One or two smirked into their hands. Others bristled, muttering something about respect.
Kowalski hissed at Takeda, elbowing him under the table. “Shut the fuck up.”
Schreiber scoffed, too loud. “Unbelievable.”
Callum sat back, deceptively calm, but I could feel the storm in him just by the way his fingers twitched against his thigh. Kimi said nothing, but the icy little smile curving his mouth told me everything—he was ready to let the whole place burn.
The silence was razor-sharp, broken only by the sound of my pulse in my ears.
And then there was a loud, insistentbeep-beep-beeperupted from my purse.
My heart seized and my stomach bottomed out.Shit. Not here, not now.
I fumbled to grab my purse at my feet, but Callum’s low, calm voice stopped me. “Aurélie.” His blue eyes were soft as he turned toward me. He didn’t flinch as every gaze in the room swung toward him; he just reached for my hand under the table, steadying me, then gave me a look and a boyish, just-for-me smile that saidI know love.
“It’s time, isn’t it?” he murmured.
“Yes.” My throat caught, so I switched to French, just to get an iota of privacy as I reached blindly into my purse. My hand closed around the pill case ’d bought him yesterday. Two slots were already filled, because I refused to let him slip through my fingers again.
“Pour deux d’entre elles,” I whispered.For two of them.
He nodded once, appearing completely unbothered, and reached for the pill case. In front of everyone.
The air in the room shifted, growing more charged as team officials exchanged glances. Reinhardt’s brows drew together as Callum dry-swallowed the pills with all the casualness of a man ordering coffee. No armor. No shame.
“These?” His voice was razor-steady, even as my eyes burned with tears. “These are because ofyou.”
All the air left my lungs.
“My ribs didn’t bruise themselves. My car didn’t crash on its own or by my own hands. This isn’t because I took a bad line.ThatI could accept. But Morel clipped me. Late braking into the chicane—it’s reckless and illegal, and you all know it.”
My vision blurred. The image of fire and twisted metal slammed into me, the smell of smoke, the terror of screaming his name. I nearly lost him. Ialmostwatched him die.
Callum’s eyes stayed locked on Reinhardt, lethal and resolute. “For the first time in my career, I will have to sit out of a race. But I swear to you, it’ll be the only one. Because I’ll be damned if this institution takes anything more from me.”
The room was grave-silent.
He leaned forward. “And if Aurélie hadn’t screamed loud enough for the world to listen, you’d be holding a fucking memorial right now instead of a meeting.”
You could’ve heard a pin drop.
Even Reinhardt’s mask faltered for a fraction of a second. Then, smoothing his lapel, he cleared his throat. “We will… reconvene on this matter. Further evidence will be reviewed. For now, this session is adjourned.”
The statement was final, but the tension in the room remained like smoke after a fire.
I squeezed Callum’s hand under the table. He hadn’t just defended me. He’d exposed himself—his pain, his body, his truth—as the ultimate weapon.
And as we rose, walking out shoulder-to-shoulder, I knew we hadn’t just survived the wolves.
We’d rattled their fucking cage.
The daysbetween the FIA showdown and race week blurred. Aurélie buried herself in team briefings, poring over telemetry printouts and sitting through debriefs until her eyes were bloodshot. I let her go, because she thrived in that grind, even if it drained her, even though the distance gnawed at me. My job was to “rest,” which felt like exile. Hotel curtains drawn, ice packs on my ribs, scrolling the endless discourse online where half the world called her a saint and the other half a circus act.
Sometimes she came back to me wired, muttering about aero balance or brake temps; sometimes she collapsed against me and we just lay there, tangled in sweat and sex and silence, fighting off nightmares with each other’s skin. I took comfort in the small rituals: the pill case she filled for me every morning, the way her laptop was never far away, her phone buzzing with engineers or journalists or both.
I even spoke to an old friend one night, the kind who doesn’t ask how you’re doing but offers a way out instead, like an investment opportunity that could change everything if I ever walked away from the cockpit. I didn’t tell Aurélie. Not yet, not while she was still fighting like hell to keep me tethered to the sport I wasn’t ready to leave.
And then Friday came. FP1, the first practice session of the race week.
