Chapter 2 The Champion

MAYA POV

"Signing Maya Baudelaire is either the boldest move Apex Racing has made in a decade, or a multimillion-dollar PR disaster waiting to happen at Turn One."

I will not lose control today.

The words repeat in my head like a heartbeat as I pull my fireproof balaclava over my hair and lower my helmet over my face. The garage around me is a beehive of controlled chaos, mechanics shouting tire pressures over the whine of pneumatic wheel guns, but all I can feel is the weight of Nico’s stare burning into my shoulder blades from six feet away.

"Left foot in first," Evelyn says, standing on the step-frame beside my silver-and-crimson chassis.

I step up onto the slick carbon-fiber bargeboard, careful not to let my bad right knee twist, and slide down into the tight, molded bucket seat of the cockpit.

Instantly, the world shrinks to a narrow slit of rain-lashed asphalt ahead of my nose cone. My ribs press tight against the custom carbon shell. The last time I sat in a car with Nico Laurent on the same track, firefighters had to cut the halo off my cockpit with hydraulic jaws while I choked on the smell of my own leaking fuel.

My pulse spikes in my ears. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

"Breathe, Maya," Evelyn whispers, leaning down into the cockpit opening so her voice stays hidden under the roar of the blowers. She grabs the six-point harness straps and pulls them tight across my chest and hips—tight enough to bruise, tight enough to make me feel anchored to the earth. "Your tire blankets are coming off in thirty seconds. Remember, the board is watching the live telemetry feed from the gallery upstairs. Don't try to be a hero on the out-lap. Just bring the tires up to temperature."

"I don't need to be a hero," I mutter through my visor, locking the steering wheel onto the column with a sharp metallic click. "I just need to be faster than him."

"Everyone clear the nose!" the chief mechanic barks.

Evelyn squeezes my shoulder once and steps back, only for a tall shadow to block the overhead lights right above my helmet.

Nico hasn't put his own helmet on yet. He braces one gloved hand on my halo bar and the other on the sidepod, leaning down until those storm-gray eyes fill my entire field of vision.

My heart stumbles against my ribs. Up this close, I can see the darker ring of slate around his irises and the rain still beading along the scar on his cheek.

"Listen to me very carefully, rookie," Nico says, his voice low and lethal over the idle of the engine behind my spine. 

"This isn't the junior series anymore. The board wants to see how you handle traffic in the wet, which means you are running two car-lengths off my rear gearbox for five laps."

"I don't need a tow from you, Nico," I snap, my gloved hands tightening around the suede grips of the steering wheel. "Get out of my way and let me set a clean lap."

His gaze drops to my white-knuckled grip on the wheel, then rises slowly back to my visor. "You’re strangling the steering column, Maya. Keep choking the wheel like that in the rain and you’ll understeer straight into the gravel before we even reach Sector Two."

"Worry about your own car."

A cold, humorless smile touches his mouth. He reaches inside my cockpit—his knuckles brushing the sensitive hollow below my collarbone as my breath catches—and flicks a toggle switch on my dash panel.

"Channel Two," Nico says softly. "Private driver-to-driver frequency. The pit wall can't hear it, and the board can't record it. If I tell you to lift off the throttle, you lift."

"Go to hell," I hissed, reaching to flip the switch back.

His hand catches my wrist. Even through two layers of fireproof Nomex, the heat and strength of his grip send a traitorous jolt straight up my arm.

"Try not to embarrass my team before lunch," he murmurs, releasing my wrist and straightening up as he pulls his matte-black helmet on.

Asshole. Arrogant, insufferable asshole.

Thirty seconds later, the mechanics wave us out, and I release the clutch, rolling down the flooded pit lane behind Nico’s flashing red rain light.

As soon as we cross the white blend line onto the circuit, Nico floors it. A rooster tail of blinding gray spray erupts from his rear diffuser, slamming directly into my visor.

I don't back off. I drop my right foot and chase him into Turn One.

"Brake balance looks good, Maya," Evelyn’s voice crackles over the main team radio in my ear. "Track evolution is terrible, though. Watch the white lines exiting Turn Three."

I flick through the gears—fourth, fifth, sixth—feeling the rear tires squirm over the puddles as the car dances beneath me. Every bump in the pavement vibrates straight through the titanium pins in my knee, aching with a dull, relentless throb, but I shove the pain into a mental box and slam the lid shut.

Up in the glass VIP room, the men who gave me a one-season expiration date are staring at my sector times. 

They expect a girl who brakes early. They expect hesitation.

So when Nico brakes at the hundred-meter board for Turn Four, I wait until eighty-five.

The car lurches sideways under heavy braking, the rear end stepping out toward the wet grass, and my hands blur on the wheel to catch the slide, muscling the nose back toward the apex purely on instinct and rage.

"You're overdriving the entry," Nico’s deep voice cuts straight into my ear over the private channel, so intimate it feels like he’s sitting inside the cockpit with me. "You left three-tenths on the exit because you wanted to prove how late you could brake. Who are you performing for, Baudelaire? Me, or the suits upstairs?"

"Shut up and drive, Nico!" I bark back, hitting the throttle hard as we rocket onto the back straight.

"Check your ego before you run out of talent," he fires back, his silver car pulling half a second ahead as the engine screams past twelve thousand RPM. "Sector Two. Follow my line through the chicane and back off the throttle before Turn Seven. The standing water has doubled since the installation lap."

Turn Seven.

The long, blind, high-speed left-hander looms ahead through the sheets of rain.

Two years ago, it was a dry afternoon when I pulled alongside Nico’s rear quarter-panel approaching a corner just like this. I remember the flash of his silver chassis closing the door on me. I remember the sudden, sickening snap of my steering, the sky trading places with the asphalt, and the sound of my own bones breaking before the darkness took me.

Now, I am right back in his slipstream, staring at his blinking red rain light through a wall of water at a hundred and eighty miles an hour.

"Maya, ease off two percent into Seven," Evelyn’s voice pleads over the main channel. "Your heart rate sensor just jumped to one-eighty-five. Give yourself a margin!"

"Lift, Maya," Nico commands on the private line as his brake lights flash ahead of me. "Now."

Every survival instinct in my body screams at my right foot to lift. My hands tremble inside my gloves. If I lift now, I stay safe. If I lift now, Nico wins, the board writes me off as a scared little girl who never recovered from her crash, and my dream dies right here in the rain.

I will not quit.

I stay flat on the throttle a fraction of a second longer, diving into Turn Seven right behind Nico’s gearbox—and my left front tire hits the deep ribbon of standing water at a hundred and seventy miles an hour.

The steering wheel goes completely, terrifyingly weightless in my hands.