Chapter 26
Fia
Veltar’s pit box was chaos.
Patrick was shouting into his headpiece. The sports analyst was tapping with a furious finger on his iPad. The organisers whispered amongst each other. The mechanics were looking over one of the three bikes.
And it all passed me by. I hardly let it fall onto my senses, as if a forcefield held the noise, the people, the worry at arm’s length.
I made my way to the bike. Zolt’s bike. I traced the 91 on the engine, ignoring the mechanics at my feet, feeling the heat of the metal on my palm.
He’d only just come in.
Imre, at my knee, looked up. “No mechanical fault. Not why he came off track.”
There was silence.
So no one knew.
“What happened?” I asked, turning to fifteen pairs of eyes on me.
“Brilliant,” Patrick spat. “So no one knows a damn thing. Where were you?”
“I was in the PR tent.” Zolt didn’t need my help for track-talk.
Patrick rolled his eyes. “Fuck sake.”
“So, we don’t even know where he is now?”
“He got off the bike and legged it through the tunnel, ignoring every shout his way. There was nothing on the pit wall. We heard no radio call. He must have had one, though.”
But who it was from or what was said was anyone’s guess.
“And he was riding okay?”
“Flawless,” the sports analyst said. “No rules were broken. He didn’t have any ride-through penalties. That wasn’t the issue. Seems there wasn’t a technical issue either.”
And then, despite the race taking place and the fact that I had never seen the man outside of VIP, Julian Marchetti strode in.
The CEO of StormSprint.
His linen trousers and dark blue shirt were cut loose, deliberately oversized, but I supposed it was meant to be fashionable. He always gave the air of nonchalant class.
But now he was red-faced as he pointed at me. “You. You’re needed.”
I swallowed and let my hand slip from the bike.
The forcefield snapped.
That awful, creepy feeling at the top of my spine was so heightened, I rolled my shoulders back as I followed Julian into the tunnel.
“Is he okay?” I asked him, voice low.
“He won’t be, no.” His footsteps were quick, far from the slow, leisurely pace he normally took to the bar if he didn’t call staff to him. “I need you to translate word for word on this…”
He trailed off. He didn’t know my name.
“Fia Bacque.”
He frowned, stopped, and inched his head back. “As in Cris’s daughter?”
I nodded slowly. I’d spoken to him twice this year. Once, in front of my dad.
“You look nothing alike. Not even like Everly,” he said, shaking his head and hurrying us through the tunnel.
I wasn’t about to go into detail on how I wasn’t technically related to either of them, but he didn’t really care, and it was the last thing I wanted to spend energy on.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
He shouldered open a door and waved me into one of the meeting rooms. There, directly in front of me, sat Zoltán, looking down at his hands on the desk, eyes tight in the bright LEDs overhead.
His skin was ashen, his expression hopeless, and his wrists were so close together I had to double-check they weren’t shackled.
“Zolt,” I breathed, my voice pure sympathy.
He shook his head and looked to the floor.
I sat at his side, resting my hand on his leather-clad thigh under the table.
Julian sat directly opposite Zolt. In front of me was Dr. Yvette Sannier, and on his other side was someone I didn’t know with a notepad.
“For the record,” Sannier started, and I looked around the room, trying to find anything that could be recording.
The table was empty apart from papers. No cameras were tucked in the ceiling.
She was talking in idioms. “My name is Dr. Yvette Sannier, this is Julian Marchetti, our CEO, and this is Gracie Roberts, one of our HR consultants. You are welcome to have representation by your manager, but your brother isn’t currently picking up his phone. ”
“He’s not his manager anymore. He’s currently between managers,” I offered.
Julian closed his eyes in exasperation.
“This is the beginning of an investigation into your conduct, Mr Farkas,” Sannier finally said.
Oh shit. And my conduct too.
That’s why I had been dragged in here. Because our relationship had been found out and oh my—
But Sannier widened her eyes at me to translate. And so I did.
My voice floated in the space between us, feeling far too airy and not my own.
What conduct? If he was in trouble, I must have been too. If they were exposing our relationship, it made no sense for them to ask me to translate.
And Livie would never have done this to me. If there were a problem, she would have told me.
Zolt didn’t move, just kept looking at the floor.
“Do you understand, Mr Farkas?” Sannier continued.
I translated, and he sat up, stared her down, and said, “Yes.”
“You are not to talk English, Zoltán. Only Hungarian. That way, we can be sure there is no misinterpretation.” She waited for me to repeat, the two of them locked in a death glare. Zolt’s leathers creaked as he crossed his arms.
“I understand,” he said, voice sharp.
“Do you know why you’re here?”
The look between them nearly made me go off topic and beg him to settle down.
“Enlighten me,” he told her through me.
Sannier breathed in deeply and lifted the papers in front of her. “These here are your real medical records, Zoltán. Not the fake ones you had translated. These paint a far different picture than what you have been presenting and what your team gave me.”
She placed them down to show CT scans I’d never seen. Words I’d never seen.
“You have a diagnosis of persistent post-concussive syndrome.”
I repeated that as best I could, without having ever heard of it.
Zolt shrugged.
“You’ve known?”
Another shrug. “It’s been mentioned.”
My hand stilled on his leathers and then slid off, hanging in the space between our chairs. A dead weight.
What?
He needed to find the right words. He needed to prove them wrong. For me. For us.
I blinked tears away while I translated, my voice breaking.
“So you knowingly raced despite brain fog, impaired focus, and delayed reactions?”
Zolt didn’t respond.
I hated that her angry words were in my voice, that mine was blending with hers, that the sympathy was trailing off.
“Okay, and so you know you’ve been diagnosed with vestibular dysfunction, in this case, post-traumatic vestibulopathy.
You know that this impacts your balance, gives you blurred vision, nausea, and blackout episodes that can hit you at any moment?
You know that you are not fit to race and have endangered not only yourself but all of your fellow racers?
Fia’s own brother-in-law rides that track, and your negligence could have killed him.
All because you were desperate to race and prove yourself. ”
“Do you even understand the kind of liability we’re facing because of you?” Julian snapped. “Insurance has been null. You’re responsible for any damages because of your lies.”
I wrung my sweaty hands under the table, biting my lip through their words to hold back the tears. The seat was rigid and uncomfortable beneath me, but I didn’t feel like I was sitting on it. I didn’t feel like I was there.
Because this couldn’t be happening.
Zolt hung his head. Of course, he avoided looking at me. He didn’t need me to translate because he must have known all the symptoms of his own condition.
“Fia, please,” Julian said and nodded at Zolt.
Those words would leave a bad taste in my mouth.
“I…” I took a deep breath, eyes fixed on the blank wall between Sannier and Julian’s heads, not to look at Zoltán.
“Do not interrupt me. Do not talk. Do not follow me when I leave.” Every sentence was clipped, controlled, when everything inside of me was raging.
I channelled all of my energy through the fluency of my mother tongue, even if the words were cutting my throat like glass.
“Everly will collect my things from your house. From this moment…” I had to regain control.
This was it. There was no coming back from this.
“From this moment, you are nothing to me. We are nothing.” I risked a glance at him, and it nearly unravelled me—the tears in his eyes, his mouth parted as if he had a case to argue.
My voice tightened, but I kept it cool, detached, as if I were translating someone else’s anger.
“You have risked your life, the life of my friends, of Luca’s.
If anything had happened to him… I… fuck, I don’t even know.
” I looked at my hands, holding so tightly to my thighs that I knew I’d have bruises.
I just needed to hold onto something that couldn’t betray me.
“You are the most selfish person I have ever known. I don’t love you.
I take it all back because I never knew you to love you. ”
“Fia—” he started, but I raised a finger, blinking through the tears and uncaring for the reactions of my superiors.
“No. You knew you had episodes that could lead to blackouts. To dizziness. Blurred vision. You’ve had that all this time. And you knew, didn’t you?”
“No, I swear, I didn’t—”
“He claims he didn’t know,” I told them coldly. “But I’ve seen symptoms myself. He’s brushed them off as contact lenses and other things.”
Julian sighed. “We’ll need a statement from you.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m really sorry, but I don’t know if I can do this. Zoltán and I were friends and… This is not a position I ever foresaw myself in.”
Sannier nodded, a hint of sympathy in the sad turn of her lips. “I understand. This is news for all of us.” She gestured to the papers. “He’ll be escorted out soon and questioned once we know the bigger picture of his lies.”
Lies. He’d lied to me.
“Thank you.”
I stood and, without looking back, rushed out of the room, pretending I didn’t hear them mention how they needed Livie and that this ‘couldn’t leak.’
If I saw her, I’d break if I wasn’t already broken.