Chapter 16
SOFIA
Singapore at night is a fever you choose.
The city doesn't sleep — that's not news, Singapore never sleeps — but during race week it achieves a specific kind of wakefulness that operates above the usual register.
The circuit runs along Marina Bay, through the financial district, past the hotel towers and the casino and the promenade where the harbor lights double themselves in the water.
Everything is lit. The buildings, the track, the grandstands, the yachts moored along the waterfront — all of it blazing in the thirty-degree dark, the kind of heat that exists after midnight here and shows no signs of relenting.
A night race is a different animal from a day race.
I know this now. I've been in Aleksei's world for a month and I've been learning its language, and one of the things I've learned is that F1 is not one thing — it's many things wearing the same name, and the specific thing it is changes with the conditions.
Miami in October afternoon heat was immediate and loud, the asphalt shimmering, everything exposed.
This is different. The dark gives the circuit a quality of theater that the daylight doesn't — the cars running lit, the crash barriers floodlit, the corners arriving out of blackness. More beautiful. More dangerous.
He's been on pole since qualifying yesterday.
I watched qualifying from the garage. Not the pit wall this time — he specifically did not put me on the pit wall this time, which is the closest he's come to acknowledging what happened in Miami without saying anything.
He put me in the garage with the performance engineers, which is still inside the operation, still close enough to read the faces, just not directly visible from the cockpit.
He drives better when he can't see me.
I'm still deciding how I feel about that.
The Obsidian hospitality suite at Singapore is on the forty-first floor of a tower that has a view of the entire circuit — the full sweep of it, the lights tracing the layout through the city's heart.
I've been here for two hours.
Two hours of the specific work of circulating in a room where everyone is watching everyone else and trying to look like they're not.
I've gotten better at this. I know the rhythm of Obsidian events: the entrance that should be timed, the conversation that should be brief, the glass that should be held but not drunk.
I know which clusters of people are worth fifteen minutes and which are performing their own calculations that I'm not relevant to.
I know how to move through a room without appearing to be going anywhere.
The suite is extraordinary — floor-to-ceiling glass on the circuit side, the whole city laid out below and the track scoring through it, everything lit gold and white against the tropical dark.
I stand at the window for a moment before I start circulating, just to have the view.
The installation lap is under way — the cars moving in a slow procession around the circuit, headlights forward, the field spread out through the city streets.
From here they look small. Jewels moving through a grid.
It's easy to forget, from this height, how fast they're actually going.
It's not easy to forget when you're watching from track level.
I know which car is his. I could find it from twice this distance.
Niko Drakos finds me near the window.
"You look different than you did at the penthouse," he says, handing me a drink without being asked.
"Two months," I say.
"A year at St. Gabriel usually does more than that. You've been in it for sixty days and you're—" He considers. "Steadier. Less like someone expecting to be hit."
"I still expect to be hit."
"But you're ready now." He turns to look at the circuit below. The cars are completing the installation lap, the field beginning to compress for the grid. "That's the difference."
I watch them for a moment. The cars are beautiful at night — the headlights forward, the glow of the brake discs as they slow for corners, the specific way the rear lights streak in the dark.
The circuit runs close to the water here, and in the distance the harbor reflects everything — the buildings, the lights, the movement of the race folded into the bay like a mirror held up to the city.
"Luca?" I ask.
"Good." Niko's voice is careful. "He's stopped trying to intercept your communications through official channels and started building his own. Your brothers are — adapting."
"To me being here."
"To you being here and not being retrievable." He glances at me. "It's not the same as accepting it. But it's movement."
I nod. Tuck that away. Luca building his own channels — that sounds exactly like Luca, methodical under the fury, finding the indirect route when the direct one is blocked. I think of him keeping the lemon tree alive and something in me settles, fractionally.
"Dimitri was asking about you," Niko says. Not casually. The specific not-casual of something he's decided to say because not saying it would be worse.
"Here?"
"At the Regent event last night. The private one — you weren't invited.
" He turns to face me properly. The easy warmth is still there but underneath it is something more serious, the thing I've come to understand is the actual Niko beneath the comfortable surface.
"He's building something. I don't know yet what shape it takes, but I know it involves you, and I know it's been in motion since October. "
He pauses.
"He doesn't want you personally, Sofia. He wants the position. Whichever one you represent."
"Leverage against Aleksei."
"Leverage against the Romanov succession.
There's a Regent vote in the spring — seat assignments, House standings for the next decade.
Aleksei is positioning to consolidate. Dimitri is trying to find the crack before he can.
" Niko looks back at the circuit. "You're the crack he's decided to look for. "
Below us, the cars complete their formation lap. The grid is set. The lights are on — the five red lights of the start sequence, one after another, the whole circuit holding its breath.
"What do I do with this?" I ask.
"Know it," Niko says. "That's usually enough."
The lights go out.
The race runs two hours and forty minutes.
I watch from the suite for the first half, tracking the circuit on the television feed with the kind of attention I didn't have two months ago.
I understand the strategy now — the early pitstop on lap eighteen that trades track position for fresher tyres, the undercut attempt in the second stint that doesn't quite work, the twenty-lap battle for second that resolves when one car makes a small error into turn seven and loses two positions in a single corner.
He's been leading since lap three.
The gap builds incrementally, lap after lap — not dramatically, not in the kind of moments that make the broadcast cut to his onboard, but in the steady accumulation of two-tenths, three-tenths, five-tenths.
He runs the race at a level that looks controlled and is actually something else entirely: the edge he lives at, which from a distance looks like control because he's so good at it.
I understand this about him now.
I go to the garage for the last ten laps because I can't help it, because the suite is beautiful and comfortable and the wrong place, and the engineers at the screens are the right place now.
I've learned enough to follow it. I understand the lap delta.
I understand the tyre strategy call on lap thirty-two that trades track position for a faster final stint.
I understand what the engineer means when he says he's managing beautifully in a tone that contains relief, and I understand what the gap to second means with three laps to go.
He wins.
The team detonates. The contained, professional detonation of people who've spent a season building toward moments like this — voices, headsets, hands finding other hands. I stand in the middle of it and feel the impact of it, which is different from watching it through glass.
He climbs out of the car.
He's looking before he's fully out of the cockpit — scanning, the way he always does, the assessment automatic and immediate. He finds me. Dark eyes, visor off, the race still in his face. He holds the look for a beat.
Then the team is around him and I'm watching from the edge of it.
The post-race is in a private club two streets from the circuit — Obsidian Singapore, which has its own version of the gathering I've seen in New York and Miami and which operates, I've come to understand, as a traveling institution.
Wherever the season goes, the Obsidian follows.
The Heirs who race bring their worlds with them.
It's a useful reminder that F1 is not separate from what Aleksei is; it's an extension of it, another room in the same building.
I circulate. I talk to two people I recognize from the New York event, one person I don't recognize who asks me careful questions that I answer with careful answers, and Niko briefly, who hands me a water because it's midnight and hot and I've forgotten to drink anything since the suite.
I'm on the terrace when he finds me.
He comes out through the glass doors — not looking for me specifically, I don't think, just coming out, needing air, needing the outside of the inside — and then he sees me and stops, and the thirty feet of terrace between us has the specific charge that's been building since Miami.
He crosses it.
He doesn't say anything when he reaches me. He comes to stand beside me at the railing, shoulder to shoulder, and we look at the city — the harbor, the reflected lights, the circuit dark now, the grandstands emptying.
"Niko told you something," he says.
"Is it that obvious?"
"You have a specific expression for new information you're integrating." He looks at the water. "You've had it since you came back inside."
I look at his profile. The hard lines of it. The jaw that's been clean-shaved for the Obsidian events and is now starting to show the end of a race day. "Dimitri. The Regent vote. The position I represent."
He's quiet for a moment.
"You knew," I say.
"Yes."
"And you weren't going to tell me."
He turns to look at me. His eyes in the Singapore dark are very steady. "I was deciding when."
"That's a more honest answer than I expected."
"I've been practicing." The corner of his mouth moves. "You asked me once to explain things rather than manage them. I'm trying."
I look back at the harbor.
The boats are lit along the waterfront, their reflections breaking and reforming on the dark water.
The Regent vote. The spring. Whatever Dimitri is building and has been building since October.
I am the crack he's looking for, Niko said.
The variable Aleksei didn't plan for, the human element that doesn't file neatly.
His shoulder against mine.
He doesn't move.
Neither do I.
"The Regent vote," I say. "What happens if you win it?"
"The Romanov seat is consolidated for ten years. No challenges."
"And if Dimitri gets what he's looking for."
"Then he gets leverage. And leverage—"
"Becomes the game." I look at him. "I know. I've been learning."
Something shifts in his expression. Not the barely-there flicker I'm used to — more than that. Something that sits long enough to be read.
"I know you have," he says.
We stand on the terrace until the last of the circuit lights go dark, and the harbor settles, and Singapore breathes its particular warm night around us, and neither of us says the things that the shoulder-to-shoulder says instead.
Later — much later — I lie in the hotel room separate from his (always separate, always the correct distance) and think about what Niko said, what Aleksei confirmed, and what the confirmation means.
He was deciding when to tell me.
Not whether.
When.
There's a difference between those two things. I've been learning to pay attention to the difference between things that look the same from the outside but are completely different from the inside. This is one of them.
Not whether, I think.
I close my eyes.
The season is still running, and the yacht is ahead, and the Hamptons, and everything that comes after — but here, on the other side of a night race in Singapore, something has shifted by a fraction I don't yet have a name for.
I'm too tired to find one tonight.
But I'll know it when I see it.