Chapter 181 Aurélie #3
The road curved, narrowing between a stretch of stone walls and overhanging trees, the rain slicking the pavement into glass.
My fingers stayed steady. My foot didn’t lift.
I barely blinked, even though my eyes stung as the tears blurred my view.
I grieved for him. For the boy who never felt safe enough to slow down.
And I hated that I still loved him like this.
Or maybe I loved it. I didn’t fucking know anymore.
The tires hydroplaned slightly around the curve, and I corrected it instantly. Callum grabbed the door frame again. Internally, my stomach flipped, indicating that this was cutting it too close.
“You don’t get to control me just because the rest of your life feels like it’s slipping away.
Don’t you get that? What you did in front Reinhardt—the fucking FIA president—how you made that announcement like I was irrelevant—that was a betrayal, Callum.
It wasn’t protective. It was disrespectful. And it was cowardly.”
His head dropped back against the seat. “I know. I know, and I fucking hate myself for it.”
“I hate that you had to survive like that. That you’ve carried so much for so long. But I am not your childhood. I am not your past. I am not a woman you can silence to feel like a man again. I love you, but I won’t shrink to make you feel whole.”
My pulse thundered in my ears. I hesitated for half a breath—then I pressed harder on the accelerator. The world blurred at the edges as the speedometer ticked up, 110… 120… 130. The engine screamed its protest. The car trembled with power. My knuckles were white against the leather wheel.
“Aurélie, please,” he rasped, his voice fraying at the edges. “Slow the goddamn car down. This is madness, mon c?ur. Please.”
I laughed humorlessly. That’s when I said it. “See how scary it can feel to give up control, mon champion?” His nickname used like a dagger, sharp and poisoned, but I pressed on. “You ask me to trust you, so I do. But giving up control? It feels like the ground is being ripped out from under you.”
He turned toward me, face pale in the flickering light from oncoming cars.
His hand hovered just above my knee, desperate but unsure if he was allowed to touch me.
“I never wanted you to feel that way,” he pleaded hoarsely.
“I just wanted to keep you safe. You don’t know what it’s like to wake up thinking you’ve already lost everything. ”
“Then stop trying to save me from the parts of life that hurt!” I shouted, eyes flicking between him and the slick stretch of road ahead. “If we’re a team, Callum, then you won’t shield me from pain, from fallout, from truth. You’ll face it with me.”
The rain lashed harder, streaking the windshield in silver sheets. I could barely see, but my vision tunneled anyway—because of him. Because he looked wrecked. Because some part of me wanted to reach across the console and grab his hand, to tell him I didn’t want to drive away, not really.
But I couldn’t.
Not yet.
I needed him to feel the fear and the surrender he asked from me every time he said trust me.
I didn’t want to look at him, but I had to. If I didn’t, I might convince myself I imagined all of this. That he hadn’t blown up our entire relationship with a single offhanded comment. That I wasn’t still shaking with rage from the way he’d blindsided me. That he hadn’t taken away my choice.
Callum let go of the safety handle and folded his hands in his lap, as if he was finally realizing what it meant to lose control.
I inhaled sharply through my nose, trying to slow the gallop of my pulse. It was the first step to unconditional trust. “You think I haven’t bent to your will? Let you lead? Trusted you in things that fucking terrified me?”
He sighed, but he didn’t speak.
I turned my head enough to catch him in my peripheral.
“Submission isn’t weakness, Callum. You should know that better than anyone.
It’s a choice. And so is partnership.” My voice dipped into something intimate and brutal.
“If you want us to work… we have to be equals. That means you don’t get to control everything.
That means full transparency. That means trusting me to hold you when you fall, just like I trust you. ”
The silence in the car grew thick. Only the rhythm of the rain filled the space between us. That, and the shuddering thud of my heart against my ribs.
I kept my eyes on the road. On the blur of headlights and wet pavement. But I felt his stare like a weight pressing into my skin.
I knew what he saw: the woman who had given him everything—body and soul—with the confidence that he wouldn’t break it.
Now I was asking him to do the same. To let go. To fucking trust me.
Finally, opened his mouth, but I didn’t let him speak. I floored it one last time, the tires screaming beneath us, and our bodies jolted back against the seat.
“Don’t like it?” I asked sweetly, my tone dipped in venom. “Your stomach’s in knots, your palms are sweating, and you’re starting to wonder if I’m even going to stop, aren’t you?”
I eased off the gas, letting our speed drop to a more “manageable” eighty. Maybe ninety. Still reckless, still mine.
“A little scary, isn’t it?” I went on, low and sharp. “When someone else gets to make the choices? When your safety is in someone else’s hands? When you realize you’re not the one calling the shots anymore?”
He stared at me, jaw feathering, the muscles in his neck taut as cables.
“I could take you anywhere right now,” I whispered. “You gave me the wheel. Trusted me. Even when it scared you.”
I looked at him then and saw it in his face—that war between pride and pain. Between needing to lead and aching to surrender.
So I gave him the truth.
“So why,” I asked softly, “can’t you do the same when it actually matters?”
He didn’t speak at first. Just stared ahead, jaw slack, breath shallow. And then, so quietly I almost missed it, he murmured, “Because letting go means I have to trust you not to leave when you see how much of me is still broken.”
His hand came down on my thigh, firm but trembling.
“And I trust you, Aurélie. I do. But sometimes I still look at you and wonder if I deserve to be loved this completely. If I’ve earned the kind of grace you give me.”
“You can’t only trust me when I’m kneeling,” I whispered. “I let you use my body last night, Callum. Gave you the last pieces of me. Let you own me. Let you fucking mark me. And you held that power like it was sacred.” I blinked hard. “You touched me like I was holy.”
No brakes. I took the next turn sharp and fast, like I didn’t care if we spun out.
He squeezed my thigh again, his voice low and reverent.
“You are holy, Aurélie Camille Dubois. Don’t you fucking get it? You’re the altar I built my future on. I didn’t keep you out because I don’t trust you. I kept you out because I didn’t trust myself to be worthy of staying in.”
Fucking pain and poetry.
This goddamn man.
“I would’ve stood by you,” I whispered. “I will always stand by you. But I’m not just some soft thing to tuck behind your choices. I’m not your good little secret. And I am not going to sit there smiling while you dictate my life.”
I slowed a little more.
“So tell me, mon amour… can you really handle what it means to let go? Or do you just like the illusion of it when I’m naked and begging?”
“Every plan I made ended with you in it,” he said hoarsely, voice thick with emotion as his hand gripped my thigh. “You’ve been in control of me for the last ten years, whether or not either of us knew it.”
I frowned, but before I could ask a follow-up question, he continued.
His thumb dragged over the inside of my leg like he needed the contact, like it was the only thing anchoring him to me. I could hear his breath catch, ragged and unsteady. When he spoke again, the words were softer, the accent more pronounced. Raw and unfiltered.
“I just didn’t know how to tell you the parts where I might fail you.
” He exhaled sharply, almost like a laugh—but it cracked in the middle, like it hurt to say.
“You think I only like control when you’re beggin’, aye?
Nah, love. I like control because I’ve never known what it felt like to be safe… until you.”
His hand tightened slightly. Just enough to say I’m still here. Stay with me.
“And I’m too fuckin’ scared to lose you. D’you hear me?” His voice broke again, grappling with the accent he hated but the one I loved with all my goddamn heart. “You’re my past. My present. My fuckin’ forever. I’m not running from anything, Auri. I’m running to you.”
He looked at me then. Eyes glassy, shoulders tense, every part of him trembling with something too big to name.
“You’re the love of my life,” he said, voice fraying at the edges.
“And I want to marry you one day. I want to wake up beside you for the rest of my life—not because I control you, but because I get to. Because you chose me. And if I’m not racing anymore, then fuck it, I’ll spend every day learnin’ how to deserve that. ”
It hung in the air between us like incense. Heavy, sacred, and unbearable. I was speechless. Not the strong, seething kind of silence that came with fury. This was something else, soft and sad and splintering.
My heart ached. My lower lip trembled. My foot hovered over the gas, but I didn’t press down.
Because suddenly I wasn’t driving to outrun him anymore or push him outside of his comfort zone. I was trying to outpace the ache in my chest. The heartbreak. The humiliation. The way everything we’d built felt like it had just been red flagged.
And then, I jerked the wheel.
We screeched into a barely-visible gravel turnout at the edge of the road, the trees rising like sentinels around us, rain blurring the windshield. I threw the car in park and shoved the door open.
I didn’t wait for him, didn’t so much as look back.
I stepped into the rain like it was baptism. My hair soaked instantly, dress clinging to my skin as I teetered in my heels. My fists were clenched at my sides, holding in everything that still burned in my veins, heading straight for the metal barrier.
I just needed a minute. Needed to clear my head. Needed to get some fucking air in my lungs.
And that’s when I heard him behind me.
The scuff of shoes on wet gravel.
He was coming after me.
Finally. 1
1 Before stepping into this chapter, and the few that follow, I want to take a moment to hold space for you, especially if you’ve ever carried private grief, complicated fear, or uncertainty surrounding reproductive health.
The chapter you’re about to read includes intimate themes of power, control, and emotional catharsis.
The majority of the scene focuses on reclamation and connection between two people who love each other fiercely.
However, in the final few lines, the narrative shifts—subtly, then sharply—toward the beginning of a miscarriage.
Aurélie does not know she’s pregnant during this scene. The miscarriage is not a result of physical trauma or her choices in this chapter. It is, heartbreakingly, a result of her body’s betrayal.
This storyline is deeply personal to me. And like many women, Aurélie’s first instinct is to compartmentalize—to hold herself together until she can’t. That moment doesn’t come until the very end of this chapter, and the emotional fallout unfolds gradually in the next few.
If this is something you’re not in a place to read right now, please take care of yourself. You can safely read through the chapter until the last few lines, then skip ahead to the footnote at the end of the book for a brief recap of these chapters before continuing the story.
Every woman’s journey through grief, fertility, miscarriage, and recovery is different. There is no single way to react. There is no right way to feel.
Please extend grace—to yourself, and to every woman who’s ever walked through something quietly, because she knew even other women might not understand.
XO,
Cait