Chapter 24
Zoltán
“What the fuck is happening with you?”
I closed the trailer door quietly behind me, stepping out into the late evening air, my finger to my lips. “Shh.”
If Benedek woke Fia, there would be hell to pay. She more than deserved her sleep.
“Oh, do not get me started on that,” he barked, scowling.
I tiptoed down the steps to the lot, dragging him by the arm.
On the concrete, he pushed me off. “No, we need to talk, Zolt.”
“So walk with me,” I said, gesturing at his perfectly capable legs. “And speak at a volume where we’re having a normal, private conversation.”
Just before she drifted to sleep, Fia had gone on a ramble about how glad she was that I was starting to enjoy pineapple on pizza and how cute she found it that I was a new fan of scones.
“Just the thought of you loading up a scone with jam is adorable,” she’d said.
I didn’t understand it, but the quiet, fast-paced nonsense talk — and the fact it was about food — told me one thing. She was going to wake up ravenous. So I was on the hunt for dinner.
“I’ll fucking talk however I want,” Benedek snapped, shaking his head at me, but walking at my side. “You seem to be doing whatever you want. Even at the risk of your career and family.”
If Benedek ever shut up, the world might stop spinning.
“Go on then,” I sighed, opening the door for him into the tunnel. “Talk.”
My response seemed to enrage him, but the tunnels echoed, so he hissed, “You crashed again today.”
“Yes.”
The tunnels always made me feel safe. They were a home away from home. Sure, they were a bit suffocating. Okay, they were hospital-bright, what with the fluorescent lights — so bright I had to narrow my eyes — and, yes, they could be like a maze at times, but… they meant I was racing.
Something I’d spent so long thinking wasn’t a possibility.
Benedek’s anger wasn’t going to phase me while I was here, on track, and my girl was sleeping in my trailer.
“You were ‘too ill’ to race last week,” he said, his air quote nearly as passive-aggressive as the baby voice he used to mock me. “Your points are minimal, Zoltán. You’re not focused.”
“Someone took me out this week,” I laughed. What did he want me to do? That was racing. Shit happened. “Last week, I was so lightheaded, it would have been unsafe for me to race. I would have been a track risk.”
In my peripherals, Benedek rolled his eyes. Nothing was going to bring me down. Not crashing. Not how ill I’d been feeling. Certainly not his opinions.
“When are you going to get over this?” Benedek tried to stop me at the door to the dining hall.
I only let him because I didn’t want a scandal to spread beyond the doors. Through the glass circles, I could see and hear multiple teams sitting and eating.
“You’re fine,” he dismissed. “You have bad days. As does everyone. People push through it. Apó would be telling you the same.”
Our grandad. My fists tightened.
“Apó would care more about my health than championship points,” I told him, trying to keep my voice light. “I’m still in recovery — and before you panic about the family name — my contract is for next year, too. Veltar knew I wasn’t going to be back to full health.”
Benedek looked away, peering through the windows of the door.
“Didn’t they?”
As my manager, he was the one who had been in talks with them.
“They didn’t realise you’d be stepping back from a race because of a headache.”
That wasn’t an answer.
“You told them I was still in recovery, didn’t you? The report Fia translated wasn’t a surprise to them, was it?”
He didn’t look back until I shoved at his shoulder, pushing him into the wall. The door swung slightly.
“Tell me you told them.”
Benedek slowly looked up into my eyes, his expression blank.
“Benedek, tell me I’m not against my contract because you didn’t fucking tell them.”
“I had a meeting about it this week,” he said. “If you meet certain criteria, you’ll still be there next year.”
“Certain criteria?” I barked. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“Some fucking points, Zoltán! If you fail, I fail right alongside you!”
I ground my teeth, breathing heavily, stabbing my palms with my fingers. How could he let this happen?
How could I?
“I’m not about to be a safety risk,” I said, my words curt. “That’s how accidents happen.”
My body rolling. The crunch of bones. The screams. The fire.
I couldn’t do that to someone.
Not when I’d lived through the worst of it.
“Something has got to give here,” Benedek said. “Or it will be your career. Or family.”
My eyes narrowed. “Family?”
“You’re going to destroy our family reputation either by losing your position or exposing your little incestuous relationship. Either way, you’ll devastate Mum. She’s been through enough.”
It was a jab worse than the crash, and he knew it.
My feet staggered back, losing control.
The hits kept coming, as if I was rolling on the tarmac again and again.
“Stop your little fetish with our step-sister. She’s taking up too much of your time and focus. You need to race at your A-game, and Mum deserves to be happy.”
But I thought I might too.
“You need to snap out of it.”
“And you need to fuck off,” I snarled and shoved him directly into the wall.
His face reddened, and he lunged, but I raised a hand to stop his fist from crushing my nose.
His nostrils flared. “Everyone knows. Nora told the grid girls who her real dad is. So if you two come out… everyone will think the two of you are selfish fucks.”
“Nora?”
I knew she could play detective when it came to gossip. She was willing to flirt and smile, and lie her way to any information if it made people want to listen to her.
“Nadia came and asked me if it was true. I assume everyone knows by now. So save our family from the scandal. Save mum the heartbreak in knowing her son is a selfish cunt.”
I was the one in the wrong? For the only thing that had felt real in the last two years? After what he had just admitted to?
“Walk away from this mess you’ve made, Benedek. I promise you do not want to be in the same room as me right now.”
“You’re right,” he said, voice full of venom as his lip curled. “I don’t.”
He turned and left me breathing rapidly through my nose, barely keeping my feet grounded.
We wanted the same thing.
To make Apó proud wherever he was.
Our understandings of our grandad were very different.
Maybe he was firmer like Benedek remembered — maybe I was pathetic for not racing. I’d never triggered an accident. I rode clean.
But I was down on the leaderboard. On weeks that were good, I was often on the podium. On weeks that were bad, I crashed. Or refused to race.
It had been a brazen move, but one out of necessity.
I’d gone to the medical bay and been told it was viral, but every time I got up, the room spun.
Racing would have been negligent.
Or maybe I was overthinking things. In a month, I was set to race on the same track I’d crashed on.
I rubbed the sweat of my palms on my shorts, counted my breaths to ten, and went inside to grab my grilled salmon before asking for a pineapple and ham pizza for my girl.
Not that I said that last bit aloud.
Waiting, I surveyed the dining hall. Veltar ate together. I knew it happened. But I had only joined them a couple of times.
It made me feel worse than eating alone.
My brother and Imre had been there, but they easily fell into conversation with the others, and I… just sat there.
Now, I shared every meal with Fia. I never had to eat alone again.
They laughed, digging into their food. Henrik ended up choking with his laughter, and our team director slapped him on the back.
It was something I’d never have.
Because they didn’t understand me. Literally.
The isolation had been painful at MotoBike, but never as prevalent as at StormSprint. No one other than my family spoke my language.
“Time?” I asked in English to the kitchen staff. I hadn’t pre-ordered her pizza because I’d been preoccupied with eating her.
They replied with something about my trailer.
But they might hear Fia if they came knocking.
I pointed to myself. “Waiting.”
And I knew it would seem rude, but my brain was too frazzled to consider a language that used up my entire bandwidth.
Some phrases I knew — and had learned specifically to toy with Fia — but they were normally about taking her clothes off or about gas consumption. Bikes and sex.
Other than that, I was level two on my phone app, still learning what the colours and days of the week were, despite using it for months.
I understood a lot simply by being surrounded by it. But there was something wrong with my brain — and confidence — when it came to speaking it. I’d only embarrass myself.
Which was why I needed Fia.
I started a lesson in English on the app, losing two hearts to silly, distracted mistakes in the first minute. My hands tightened around the tiny screen, wondering just how much pressure would make it crack.
“You hurt it,” said a voice in badly enunciated Hungarian.
I closed my eyes, my knuckles whitening. Just what I needed. Nora.
“It deserves it,” I snapped. “What do you want?”
“I see Fia,” she told me.
“Yes.”
I was already done with this conversation.
“She look very chair today. You think?”
My skull was starting to pound, considering her word choice. Did I suddenly lose my understanding of Hungarian as well?
“Chair?”
“Yes.”
How had we been together for so long? She made no sense.
Literally, with her words but also… her and me.
But back then, I hadn’t needed a strong relationship with who I screwed, because I had my grandfather, my mother, my brother, and my health.
Now, I didn’t have those. But I had Fia.
“Chair,” I said slowly, praying she would interrupt me, realise her mistake, and save my sanity.
She nodded.
God give me strength — and then it hit me. She’d got confused. She meant beautiful.
I closed my eyes, imagining Fia’s cackle when I told her and handed her a pizza.
“One of the prettiest pieces of furniture I’ve ever seen,” I said with a smile.
Her mouth opened, eyes narrowed, trying to translate.
Good luck to her.
“What do you want, Nora?”
“You and Fia. Your sister. Having sex.” She said it with a chuffed, rattling little smile.
That scrunched my nose.
I raised a brow. Maybe if I pretended her attempts at Hungarian were so wrong, and I simply didn’t understand her, she might just piss off.
“Not sister,” I said as if talking to a toddler. “Not sex.”
Nora rolled her eyes. “Lies.”
And she got out her phone.
She did this sometimes. When she hadn’t rehearsed what she wanted to say to me through Google Translate, she would write it down and have the internet translate it for her.
But she didn’t show me words. It was a picture.
The conference set-up from a couple of months ago. The white sheet was draped over the extended table. The backdrop with the StormSprint logo. My name beside Fia’s.
My hand reached down behind the table, and she clutched my arm, her eyes on mine as her mouth parted in pleasure.
“Okay?”
“So do as told or this everywhere,” she said with a nod.
I cocked a brow.
“You leave her.”
“No.”
I wasn’t capable. I couldn’t.
“Yes. Or this… everywhere.” She gestured around us at the entirety of StormSprint. “Your family will hate you.”
Too late by the sounds of it.
I shrugged and smiled at the cook, who placed one of the take-out boxes into a bag before calling out to one of the other workers behind him.
Get me out of here.
“Think of her. You ruin her job.”
My body went stiff. On the heel of my foot, I swivelled to face her. “I think of her day and night. She’s my first and last thought every day. Your photo proves nothing. It’s photoshopped for all I care. If you had the video, you would show me. But… you don’t.”
But someone did.
My jaw snapped shut.
“Who gave you that.” It wasn’t a question. It was all demand.
She shrugged, pursing her lips, her eyes glinting with power.
This had come from someone. Someone who didn’t want to expose this themselves.
But they were unhinged to give Nora so much control.
Which was exactly why she didn’t show me the video.
Because she didn’t have it yet.
But someone did.
“Who?” I hissed in English.
She lifted her hands in defence, a proud smirk on her irritating face. “End with Fia,” she whispered. “Then nobody need know your dirty thing.”
“You do realise, I wouldn’t be with you whether I was with Fia or not.”
That didn’t surprise her. “You two is wrong. I try make your name still good. All world now know you are family.”
“Not family. Post the picture. Have fun with it, Nora. Because it will just make you look like a pathetic, jealous bitch.”
Her mouth parted, brows furrowed, and she went to speak, but Fia’s pizza was now in the bag. And I was gone.
Fia had reacted so badly to just a picture of my arm around her.
This would catapult her out of my trailer into a spiral of worry that would do nothing but harm. And Nora was just a nuisance. She wanted attention, and I was no longer willing to give her any.
That photo could’ve been me sorting the cloth and Fia sneezing, for crying out loud. It was meaningless.
It just fucked me off that she thought she had some entitlement to my feelings. She didn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t.
Ever again.
There had to be some motive. All I saw was her constant need to be in control.
But what tightened my fist around the bag of food wasn’t Nora.
It was who had sent her the footage.
My fucking brother.