51. Callum
The lights in the medical center were too bright, breaking through the haze that had settled in my head.
My body ached, every movement feeling like daggers.
I could still feel the phantom weight of the harness digging into my shoulders and hear the crunch of metal echoing in my ears, the loss of consciousness when my final thoughts had been of her.
When I’d first come to, I couldn’t feel my legs. Just dead weight. No sensation, no movement. For a horrifying, soul-piercing moment, I thought it was over. Thought I was paralyzed, that my career was gone, that my life was changed… forever.
It was why I needed Aurélie to finish the race. She couldn’t risk her career too.
The safety crew had told me the cockpit had to be dismantled to get me out—my legs were pinned so tightly between the crushed panels that the hydraulic cutters took minutes to work. Minutes I didn’t have.
Because my foot had been stuck, jammed on the throttle.
And when the throttle’s pinned, the engine doesn’t stop.
It keeps screaming, redlining, generating more and more heat until it ignites.
That’s why the fire started. That’s why it spread so fast. The car didn’t just crash. It cooked itself from the inside out.
If the marshals hadn’t gotten there when they did, I’d have burned alive.
It was a rude fucking awakening. A grim reminder of just how fine the line between winning and dying really was.
The car had recorded forty-eight Gs on impact.
My body weight multiplied by that force was the equivalent of being hit by several thousand pounds.
The fact that I wasn’t going to wind up in traction or dead was a miracle.
And then, by some divine force looking out for me, the feeling came back to my legs after being loaded into the ambulance. It started in my toes, and when I was able to curl them in my race boots, I literally choked on my emotions. The relief that had coursed through me was palpable.
By the time we’d arrived at the medical center, full mobility had returned, and they rushed to strip my race suit off to treat the gash on my ribs.
They kept trying to make me lie down—one of the nurses had even put a hand on my tender chest to keep me there—but I couldn’t. I got the stitches, and now I needed to sit up, needed to feel normal for a moment, needed to not feel like my whole life had almost been ripped away from me.
I couldn’t stop replaying it all. The crash. The spin. The pain. Aurélie.
The doctor’s voice broke through my thoughts. “You’re lucky to be alive, Fraser.”
“Yeah,” I muttered, running a hand over my face. My fingers stopped at my temple, where the dull throb of a migraine kept reminding me of just how severe this crash really was. No wonder my head felt like it had been through a meat grinder.
I shouldn’t be alive. Not really. That much was obvious.
I’d been in plenty of crashes over the years, but nothing like this.
“Mild concussion, bruised ribs, possible soft tissue damage,” the doctor continued, rattling off my injuries like he was reading a shopping list. “You got thirteen stitches on the laceration on your ribs, and you’ll need scans to rule out?—”
“I’m fine,” I interrupted, sharper than I intended, even though I really wasn’t. “No hospital until the race is over.”
The doctor frowned but didn’t argue. Not yet, at least. I could feel Dominic’s presence, my team principal, looming in the corner with his arms crossed.
His usual stern expression was somehow more severe.
No doubt he was waiting to jump in with a lecture about how reckless I’d been or how the team couldn’t afford another incident like this.
But I wasn’t reckless. I’d done everything right.
It didn’t matter. Morel had made sure of that.
I glanced at the monitor on the wall, where footage of the crash looped on mute. Morel’s car stood out, and my chest tightened as I watched the moment everything had gone to hell. The swerve, the clip, the spin. It was all there, a mechanical autopsy of my failure to avoid him.
My failure.
“Play it again,” I said, my voice low. The medic hovered uncertainly, but Dominic gave a curt nod, and the footage restarted.
The screen showed my car approaching Morel’s, the gap closing as I lined up the overtake, DRS activated.
I remembered it vividly—how clean it had felt, how perfect.
It was perfect from a bird’s eye view, too.
And then Morel moved. His car jerked, just enough to force me wide.
I swerved, reacting instinctively, but it was too late.
The footage slowed, frame by frame, capturing the exact moment my front wing clipped his rear tire.
The spin was violent, even on replay. My car was a blur of red and black as it tumbled, sparks flying in slow motion, the way it disintegrated, metal screeching as the halo held and the chassis crumpled.
I barely registered the debris scattering across the track until I saw it—a chunk of my front wing colliding with Aurélie’s halo.
My stomach churned. She’d spun out, her car veering off into the grass on the other side of the track and narrowly missing Schreiber closing in behind her. The camera cut to her, still and silent in the cockpit. For a brief moment, she didn’t move, and I held my breath as I watched.
But then she did.
Her hands moved quickly, yanking at her harness.
I watched as she scrambled out of the car, her movements frantic but precise.
She had no regard for anything but one thing— me .
She was out of the car before the commentary even caught up.
Her feet hit the ground, and she sprinted across the gravel and track like the devil himself was chasing her.
Marshals shouted after her, trying to block her path, but she dodged them.
Untouchable, unstoppable. That was my Aurélie.
And then she screamed.
“CALLUM!”
Even in the replay, I could hear it. Raw and wild, so much pain and panic laced in her voice that my heart shattered. It was a sound I’d never forget even if I lived to be a hundred. That scream would live in my DNA. It would haunt me.
I watched her climb the barrier and crawl across the tires, weaving through the crowd of safety workers gathering around my wrecked car.
One man grabbed her arm, but she threw him off.
Another wrapped his arms around her waist from behind.
She twisted and kicked, fighting even as a second worker gripped her shoulders.
It took three of them to finally drag her back, and even once she was back on the ground, she kept fighting to get to me.
“Christ,” I muttered, leaning forward despite the protest from my ribs, the tenderness in my chest. She’d run straight for me, cars still passing the wreck while she ignored every rule in the book. It was reckless, dangerous, and so... Aurélie. My vision blurred for a moment.
“She could’ve gotten herself killed,” Dominic said, his voice pulling me back to the present.
“She didn’t care,” I muttered, eyes never leaving the screen. “She didn’t even fucking think because she thought I was dead.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The footage kept rolling, and it broke me.
She was still thrashing in the arms of the marshals.
The cameras zoomed in on her, helmet still on but visor up.
The flood of tears on her scrunched cheeks was clear, her skin mottled red, the anguish written all over her a tangible thing.
“He’s my fucking safety! Do you understand? I’m not leaving him! Let me go!” Her voice broke.
Finally, she relented, head hanging in defeat as she trudged back to her car with a marshal escorting her. Her hands trembled violently, her shoulders shaking.
My chest ached, and it had nothing to do with the crash.
The camera angle panned wide, and I saw my own body—limp, practically lifeless—being lifted out of the cockpit. And the flames, fuck, the flames had already started licking at the lower sidepod when they’d pulled me free.
And I just… watched. Watched the woman I loved completely unravel at the thought of losing me.
There was nothing in the world worth making her feel that way again.
When I regained consciousness moments later, caught on the replay I was watching, the first thing I’d thought of was her .
My eyes opened, and I saw clear blue sky above me, and I wondered briefly if I’d gone to heaven or hell.
That is, until I felt the rocking of the gurney below me and I turned my head to see my charred car crushed against the metal fencing.
My ribs had flared with pain, but I didn’t feel anything from my waist down at first. But it didn’t matter—only one thing mattered.
The first thing I’d done was tell them I wasn’t going anywhere until I saw Aurélie.
I threatened to get every single one of them fired if they took me away before she could see I was alive and breathing.
A marshal had run to flag her down. She’d just climbed back in like she hadn’t just watched me nearly die.
I was watching it like a man seeing his own funeral from afar.
The screen froze on her face, mid-shout, her eyes rimmed in salt and fury and something I didn’t deserve.
When I saw her emerge through the crowd of medical staff and safety workers, I knew I was okay. And then, as if she knew what I needed, she grabbed my hand, and I felt alive like only she could make me feel. Because for a moment there, I wasn’t convinced I was until her hands touched me.
The cameras showed her getting back into her car, and then as she drove off. Her radio popped up with her team principal talking to her.
“You stopped mid-race, Aurélie. I’ll have to ask the FIA if they’ll even let you finish.”
“That’s your job, isn’t it? And while you’re at it, go ahead and ask what they plan to do about Morel. I warned them this would happen, and they didn’t listen. Not to me. Not when it mattered,” she replied, sounding bitter and angry in a way I’d never heard from her before.
Her voice on the radio sent a fresh wave of adrenaline through me.
That edge to her tone, the venom she spat when she mentioned Morel—it was a side of her I’d never heard before.
And yet, there was something comforting in it.
Even in the middle of her own chaos, she’d thought to stand up for me.
To demand justice. To do what no one else on the grid had the guts to do.
I closed my eyes for a moment, her words echoing in my mind. She didn’t just care about the sport—she cared about people. About me. That realization struck harder than any of the blows I’d taken today.
No one had ever fought for me like that—not the team, not even myself. But she had.
And I had missed her so fucking much while our PR teams worked overtime to keep us apart.
The footage panned back to the wreckage, and all I could hear was the panic in her voice pleading with me to stay with her, that help was on the way. I never wanted to hear it again. Wanted to die just thinking about what she must’ve felt in those moments before I regained consciousness.
“Restart it,” I demanded, and the medic obeyed.
As the footage looped again, I forced myself to watch the spin, the flips, the shattering of carbon fiber.
I tried to separate the man from the machine, but it was impossible.
Every frame felt like I was back in that car.
Forty-eight Gs. Most drivers didn’t walk away from impacts like that.
Hell, most didn’t even survive them. My hands trembled at the memory of weightlessness as the car flipped, the sickening realization that I had no control.
For the first time since I’d stepped foot in a car, I’d truly thought it was the end.
I forced myself to watch it for a third time. Then, I saw it—the red flags waving in the background.
“Pause it,” I said, pointing at the screen. I bit back a groan as I leaned forward, the pain in my ribs sharp enough to steal my breath. The medic fumbled with the remote, freezing the frame. The flags were clear as day, their bold color standing out against flying debris and swerving cars.
“She was still in her car when the flags went up,” I muttered, my voice firm. “She didn’t break protocol.”
Dominic stepped closer, his gaze narrowing as he studied the screen. “You’re sure about this?”
“Positive.” My hands clenched into fists, the adrenaline coursing through me like a second wind. “We’re taking this to the FIA. Now.”
Dominic sighed, the lines around his mouth deepening. “This isn’t the time to make enemies, Callum,” he said, but his tone lacked its usual bite. Maybe he understood better than he let on.
“I’m not thinking about politics right now, Dom,” I snapped, cutting him off.
Dominic’s frown deepened, his arms crossing tighter as he stepped closer to the screen. “We have to think carefully about how we approach this, Callum. If you barge into the FIA room waving footage around?—”
“Stop for a second. They’re going to rip her apart if we don’t act.” My voice softened, but the anger was still there, bubbling beneath the surface. “She’s not going to be their scapegoat for Morel’s recklessness. Not this time. And we don’t have much time before they restart the race.”
For a moment, Dominic hesitated, then gave a reluctant nod. “Alright,” Dominic said after a beat, his voice quieter. “Let’s hope they’re willing to listen.”
I could already see their faces, the sneers, the dismissive tones. But they couldn’t ignore this. Not when I had the proof right here.