Chapter 157 Aurélie #2
Safe. Barely. The lowest rung on the ladder still counted, but it burned that survival was all I had left. My heart pounded against my ribcage almost painfully, and I forced my breath to even out as much as it could.
Back into the garage. Hydrate, they told me. Reset. Like water could wash out the ache, like thirty seconds could reset years of ghosts pushing at the recesses of my mind to break free.
Q2. The drizzle thickened, spitting silver drops across the visor, reducing my visibility more. On a day where my focus needed to be flawless, these were detrimental conditions. The sheen on the track turned corners into death traps.
Out lap. My arms already felt like lead weights. I told myself to loosen my grip, but I couldn’t. My fingers locked tight, knuckles aching, like if I let go even slightly the whole car would slip away.
First push lap. There was a wobble through Becketts, oversteer snapping like a whip. My wrists slid, just a fraction, but enough to jolt the wheel wrong. Tires screamed, my stomach plummeted, the gravel trap yawning too close—
“Careful, Dubois,” Henric clipped just as I corrected back on the track, narrowly avoiding the wall.
“Copy,” I forced through clenched teeth. Maybe my statement to Ivy was a little too on the nose.
Second run. My shoulders howled through every turn, muscles spasming with effort. Copse loomed, wide and hungry, ready to devour me whole. My chest squeezed like a fist around my heart, breath caught under the belts as I flung her through. Somehow she stuck. Somehow I stuck.
It was a goddamn miracle.
But the pain blurred my edges. Every corner was a hallucination—Morel’s breath in my ear, Santino’s hands forcing me still, Callum’s voice cracking when he admitted his anxiety. It all lived in the car with me, suffocating me more than the straps ever could.
Final minutes. I sat in P12, not enough. It was never enough. I was never enough. I would never be enough.
“Box now or push,” Henric said. His voice was even, but I could hear the gamble he was asking me to take.
My choice. Always my choice—except when it wasn’t. Except when men decided for me.
“Pushing,” I rasped. My chest heaved as I jammed the throttle, and I knew it was a mistake to push the instant I passed the pit lane, but I pressed on anyway.
The car bucked—pogoed, as Callum described—beneath me, and I felt it in every joint.
The migration curve hit like a goddamn sledgehammer, the suspension bottoming out wrong, dampers tuned like they were meant to punish instead of protect.
The packers snapped down hard enough to rattle my teeth.
Each bounce felt like a battering ram slamming straight through my spine.
Everything Callum and I had found, and God he was right, he was right, he was fucking right and I should’ve listened to him.
But I kept going. The lap blurred. My vision tunneled, rain streaks slicing across the visor.
Every correction was a war between reflex and sluggish limbs.
My wrists were liquid fire. My temple pulsed in time with the engine.
My breasts throbbed against the belts with every bump, sharp reminders that my body wasn’t my ally anymore.
Henric’s voice cut in again: “Car looks unstable. You feeling it?”
Something inside me snapped. “YOU SHOULD FUCKING KNOW SEEING AS YOUR MECHANICS TAMPERED WITH MY SETUP AND SUBMITTED FALSE COPIES TO THE FIA.” The words ripped out, unprofessional and furious, too loud for the comms.
I didn’t fucking care anymore.
They could take the car away, take my seat away, take my career away. I just wanted to sleep and not be in pain anymore.
Static filled the silence before Henric came back, stiff and clipped: “Copy.”
Across the line in P10. Safe. Barely. Again.
I slumped in the seat, head thunking against the headrest, chest rising and falling like I’d just run ten marathons. My body begged me to stop, to unstrap, crawl out, admit I couldn’t anymore.
But quitting wasn’t an option. Not for me, not ever.
My stubborn pride would probably be what got me killed someday. Not Morel.
The moment I rolled back into the garage, Henric was walking across the pit lane. He leaned over the cockpit, voice pitched low so the cameras wouldn’t catch it. “Aurélie, what was that on comms? You can’t throw around accusations without—”
“Without proof?” I sneered, as I yanked my gloves off finger by finger.
“You want proof, Henric? Want me to strip this suit down and show you the bruises Morel left on me ten fucking minutes before Q1 started? Would that satisfy you?” I tugged my sleeves down so he could see the finger-shaped bruises encircling my wrists.
He blanched, eyes darting toward the engineers like he prayed they hadn’t heard. I caught Rhea hovering a few feet back, pretending to busy herself with a monitor. My rage zeroed in on her like a heat-seeking missile.
“You think I don’t know?” I snapped, tears threatening.
God, I was so fucking emotional and I couldn’t fucking stop it.
“You think I can’t feel when my own setup’s been fucked with?
Or that I don’t know which of you handed Morel the keys to do it?
” My eyes locked on Rhea, her gaze flicking away, her jaw tight.
“Go on. Keep hiding behind the false reports you’re submitting.
I have all the evidence I need anyway. But don’t stand there and act like I’m crazy when the bruises on my body say otherwise. ”
For a heartbeat, the whole garage went still. Only the tick-tick of the cooling brakes filled the silence. Then Kimi’s car rolled back into the garage as he wrapped up his Q2 session.
Henric swallowed hard, his voice forced calm. “Focus on Q3. We’ll talk after.”
I barked out a bitter laugh and turned my head forward, securing my gloves again. “Ouai. Après.”
My eyes fell shut, and I tried to find my zen, but I didn’t know what that looked like anymore. I just sat there and waited.
Then it was time for Q3.
The storm unleashed. Sheets of water hammered the track, a thousand needles pounding the halo, soaking through my suit.
Rivers carved through the asphalt, pooling at apexes like landmines.
I could feel every ounce of sabotage in my chassis, each bump down the straights hitting like a literal battering ram against my spine.
My body was slow. My mind was foggy. The painkillers dulled the sharp edges but left the fire roaring. My shoulders weakened at every correction. My wrists burned. I wasn’t fighting the car anymore. The car was fighting me.
“Delta’s high,” Henric’s voice chirped in my ear. “You need this lap. Clean. Precise. Easy does it, Dubois.”
Clean. Precise. Two words that didn’t exist in my world anymore.
Tears burned at the corners of my eyes. At first I blinked them back, but then—fuck it. Visibility was shit anyway, so I let them fall. My vision was already a smear of rain and streaked blinking red lights. Nobody could see me crying under the visor.
I sobbed once, the sound guttural. Then another.
The pain, the bruises, the betrayal of my team—it all blurred into the same vicious noise.
What the hell was I even doing this for anymore?
Proving myself to men who wanted me gone?
To fans who cheered when I failed? To a sport that had taken my body, my peace, and nearly the man I loved?
I’d compartmentalized my whole life. Box after box, locked tight, stacked high.
But the walls had cracked, the dam was breaking, and now everything poured through me at once—the hate, the threats, the comments, the headlines, my family resenting me for standing on my own two feet.
Santino, Morel, Callum’s crash. Every insult ever spat my way, every whisper that I was too weak, too reckless, too female to survive here.
Whore.
Slut.
Fraser’s cum-dump.
Open your legs, close your mouth.
She’s fucked half the paddock to get here.
Ugly without the helmet.
Pathetic little girl.
A liability.
Crash out already, bitch.
And of course, my body. Of fucking course I would be the one thing standing in my way from happiness, from a conventional future.
Each turn, each chicane came at me hard and fast. Abbey. Farm. My lines blurred with my tears. My chest convulsed with sobs, hands shaking on the wheel.
I really was the problem.
Copse.
My enemy. Always fucking Copse.
You’re nothing.
You’ll never be enough.
Fraser’s downfall.
Grid princess.
Pussy in a cockpit.
The tires hit standing water, slipping under me. I heard every cruel word I’d ever endured, echoing in my skull, drowning out the engine. My name twisted into slurs. My face plastered on headlines. My body reduced to whispers about sex and weakness. My career, a complete mockery.
I was still in my head when the rear snapped.
The twitch became a sway. The sway became a spin. My arms reacted too late, sluggish from exhaustion, from bruises, from rage that had finally curdled into despair.
Hydroplaning. Skating sideways across rivers. No grip. No chance.
“Correction, correction, correction—” Henric’s voice was frantic, too far away to matter.
The barrier loomed ahead, white and gray in the storm, and time fractured into stuttering frames.
The sobs choked me.
The steering wheel twisted out of my grip, and I let it, doing what no driver should ever do: let go.
The belts dug into my chest as the nose veered.
The disloyalty of the only place I’d ever felt like I belonged.
Then impact.
The world detonated.
Metal screamed, carbon fiber splintered into shards, and the belts dug deep into my shoulders as the car stopped dead.
All that force funneled through me until my teeth clacked together hard enough to rattle my skull.
My lungs emptied in a violent rush, the cockpit shaking like a goddamn earthquake.
And then there was silence.
It was worse than the noise, because it let me hear the ragged sobs still tearing out of me. It let me hear the hissing of hot metal cooling in the rain. It let me hear the marshals shouting in the distance, muffled, like I wasn’t really here anymore.
Pinned. My body was trembling, arms screaming, legs heavy as stone. The steering wheel blurred in my vision, my hands in my lap because I’d let go, let whatever divine intervention interfere with my fate.
“Dubois, respond please,” Henric said. “Are you okay?”
I swallowed through my gasps, my throat sandpaper as I lifted a hand to push the radio button on my wheel. “I’m… I’m here.” My voice was barely a rasp, broken and raw. “Pinned. Need… marshals.”
I didn’t know if that was true. I just didn’t have the energy to move.
Rain hammered the silence that followed, heavy as judgment.
Somehow, I’d survived. But right then, it didn’t feel like surviving.