Chapter 10 Kotov Syndrome #2
Faust walks in, looks at me, and shuts the door behind himself with one flat palm. He’s changed into his racing uniform, a skin-tight shellac of gray on gray on gray. “Cat,” he says by way of a greeting, eyebrows slanted with faux sympathy. “Something wrong?”
My mouth is a pile of sawdust and yet, words do happen. “No.”
“You watched the broadcast?”
“You mean the thing on every TV in here?”
The skin of his cheek grows taut, like he’s biting behind his lip to keep his face still. This is funny to him. Ruining Mei’s plans, making me uncomfortable. Acid burns in my throat, years of anger I’ve channeled everywhere but here. To a man’s face.
A rich, miserable man.
Before he can say anything else, I force my legs to get with the program, taking a step toward him. He leans back, brows shooting higher in surprise. “I have to do your hair,” I remind him through gritted teeth.
Frowning, he watches my fingers drift to his temple until he can’t anymore, then shifts his eyes to me.
I ignore it. That look. A foot away from me and far too close.
Stomach churning, I skim my fingertips over the dark wave he’s awkwardly pushed back, coarse yet soft, working it into a better angle.
Why does even touching him make me feel less oriented?
“No hair gel?” he asks softly, almost teasing.
Anger flares beneath my skin and I suck in one cheek, needing the pain. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Helmet.”
“Right.” His gaze drifts over my skin. “Doesn’t make sense to do this before I race.”
I don’t bother explaining that millions of eyeballs will be on him during his few minutes of screentime, or how many women would trade their souls for hair like his, thick and shiny and such a rich espresso brown that it’d probably talk with a put-on transatlantic accent.
I’m sure Stark-Benzin has shampoo sponsorships lined up.
This one easy trick gives you Faust’s gravity-defying hair!
With a deep breath, I tuck the last loose strand up with the others, then step around him. “What are you—?” he starts.
I run a finger over the back of his neck, relishing in the way his shoulders stiffen.
“Almost done.”
His skin has the lightest sheen of sweat, warm with a hint of…
something. Cologne? He smells earthy, woodsy.
It reminds me of the forests I used to wander back home, after the rain, when the trees were a silent hug all around me.
I pinch the loose waves at the nape of his neck, ignoring the objectively nice smell.
And the tattoo almost hidden beneath his hair, a small horseshoe in all black.
And when his chest lifts with a long, deep breath and he says, “Cat,” with his back still toward me, I ignore that, too.
He’s only quiet for another moment. “You’re mad, aren’t you? That I said it on TV.”
It. My anger scatters into panicked sparks. No, no, no.
“My name?” I keep my tone light, uncaring. “It isn’t what Mei wanted, no.”
“And what do you want?”
“I want to keep my job.”
“What job?”
“This job.” My fingers drop to his shoulders without realizing it. “The one I’m doing at this very moment?”
“Just stop,” he snaps, finally turning around to face me, frustration glowing from his unyielding eyes. “I remember you, Cat. From Bernard’s wedding. Who could forget you?”
Time slows. My stomach plummets. I hear the sound of something heavy pounding—my heart, I realize moments later, a kick-drum reverberating in my empty head.
He didn’t just say what I think he did. This isn’t, it can’t be happening.
But he’s looking at me like he’s waiting, and I’m not waking up, and this isn’t another bad dream between bouts of insomnia.
Faust remembers me.
Then his deep voice loops back around my ankles, pulling me off-balance. “Tell me I’m right,” he says—and my pulse grinds to a standstill.
“I, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t?” He laughs darkly. “Then why are you here? After his wedding. After he quits.”
“I just didn’t—”
“And then I see you with him? What’s going on?”
Pain stings between my lips. I’m biting my lip so hard, I think I just broke skin. I don’t know what to say to any of it. How to get myself out of this situation closing around me, sinking my life, all my hard work.
“He’s nice,” I whisper. One last shot in the dark. “It’s nothing.”
“Nice?” he scoffs. “You like him? Him.”
I’m all tight breath and empty static and who could forget you as my brain scrambles for anything to say, anything at all.
Faust waits, a muscle in his jaw twitching, the rest of him very, very still.
And in the quiet, two things occur to me at once.
The first is surface level, easy. It’s the realization that pretending to date Bernard will make Faust and the rest of the team think I’m dating the absolute worst man on the planet.
And the second is a feeling. Deeper, harder. Something I can’t name, unraveling down my spine. Something that feels too big to touch and too shapeless to hold on to.
“Maybe I do,” I say, swallowing against the glass in my throat. “So what? What happens if I like Bernard? Are you going to stare at me some more? Name-drop me on television so that my—my boss gets angry? What are you, jealous?”
I don’t mean to say it, only there’s the word, and it makes that feeling a little sharper, a little easier to see. Faust blinks, twin lines crinkling along the edges of his angry eyes. “No.”
“Are you obsessed with tracking down everyone else’s lies?”
His nostrils flare and his mouth stays shut, but I can see his answer, right there on his face.
No.
“So maybe I lied, maybe I got this job because I thought I might meet him, okay. You caught me. Yay, Faust. You did it.” I’m thinking on my feet, agile, going wherever this is going to go.
Every word hurts to say, but at least I’m moving.
“But don’t judge me for doing what I have to do in this world.
You’re more like him than you’re not like him.
So please, please, don’t ruin this for me.
” Saying that stings the most; it’s honest.
His eyes flash. Surprise, hurt, surprise. Then his arms cross, muscles flexing defensively over his broad chest. “You can’t speak to me like this, Cat.”
Whatever emotion that had been building inside me vanishes, and all that’s left is my anger.
Decades of it, swirling behind every fake date, every forced laugh, smiling through being called a bitch and frigid and every other word men use to try and control women, watching the charities that I donate to fold up shop year after year because what I do just isn’t enough.
Bills. Debt. Broken hearts. Broken families.
Entire countries and climates and cultures ransacked for what—money?
Another drop in these billionaires’ buckets?
Their greed is endless, and I can’t understand it, and I hate it, but my anger is endless, too.
If I can’t stop them, I can meet them, sin to sin.
Greed to rage. And that’s why I don’t believe in any of it, that we get anything great after we die.
Because this is hell, right here; and my anger at being hurt cannot be just as bad of a sin as the greed that makes the Bernards and Fausts of the world hurt me.
The bruise can’t be punished as harshly as the hand.
“Why?” I hiss. “Because you’re a billionaire, so I’m supposed to treat you like royalty?”
“Because you don’t know me,” Faust says roughly. “And I am not a billionaire.”
“Multimillionaire, then. Whatever.”
“Whatever?” he huffs. “Do you think I can personally control how hyper-capitalist this sport can be?”
“Do you even try?”
“I fund ten charities in my hometown. Hundreds, thousands of salaries.”
“Oh, you’re the kindest duke in the ton—”
He gives me a wild, confused look, then continues. “My family lives off what I give them.”
My breath catches. Sucker punched. “That, I…”
“Does that impress you?” he says, blunt as ever. “You won’t like Bernard, then.”
“I don’t care what you think.”
Whereas his intensity has been stifling before, now the anger etched into his face is like flame let loose.
Bounding and exciting and destructively mesmerizing.
“You do,” he snaps, his dark gaze clinging to mine as words tumble from his lips.
“You and me, Cat. You think we’re not alike?
My whole life, everyone here has underestimated me because I wasn’t born into money.
I worked to get here. My family sacrificed to put me in the kart as a child.
And I’ve had to sit here, silently, for thirty-three years, and take how much people like Bernard hate me for it.
They hate that I’m hungry, they hate that I show to them that there are others out there, right now, who would be good enough to drive in Formula 1 if they had the chance.
But those people never will, because their parents weren’t drivers, and their families aren’t millionaires. Why do you think Bernard left?”
I’m breathless, air trembling at the edge of my lungs. Wordless.
“Because,” he pushes on, “I remind him that he will never be able to prove that he’s special. He was born with everything, so of course he has everything. That isn’t greatness. It just is the fucking bar on the floor. Enjoy it, if you stoop that low.”
“You don’t know me, either—”
My rebuttal is cut off by frantic knocking on the door. “Faust!” someone yells. “We need to get moving.”
We both go quiet, looking at each other in surprise.
I hadn’t noticed how much of a bubble we’d been in, just me and him and this anger.
Faust presses his lips together, ignoring whoever’s outside.
“I think I do, though. I’m starting to,” he says, like we’d never been interrupted.
“I know the sort of person he goes for. It isn’t you. ”
Imogen’s tearstained face flashes in my memory, her bridal makeup puddled down her cheeks. “Kind?” I ask.
“Fixable,” Faust says quietly. “He wants a woman he can fix, then break again when he leaves.”