The Paddock Pact

Chapter 13: Cold Focus

POV: Anya

The tension in our hotel room that Saturday morning was terrible.

When I woke up at six, the bedroom was already freezing because the balcony doors were open. Mateo was pacing back and forth near the window, holding a porcelain cup of black coffee in his right hand. The cup was shaking just a little bit. He clearly hadn't slept at all during the night. The dark, purple circles under his eyes were pretty bad and spoke for themselves.

He was just wearing a pair of dark grey gym shorts, no shirt, leaving his torso completely out in the cold mountain air blowing from the Styrian hills. The chill, charming driver everyone saw on TV and read about in magazines wasn't there today. In his place was a quiet, totally stressed-out guy radiating this cold, dangerous focus. Every time he turned around to keep walking in circles, you could see the tight muscles of his back flex.

I sat up under the duvet, fixed my messy hair, and watched him for three solid seconds.

Mateo caught my reflection in the glass of the balcony door. He stopped pacing, turned his head slowly, and took a sip of his coffee. His green eyes looked totally flat and unreadable.

"See something you like, Anya?" he asked. His voice was low, raspy from sleep, and completely missing its usual soft warmth.

"I’m actually thinking if I should buy you a shirt," I replied smoothly, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed and crossing my arms against the chill. "Because at this point, I'm starting to wonder if you actually own one. I get that you're the pretty face for the sponsors, Alvarez, but it’s six in the morning and fifteen degrees outside. Put something on. You're giving me hypothermia just looking at you."

Mateo didn't reach for his clothes. Instead, he put his coffee cup down on the window sill with a quiet clink and slowly walked right over to my side of the bed.

He stopped way too close to where I was sitting, crowding my space, invading my zone without any hesitation. He leaned down, his warm skin radiating heat against the cold morning air, his face coming so close to mine I could see the tiny gold specks in his eyes.

He gave me this slow, annoying smirk.

"Pretty face, huh?" he muttered, his voice dropping low, hitting right behind my collarbone. "So you do look. Good to know my gym time isn't completely wasted on my corporate handler."

My heart did an annoying, stupid little jump, but I kept my face totally cold and blank. I tilted my chin up, looking him straight in the eye, refusing to give him an inch.

"Just get dressed, Mateo."

His smirk stayed for another second, his eyes flashing with a bit of his old self, before he finally stood up, grabbed his team polo off a chair, and pulled it over his head.

We didn't say a single word during the twenty-minute drive to the Red Bull Ring. Mateo just stared out the dark, tinted window of the team car, his jaw locked tight. His fingers were rhythmically tapping against his knee—practicing the downshifts of the track, no doubt. I kept my tablet on my lap, pretending to check his logistics schedule, but my eyes kept drifting back to his reflection in the glass.

Back in Warsaw, my actual job was all about mitigating risk. I looked at numbers, calculated probabilities, and helped companies avoid bad decisions. But looking at Mateo right now, I realized there is no spreadsheet in the world that can calculate a guy who is completely desperate. He was fighting for his whole career, and he knew it.

By the time we got to the paddock, the atmosphere shifted from tense to absolute chaos. The clicks of camera shutters followed us the second we stepped out of the car. I played my part seamlessly—carrying his spare kit bag, staying a step behind his shoulder, playing the quiet, efficient assistant I was supposed to be.

Inside the team garage, all the media noise completely died. It was replaced by the loud, clinical reality of Formula One.

"Headphones on, Anya," Marcus, his race engineer, barked without even looking up from his bank of monitors.

I put the heavy, noise-canceling team headset over my ears, which instantly blocked out the crazy loud scream of a midfield car firing up in the pit lane right next door. The radio was filled with a monotonous stream of data—tire temperatures, track limits, wind speed—stuff that sounded like a foreign language to me.

And then I saw Mateo getting ready to get into the car.

He was standing in the back of the garage. His fireproof balaclava was already pulled tight over his face, showing only his eyes. His white racing suit was zipped all the way up to his collarbone.

I stepped closer, intending to hand him his water bottle, but I stopped dead in my tracks.

His eyes. The green intensity in them was terrifying. All the playful stuff from two hours ago was completely gone. He looked hollowed out by focus, his face stone-cold, staring at the floor like he was looking right through the concrete. He was entirely closed off from the world, trapped inside his own head.

This guy wasn't just going out to drive a fast car. He was about to strap himself into a carbon-fiber missile, fueled by high-octane gas, and drive into concrete walls at three hundred kilometers an hour.

He didn't even look at me when he took the helmet from his trainer. He didn't look at anyone. He just snapped the visor down with a sharp thud, stepped up onto the carbon cockpit, and slid deep down into the belly of the machine.

When the green light flashed at the end of the pit lane, signaling the start of Qualifying 1, the garage erupted into controlled madness.