Redline

Red room

The paddock was almost empty when Valentina stepped out of the press room. Rain hammered against the metal roof of the main building with a steady, heavy rhythm, blending with the distant sounds of tools and engines slowly shutting down. Past midnight, the entire circuit seemed different. Much darker, colder, and dangerously quiet.

Valentina adjusted the black blazer over her shoulders as she checked her phone for the fifth time. She had three missed calls from the CEO, two messages from Isabelle, and none from Dante. Strangely enough, that was starting to irritate her.

After the previous night, Dante had completely withdrawn into himself again.

She hadn’t seen him since, only catching fleeting glimpses between hallways and flashes: Dante walking into the hospitality area surrounded by engineers, ignoring reporters, moving too quickly with that perpetually exhausted expression that seemed to grow worse by the day.

As if he were surviving something invisible.

She sighed and put her phone away. She just needed to grab her laptop before heading back to the hotel.

The hallway leading to the team’s private offices was completely empty. White lights illuminated the polished floor, and the silence was so absolute that her own footsteps sounded unnaturally loud.

When she reached her office and opened the door, she stopped immediately.

The light in the adjoining office was on.

Dante’s office.

She frowned. At this hour, he should have been sleeping, drinking, or disappearing with some impossibly beautiful model, just as the magazines constantly suggested.

She hesitated for a few seconds before moving closer.

That was when she heard him.

“Play it again.”

Dante’s voice was low, cold, and exhausted.

Another voice answered from inside.

“We’ve already watched it twenty times.”

“Twenty-one.”

Then came the sound of the video starting.

Valentina moved closer to the half-open door, driven by an uncomfortable mix of curiosity and alarm.

What she saw made her stomach clench immediately.

The walls of the office were covered with photographs, technical diagrams, images of the wrecked car, security camera footage, printed reports, and newspaper articles covered in aggressive red-ink annotations. Dates had been circled, names underlined several times, and lines drawn between documents as if everything were part of an obsessive theory that had been built over the course of years.

At the center of that organized madness was Luca Bianchi.

Smiling in some photographs, bleeding in others, and dead in far too many.

A shiver ran down Valentina’s spine.

Dante was leaning over a table covered in open folders. His black sleeves were rolled up to his tattooed forearms, one hand braced against the desk as he stared intently at the screen in front of him.

He no longer looked like the arrogant, famous, untouchable man everyone knew.

He looked devastated.

Exhausted.

Terribly exhausted.

The dark circles beneath his eyes were even more pronounced under the harsh white office lights, and there was something broken in his expression that Valentina had never seen before.

Beside him, one of the engineers avoided looking directly at him.

The accident played on the screen.

The car losing stability.

The corner.

The impact.

Over and over again.

Valentina felt her chest tighten.

It wasn’t normal to watch something like that so many times. This no longer looked like grief.

It looked like an obsession.

“He braked too late,” the engineer said uneasily.

“No.”

Dante’s response was immediate.

“Dante…”

“He didn’t brake too late.”

The tension in the room was unbearable.

Dante picked up the remote and paused the video just seconds before the impact. Then he moved closer to the screen and pointed to a specific part of the car.

“There.”

The engineer sighed wearily.

“We’re not seeing anything.”

“The rear suspension was already failing before he hit the curb.”

Valentina frowned automatically. Even she could see something strange in the frozen image, although she didn’t know enough about engineering to identify it.

The engineer slowly shook his head.

“The FIA closed the investigation two years ago.”

Dante gave a dry, completely hollow laugh.

“The FIA buried the investigation.”

Silence fell over the room.

Valentina stopped breathing for a second as Dante slowly dragged a hand down his face and walked around the table covered with documents. Open folders, printed photographs, technical reports covered in handwritten notes, and pages completely marked up in red were scattered everywhere.

It looked like the office of someone who had spent far too long chasing ghosts.

“Someone tampered with that car,” he finally said.

“You have no proof.”

“Yet.”

The word landed like a threat.

The engineer looked back at the screen, visibly uncomfortable.

“Maybe you should leave this alone for a while.”

Dante slowly raised his eyes, and although Valentina was hidden behind the door, the change in his expression sent an immediate chill through her.

“Do you think I’m crazy too?”

“I never said that.”

“But you thought it.”

The engineer fell silent.

A serious mistake, because something in Dante seemed to break even further.

“Luca knew something,” he murmured. “I know he did.”

“It’s been two years.”

“Exactly.”

The restrained fury in his voice made the atmosphere even heavier.

“And for two years, no one has wanted to answer a single damn question.”

Something tightened in Valentina’s chest as she watched him, because for the first time since she had known him, Dante didn’t look arrogant.

He looked desperate.

As if he had spent too long trying to convince the world of something no one wanted to hear.

Dante picked up another folder from the table and threw several photographs in front of the engineer.

“Then explain this.”

The man looked at them quickly.

“They’re damaged parts.”

“They’re missing parts.”

Dante’s jaw tightened again.

“Entire sections of the car disappeared after the crash. The telemetry was altered, and three mechanics left the team that same week.”

Valentina’s heart began beating faster.

This no longer sounded like paranoia.

It sounded real.

“Dante…”

“No.”

He shook his head before the engineer could continue.

“Something happened that night.”

His voice dropped slightly, becoming much more dangerous.

“And someone inside this sport made sure it never came to light.”

Silence filled the office again. Outside, the rain continued pounding against the building, and the distant sound of metal tools echoed from the main garage, but inside, everything seemed frozen in time.

Trapped in the night Luca died.

Then the engineer looked up and saw Valentina.

His expression changed immediately.

“Shit.”

Dante spun around.

The exact second his eyes met hers, the entire room seemed to freeze.

Valentina had never seen him like this.

There was no arrogance in his eyes.

No anger.

Something much worse.

Panic.

Dante immediately shut off the screen.

“Get out.”

She blinked.

“I just came for my laptop.”

“Get out, Valentina.”

The tone was brutal, but now she understood something important.

He wasn’t trying to throw her out because he was angry.

He was trying to hide this from her.

“What is all this?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Are you investigating Luca’s accident?”

The silence grew even heavier, and the engineer quickly began gathering the folders.

“I’m going to leave you two alone.”

He disappeared before either of them could stop him.

The door closed behind him.

Now there were only the two of them.

Dante held Valentina’s gaze for several long seconds before slowly stepping away from the desk.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“Do you think Luca was murdered?”

Dante’s jaw tightened almost immediately.

Valentina slowly stepped farther into the office. The photographs seemed to watch her from every wall. Luca celebrating on podiums, walking into the garage, smiling beside Dante.

And then the photographs of the accident:

Destroyed metal.

Fire.

Blood.

It was disturbing, but also deeply sad.

“Oh my God…” she whispered.

Dante let out a barely audible laugh.

“That was more or less my reaction.”

Valentina looked up at him.

“How long have you been doing this?”

“Two years.”

Two years trapped inside that obsession.

Now she understood why he always seemed so exhausted.

Because he had never really left that corner behind.

The silence between them grew heavy again. Valentina slowly looked around the office once more, trying to process everything she had just heard. The photographs, the marked dates, the hidden reports…

Dante had spent two years living inside that obsession.

Then she saw something else.

A photograph partially hidden beneath several folders.

She picked it up before thinking twice.

It was a blurry image, apparently taken from a distance. Several men were entering a private building somewhere in a European city. Dark suits, security surrounding them, but Valentina barely noticed any of the faces.

Until she saw one.

Her father.

The air left her lungs.

“What is this?”

Dante immediately looked up.

The change in his expression was instant.

Valentina gripped the photograph tightly as she looked at the image again. There was no mistaking him.

It was her father.

Younger, perhaps, but definitely him.

“Why do you have a picture of my father?”

Dante didn’t answer. He slowly walked toward her.

“Put that down.”

“What is my father doing here?”

The tension between them exploded, and for the first time since she had known him, Dante looked away.

Dante Moreau never looked away.

Valentina’s heart began racing even faster.

“What did he do?” she asked quietly.

“I’m still trying to find out.”