PLAYING FOR HER HEART

Chapter Two: Questions With Teeth

The office Ethan Carter led her to wasn't what Ava expected. No trophies here, no framed magazine covers. Just a wall of monitors showing live telemetry from a car currently doing laps somewhere out on the test track, a desk buried in printouts, and a single photograph of when Ethan was still a boy, maybe seven or eight, sitting in his father's lap inside the cockpit of an old race car, both of them grinning like the world hadn't yet found a way to disappoint them.

"Sit anywhere," Ethan said, dropping into a leather chair behind the desk and gesturing vaguely at the room. "Denise usually sits in on these, but I told her not to bother today. She makes people nervous. Apparently I don't."

"Apparently," Ava said, taking the chair across from him and setting her recorder on the desk between them like a small, watchful animal. "Do you mind if I record?"

"Go ahead. I've said worse things on live television."

She pressed record and let the silence stretch for a beat before starting. An old trick, letting the subject fill dead air with something unguarded. Ethan didn't take the bait. He simply watched her, unblinking, the same assessing look he'd given her hand when he shook it, as if he were running calculations she couldn't see.

"Let's start simple," Ava said. "Why racing?"

"Because my father put me in a go-kart before I could tie my shoes, and I was faster than every kid twice my age, and once you're that good at something, quitting stops being an option people let you consider." He said it flatly, like a fact he'd recited a hundred times and stopped feeling anything about. "Next question."

"That's not an answer, that's a deflection dressed up as one."

His eyebrows lifted, fractionally. "Excuse me?"

"You told me what happened to you. I asked why you love it." Ava kept her tone light, almost conversational, the way she always did right before she pushed. "Two different questions. Most people answer the second one with the first because the real answer is more complicated, or because they're not sure it's actually love."

For a moment, something raw passed over his face and gone so fast she might had thought she had imagined it, except she'd spent a career learning not to imagine things like that. Then the practiced half-smile slid back into place, smooth as a mask clicking shut.

"You've done your research," he said. "Most journalists want to know about lap times and championship odds."

"I'm not most journalists."

"No," he said, studying her in a way that made her want to look away and made her absolutely refuse to. "You're not."

The interview ran ninety minutes. Ava asked about his father's early years building the team, and Ethan gave polished, PR-approved answers about vision and legacy. She asked about the team's darkest season , twenty years ago, when a fire in the fabrication building had killed one employee and injured three others and watched his jaw tighten by a degree so small she'd have missed it if she hadn't been looking for exactly that reaction.

"That's old history," he said. "Before my time. I was a kid."

"Do you know what caused it?"

"Faulty wiring. It's in every public report." He said it too quickly, the rehearsed cadence of a line memorized rather than known. "Why are you asking about a twenty-year-old accident in a biography about my racing career?"

"Context," Ava said. "Legacy doesn't happen in a vacuum. I like to understand the foundation before I write about the building."

"That's a very poetic way of digging around in things that don't concern you."

The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees, though neither of them had moved. Ava held his gaze and didn't blink, because blinking, in her experience, was the thing that made powerful men decide you were manageable.

"With respect, Mr. Carter, everything about this team concerns me if I'm going to write eighty thousand words about it."

"With respect, Ms. Monroe", he leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and for the first time she saw something genuinely dangerous flicker behind his charm "there's a difference between writing my story and digging through my family's grief for material. I lost people in that fire too. I don't appreciate having it treated like a plot twist."

The words landed harder than he probably intended, and for one disorienting second Ava almost… almost… told him the truth. That she hadn't just lost a stranger in that fire. That the man whose death had been quietly filed under faulty wiring had tucked her into bed every night before he went to work, had promised to take her go-karting the summer he never got to see. That she wasn't digging through anyone's grief for material, she was digging through her own for answers.

She said none of it. She swallowed it, the way she'd swallowed it for three years, and instead said, "You're right. I'll be more careful with the framing."

Ethan studied her for a long moment, as if weighing whether the apology was real. "Good," he said finally, sitting back. "Let's talk about this season instead. Something we can both stomach."

They moved on. He talked about the championship fight, about his rival Marcus Webb closing the points gap, about the pressure of carrying a team that had gone three seasons without a title. Ava took notes and asked follow-ups and let the conversation settle into something almost easy, almost normal, two professionals doing their jobs.

But underneath it, she was still turning over the moment his jaw had tightened. Still cataloguing the too-quick line about faulty wiring. Still thinking about the gray-haired man in the corridor.

Near the end of the hour, Ethan's phone buzzed on the desk. He glanced at it, and something shifted in his expression like irritation, maybe, or fatigue, the specific weariness of a man dealing with a problem he'd rather not name.

"Everything okay?" Ava asked.

"Fine," he said, too fast, sliding the phone face-down. "Just someone who thinks she's entitled to more of my time than I've given her."

Ava filed that away too, though she didn't yet know it was the first mention, however oblique of Victoria Sinclair, a name that would come to occupy far more of her attention than she wanted.

"I think that's enough for today," Ethan said, standing, the interview clearly over whether Ava agreed or not. "Denise will set up your access badges. You'll have run of the factory floor, within reason. My father might want to meet you at some point, though I wouldn't hold your breath, he just doesn't do a lot of meeting people these days."

"I look forward to it regardless."

He walked her to the door, and just as she stepped through it, he said, almost carelessly, almost like an afterthought, "One more thing, Ms. Monroe."

She turned.

"That fire twenty years ago. The report says faulty wiring." His eyes held hers, steady and unreadable. "I've read that report more times than you'd think. And I've never once believed a word of it."

Then he shut the door, leaving Ava standing alone in the corridor with her pulse hammering and the sudden, dizzying certainty that Ethan Carter knew far more than he was supposed to hand her, deliberately or not, the first thread of a truth someone in this building had spent twenty years trying to bury.

She stood there a long moment, gathering herself, before she became aware of a presence at the far end of the hallway. Not the gray-haired man this time. A woman, younger, dressed in a cream suit that probably cost more than Ava's yearly rent, watching her with the particular stillness of someone who had been standing there for a while and had no intention of pretending otherwise.

"You must be the journalist," the woman said, closing the distance between them with unhurried, deliberate steps, heels clicking against the marble like a countdown. "Ethan mentioned you'd be starting today. He didn't mention you'd be quite so thorough."

"Ava Monroe." She extended a hand out of habit, though something in the woman's expression made her regret it before their palms even touched.

"Victoria Sinclair." The handshake was brief, cool, and entirely too firm, the kind of grip meant to establish something rather than greet someone. Victoria's eyes swept over Ava once, cataloguing her the way a jeweler might assess a stone of uncertain value. "I hope you're settling in. This place can be a lot to take in, if you're not used to it."

"I imagine so."

"I've known Ethan since we were children," Victoria added, though Ava hadn't asked. "Our families have history. Deep history. The kind that doesn't show up in press releases." A small, unbothered smile. "You'll want to remember that, when you're writing your little book."

She turned and walked away before Ava could respond, leaving behind the faint scent of expensive perfume and a warning so smoothly delivered it took Ava a full ten seconds to recognize it as one.