THE PADDOCK CONTRACT PRINCESS

CHAPTER 16

The Engineer

The garage had gone quiet by the time Sofia returned from the strategy room, but the silence did not feel peaceful. It carried the strained attention of a team that had just discovered how close victory had come to becoming disaster. Mechanics moved around the Vantari car with deliberate care, checking temperatures, sensors, and bodywork while the engineers studied the data from the race. Sofia stood behind the glass for a moment, watching them work, and understood that she had crossed an invisible line: she was no longer merely the woman pretending to be Lucien Chevalier’s fiancée.

Lucien found her beside the timing monitors, still wearing the team headset she had borrowed during the race. He did not congratulate her immediately because his expression held something heavier than relief, and Sofia recognized the look of a man reconsidering a decision he had already made. “You saw the temperature migration before our software did,” he said, keeping his voice low enough that the nearby engineers would not hear. Sofia folded her arms and answered that she had seen a pattern in the airflow, then reminded him that noticing something useful did not make her part of his team.

Lucien leaned against the workstation and studied her with the same concentration he gave a technical briefing. He told her that Vantari had some of the best engineers in the world, but none of them had approached the problem from the angle she had used because they were trained to trust the model before the machine. Sofia said models were only useful when reality agreed with them, and reality had nearly cooked his rear tires before the final laps. For the first time, Lucien smiled without any trace of performance, and the warmth in that expression unsettled her more than his anger ever had.

Across the garage, Margaux watched them with open amusement until Sofia caught her eye. Margaux raised both hands as if surrendering, then walked over and said the team had already started calling Sofia their unofficial emergency engineer. Sofia laughed despite herself and said she was not interested in another title created by people who barely knew her. Margaux replied that titles were the least dangerous thing circulating about her, because half the paddock now believed she had saved Lucien’s season and the other half believed she had captured the most difficult man in Formula One.

Sofia wanted to dismiss the gossip, but her attention shifted when Alessandro Costa entered the garage wearing his race suit with the top half tied around his waist. He congratulated Lucien on the podium finish they had nearly achieved, then turned toward Sofia and said her call had been brilliant. Lucien’s jaw tightened so subtly that only Sofia noticed, and she found herself strangely entertained by the reaction. Alessandro offered her a position with his team if she ever became tired of working around people who treated engineers like decorative accessories.

Lucien answered before Sofia could, saying that Vantari had no intention of losing her. Alessandro looked from Lucien to Sofia and smiled as though he had discovered something worth investigating. Sofia immediately told Lucien that she could answer for herself, then accepted Alessandro’s business card only because refusing it would make the situation more ridiculous. When Alessandro left, Lucien asked whether she enjoyed provoking him, and Sofia replied that if he was provoked by a business card, he needed a stronger temperament.

Their argument followed them into the corridor, where the noise of the garage faded behind closed doors. Lucien said Alessandro was not offering friendship, and Sofia said she was perfectly capable of recognizing flirtation without needing a billionaire to supervise her judgment. He stepped closer, then stopped before their shoulders touched, visibly forcing himself to respect the distance she had demanded from him. Sofia noticed the restraint, and that awareness softened her anger even though she refused to let him see it.

Later that night, Sofia returned to the data room alone and reopened the race telemetry. The temperature spike that had nearly ruined the car appeared in a sequence that looked familiar, and she pulled out her father’s copied notes from the folder she kept inside her bag. Mateo had written about pressure migration in a way that sounded almost identical to the anomaly in Vantari’s system, but beside the calculations he had drawn a small symbol Sofia remembered from childhood. It was the same mark she had found beside Project Sovereign, and suddenly the race no longer looked like an isolated technical problem.

Lucien appeared in the doorway before she could photograph the screen. He asked what she had found, and Sofia turned the monitor toward him without hiding anything this time. Together they compared Mateo’s notes with the telemetry, and Lucien admitted that the correlation was too precise to dismiss as coincidence. Then a new data packet appeared on the system, timestamped minutes earlier, showing that someone had accessed Project Sovereign from inside Vantari headquarters.

Sofia stared at the access record while Lucien reached for the keyboard. The account belonged to an executive whose credentials should have been locked after the earlier investigation, yet the system showed active authorization from that exact account. Lucien’s expression hardened as he told Sofia that someone inside his organization was deliberately keeping Sovereign alive, and she realized the person manipulating her family’s past might also be testing the technology on his cars. Before either of them could trace the connection, the screen went black and a single message appeared: “Stop looking for the dead, because the living are watching you.”

Lucien closed the door and told Sofia that no one outside the investigation could know what they found. She asked whether he trusted his security chief, and he said he trusted the person, but not systems they used. Sofia understood because Mateo had taught her that machines could be honest while people controlling them were not. Lucien looked at her as though he was asking for an ally.