Then Begged When I Crowned His Rival Champion

Chapter 4 A b****y Buyout

The first thing I registered was the smell. Antiseptic, cold and sterile, a universe away from the acrid smoke and molten plastic of my own personal hell. The second was the sound, a rhythmic, metronomic beeping that was the only anchor in a sea of foggy disorientation. The third, a dull, throbbing agony that emanated from my hands, swaddled in what felt like a metric ton of gauze.

I was in a hospital. Alive.

My eyes fluttered open to a world of bleached white. Starched sheets, white walls, a pale gray ceiling. A private room. V-Max’s money at work, containing the liability.

A memory, sharp and brutal, pierced the morphine haze: Julian’s back, framed by the emergency exit, choosing a data logger and his new asset over me. The white-hot agony of my hands closing around my life’s work.

I tried to move my fingers. The pain sharpened into a chorus of shrieking knives, and I bit back a cry, my throat raw. They were there, my hands, two useless, bandaged clubs at the ends of my arms. The tools of my trade, the source of my craft, utterly ruined.

The door swished open. For a heart-stopping second, I thought it was him. But the figures who entered were colder, more clinical. My father, his face a mask of grim impatience, and Arthur Vance, the head of V-Max’s legal department, clutching a leather portfolio like a shield.

No flowers. No remorse. Just business.

“Elara,” my father started, his voice devoid of any paternal warmth. “You’re awake. Good.”

Arthur stepped forward, placing his portfolio on the bedside table with a soft, final-sounding thud. “We need to discuss the events of the wind tunnel incident.”

Incident. That’s what they were calling it. An incident, like a spilled coffee or a paper jam. Not a catastrophic failure born of their greed and incompetence.

“There’s nothing to discuss,” I rasped, my voice a stranger’s. “Chloe overrode the safety protocols. You and Julian authorized it.”

Arthur opened his portfolio, his movements precise and unhurried. He slid out a sheaf of papers. “The preliminary findings from the independent safety audit tell a different story. They suggest a manual override of the core cooling system from a secondary terminal—your terminal, to be specific—minutes before the test. A desperate, unsanctioned attempt to push the parameters yourself, which led to the cascading failure.”

The lie was so audacious, so complete, it sucked the air from my lungs. They had already built their narrative. I wasn’t a victim; I was the saboteur. The rogue engineer who destroyed a multi-million-dollar prototype.

“That’s insane,” I whispered.

“It’s the official record,” my father said flatly. “And it’s the one V-Max will be presenting to the FIA and our insurers. Unless, of course, we can come to a more… discreet arrangement.”

This was the execution.

Arthur slid the papers closer to me. “This is a settlement agreement and a non-disclosure contract. In it, you voluntarily resign from V-Max, citing health reasons. You agree to a lifetime gag order regarding all proprietary V-Max technology, personnel, and internal procedures. You also cede all intellectual property claims to Project Chimera and any related designs conceived during your employment.”

He paused, letting the weight of the words sink in. “In exchange, V-Max will cover all of your medical expenses, past and future, and provide you with a generous severance package. We will also, naturally, amend the auditor’s report to reflect a simple, tragic equipment malfunction. No fault assigned.”

They weren’t just firing me. They were erasing me. Wiping my name from my own creations, burying my legacy under a mountain of legal bullshit, and buying my silence with the very money they owed me for my work.

And Julian? Where was Julian in all this?

As if on cue, the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, muted until now, caught my eye. A news ticker scrolled across the bottom of a financial channel. My father, seeing my gaze, picked up the remote and unmuted it.

There he was. Julian. Standing in front of the V-Max headquarters, looking every bit the stoic, grieving leader. And beside him, her arm tucked proprietorially in his, was Chloe. She had a small, photogenic bandage on her forehead and was dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.

“…a truly harrowing experience,” the reporter was saying, “but sources inside V-Max credit Ms. Sterling’s quick thinking under pressure with helping to evacuate key personnel and secure critical test data before the fire suppression system engaged. A real hero in a crisis.”

Chloe leaned into the microphone. “I just did what anyone would have done. My only thoughts were for the safety of the team and for… for Elara. We’re all praying for her swift recovery.”

The hypocrisy was a physical blow. I felt the bile rise in my throat. They were painting her as a hero on the bones of my career, using my near-death experience as a backdrop for her PR campaign. And Julian was standing right there, validating the lie with his silent, handsome presence.

That was it. The last ember of a foolish, decade-long loyalty flickered and died, leaving behind nothing but ice.

I turned my head back to the two men standing over my bed. I saw them clearly now. Not as my father and a colleague, but as predators who had cornered their wounded prey. They expected tears. They expected me to break, to sign anything just to make the pain stop.

They miscalculated.

“The severance,” I said, my voice quiet but steady. “How much?”

Arthur looked relieved. The easy win. “Five million. Tax-free.”

I almost laughed. Five million. A rounding error in their R&D budget. The price of my hands, my name, my future.

“No,” I said.

My father’s brow furrowed. “Don’t be difficult, Elara. It’s a generous offer.”

“It’s an insult.” I looked directly at Arthur Vance. “Here’s my counter-offer. Fifty million dollars. Wired to an offshore account of my choosing within the hour.”

Arthur choked on a laugh. “Ms. Rossi, that’s preposterous.”

“Is it?” I slowly, deliberately, pushed myself up higher on the pillows, the movement sending waves of agony up my arms. I let them see the wince of pain on my face. I let them see the sweat bead on my brow. “You are trying to bury a lead engineer who knows every dirty little secret about your non-compliant fuel mapping, your flexible bodywork, and the ‘glitch’ in last season’s telemetry that got your rival a penalty. You are trying to silence the one person who can prove that your new ‘hero,’ Chloe Sterling, is a data thief who nearly got us all killed.”

I held my bandaged hands up in the dim light. “And you are doing this while I am lying in a hospital bed, permanently disfigured because your golden boy chose a hard drive over my life. So no, Arthur, it’s not preposterous. It’s the price of my silence. It’s the cost of making your problem disappear completely.”

The room went silent, save for the steady beep of the heart monitor. My heart. Strong. Rhythmic. Full of a cold, new purpose.

My father stared at me, a flicker of something—was it shock? respect?—in his eyes before it was extinguished. He looked at Arthur. A silent, corporate negotiation passed between them.

Arthur sighed, a man defeated not by emotion but by pure, brutal risk assessment. He pulled out his phone. “I’ll need the account details.”

An hour later, a notification pinged on the secure messaging app on my hospital-issued tablet. A transfer of fifty million Swiss Francs was complete.

Arthur pushed the NDA and the pen toward me. “Your signature.”

I looked at the pen, then at my bandaged hands. “I can’t hold it.”

“A fingerprint will suffice for the digital copy. It’s legally binding.”

He held the tablet out. Using my uninjured elbow, I navigated to the signature field. With a deep breath, I pressed the tip of my bandaged right thumb onto the screen. The pain was blinding, a fresh wave of fire, and I felt moisture seep through the gauze. Blood.

The screen flashed green. *Signature Accepted.*

A buyout, signed in blood. My blood.

They left without another word. The deal was done. The asset was liquidated.

I waited until the sound of their footsteps faded completely. Then, I used my knuckles to painstakingly tap out a single, pre-arranged message on my tablet to a number not in my contacts.

*Marco. Phase Two. Now.*

Within twenty minutes, a new nurse came in. He was big, burly, with kind eyes I recognized from years in the V-Max machine shop. Marco. He checked my vitals, then leaned in close, his voice a low rumble. “Car is waiting at the service entrance. Private ambulance. The pilot is paid. Everything is ready, boss.”

He helped me into a wheelchair, covered me with a blanket, and wheeled me out through a series of staff corridors. No one looked twice. I was just another patient being transferred.

As we passed a window overlooking the front entrance, I saw the V-Max Rolls-Royce pulling away, my father and his lawyer disappearing back into their world of clean, bloodless transactions.

They thought they had bought my silence. They thought they had erased me.

They were wrong. They had just funded my war. As Marco loaded me into the back of the waiting ambulance, I looked at my bandaged hands, throbbing in the dim light. They were no longer a source of pain. They were a reminder. A promise.

By the time the sun rose over Geneva, Elara Rossi was gone. A medical transport manifest listed her as deceased en route to a specialist burn unit in Germany following sudden cardiac arrest.

But a woman with a new name and fifty million dollars in the bank was landing at a private clinic in the Swiss Alps, ready to rebuild. Not just her hands, but a machine of vengeance, piece by piece, schematic by b****y schematic.