Page 15 of Flat Out
I choked on my smoothie just as the group chat lit up with a text.
Marco
@Callum, she means you.
No shit.
Marco
HE LIVES. DUBOIS, COME GET YOUR MAN.
Kimi
Do I need to remind you that she's not only in a live interview but also NOT seeing Callum after what he did…
Don't need the reminder when I miss the fuck out of her all the time.
My heart raced, and still, somehow, we hadn’t gotten to the hard questions yet.
Ava's tone shifted into something more serious. “Okay. Jokes aside, we’ve seen the timeline. We know what happened on-track. But off-track, you’ve made headlines for more than just your driving.”
Aurélie’s smile turned cold. Beautiful as ever, but ice cold. “You mean the part where I was told to smile and stay quiet? Where I was nearly disqualified from racing for trying to help a man who was almost killed?”
My breath stuttered. She said it as if it was nothing, as if it wasn’t the moment she broke every rule to get to me.
Ava nodded slowly. “Let’s start there.”
Aurélie's hands tightened in her lap, her knuckles turning white, but her voice was even and calm—way too fucking calm. “I brought to them, inperson, documented, corroborated evidence of sabotage on the grid. They told me it was locker room talk, not solid enough. At least, not until it impacted someone they deemed important: their golden four-time world champion. Not exactly a driver they can ignore.”
God. She was talking aboutme.On a live interview, with malice and fury.
“The system is broken,” she continued. “And I’m not the first woman in this sport to say it, but I might be the loudest onethey didn’t expect because I've spent years being a perfectly PR-trained good girl in the public eye.”
The crowd didn’t breathe.
Neither did I.
Ava whispered, “They fined you fifty-thousand euros.”
Aurélie gave a sweet little shrug that made me ache to hold her. “Luckily, my Ferrari contract will pay me well next year. Luminis could've fought harder for me, so I consider it a down payment on change.”
Jesus Christ.She was taking no prisoners. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Marco texted something incoherent in the group chat, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen long enough to respond. She was lighting them up.
And then I realized she'd just announced to the whole fucking world about signing with Ferrari. She'd kept it under wraps until the perfect moment.
“And it’s not just the FIA,” she said, tone tightening. “It’s the culture. The comments. The way we’re measured by our appearance before we’re allowed to speak.”
Ava’s voice dropped. “You’ve said in the past that this started long before Formula 1.”
“Yeah. Since I was a teenager, maybe younger. I was groomed by my coach when I was fifteen. Flirted with. Controlled. Told what to wear, how to smile, how to make sponsors comfortable. Constantly told I was mature for my age and to ignore lingering stares and passive touching.”
I gripped my comforter so hard my knuckles popped. I wanted to throw something, drive something, fuckingprotecther from everything she’d already lived through. I saw red, and it had abso-fucking-lutelynothingto do with the concussion.
“Santino?” Ava asked gently.
Aurélie paused. “He wasn’t the only one.”
My whole body locked. Jesus, she was going to come clean about him and paint him to be the predator he was.
