For Laura, watching Luca lay everything out felt like being let into a secret. She found herself watching without pretending not to, drawn in totally. It had been a long time since anything felt engaging and fun, so this was an instant dopamine hit.

And Laura had always sensed a mystery behind Luca. She had been waiting for a chance to finally see what was underneath. Now, it was here, unfolded in front of her.

The photos were the most intriguing. They had clear signs of pocket wear with dog ears and creases, which strangely amplified the already grainy appearance of the picture itself. Some looked noisy, like they were taken from far away, and others looked fuzzy, like the shutter was clicked from a moving car.

They were professional images of people Laura didn’t recognize, but the Formula 1 context was impossible to miss. Men in oversized suits and 90’s hats, others in racing overalls, frozen mid-motion beside cars and pit lanes. She didn’t know many of them, but she recognized the billionaire, Mrs. Hawthorne, as well as anyone who’d seen her smile before.

"Hmm," Laura hummed, her hands on a piece of paper.

They and the files were much harder to make sense of.

It was a combination of different paper sizes shoved together. From her angle, all she could see were thick black bars for their headings, and the dim library light made the lines look like deep holes on the paper.

Rusty-looking binder clips held similar documents together. Still, it was a blurry code at every angle and a wall of text when the eyes are far. Worse, there were some scribbled notes with Luca’s handwriting. Laura tried understanding them on the spot, but the technical jargon was too overwhelming.

In general, it looked like the work of someone who hadn’t slept in three days.

Note overload. Crumpling. Cancelling. Circling. Webbing.

A scary mix.

Laura looked at Luca’s face, trying to see if he was actually made of the same stuff as everyone else.

Two days ago, he had won a major race, a turning point that might have very well sealed his championship win. That was the kind of thing that makes most people go crazy with celebrations for two weeks in a row.

Other drivers would be out at the clubs, spray-painting the town their colors, or at least asleep from the exhaustion. But here Luca was, hunched over a table of old newspapers and blurry photos at ten at night.

He wasn’t acting like a winner. He was acting like a man yet to fulfill something.

Maybe he was just so used to standing on podiums now that the thrill had worn off, or maybe whatever he was looking for in those files was just way more important than a trophy.

Laura figured it right.

’What is she doing?’

Luca’s eyes lifted briefly from the spread, and he caught Laura red-handed.

She had moved closer to the data than expected. Not just standing—leaning. Leaning in even closer than he was, her curious eyes darting across the papers like she was trying to memorize every secret.

She was so focused, she hadn’t realized how close she’d gotten until she felt his gaze on her.

As soon as Laura saw Luca looking, she snapped back, drew away, and felt totally exposed and embarrassed for being so nosy.

Without saying a single word to explain herself, she gathered her stack of books against her chest and turned around. She didn’t wait for him to ask what she was doing or why she was staring. She just walked right out of the library, leaving only the quiet thud of her footsteps behind.

Luca, who watched her go, turned his attention back to the table. He needed to lock in.

Tomorrow would be a nightmare. He had an 8 AM debrief with the engineers, followed by a sponsorhip meeting at noon, a visit to a karting academy, and a visit to Orchin Pro, a tech-simulating company here in Azerbaijan. His schedule was a cage, and if he didn’t find a breakthrough tonight, the momentum would slip through his fingers.

Luca was sure it was these exact tight schedules that usually kept him from the truth, but tonight, he felt like he was standing on the edge of something massive.

Luca was 100% sure that the glitz and glamour of the F1 paddock was just a veil covering a much darker, more complicated web of connections. Everything was tied together, and he just had to find the right thread to pull.

About two months ago, he’d made a solid lead: Margarett was related to his father.

It sent a chill down his spine.

And of course, his father hadn’t just been any driver. He raced for Nevada, a Ferrari team. But more importantly, Aldo was the first man to ever pilot a car with the HiCE engine, the very piece of technology that had ultimately killed him.

And all these cross-linkings weren’t accidents.

It was eerie how they lined up.

From the newspapers and past information he had struggled to acquire and piece together, Luca had learnt that Ferrari and Red Bull were in a similar battle back then. But the fight was for innovation and dominance.

It reminded him of the US and the Soviet Union racing to the moon.

It wasn’t about the sport; it was about who could achieve dominance before the game evolved to the next generation.

Hence, the High-Intensity Combustion Engine concept was a result of war-based innovation. If this were the space race, then Luca’s father was the Apollo 1 crew.

Like those astronauts who died in a cockpit fire during a test, Aldo had been the one inside the machine when the ambition became too dangerous. Luca couldn’t prove if his father knew about the corporate schemes, but he knew one thing for sure: his old man wanted that engine upgrade.

He wanted the speed.

Because of that, Luca knew he couldn’t really blame anyone else for the tragedy. Aldo had been chasing the moon, too.