Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The room they gave Kimi was wrong in the quiet way a smile is wrong on a corpse. It had the chill of new paint and bad intentions. White walls that pretended to be clean, a white rug that swallowed footfalls, a white table that reflected the light in a way that made his eyes ache. No bars. No chains. The absence was a performance. A single glass of water sat centered with mathematical precision. Beside it lay a gardenia blooming like a bruise against all that whiteness. The fragrance did not belong to this air. It was the kind of flower you placed near silk and old silver at long dinners where men lied through their teeth and called it diplomacy.

He did what Oliver had drilled into him for nights when old terrors woke in new clothes. Give fear a shape. Name it, count it, measure it. If it has edges, it can cut you, but it can also be held.

Six steps to the door. Seven and a half to the far wall. Three to the table. One to the chair if he let the backs of his knees fold and pretended to sit, two if he claimed the seat like a throne. Vent above the bathroom door, not the ceiling, a raspy hum that did not vary with temperature, constant. Camera nowhere obvious, so it sat behind glass or in the seam where paint met plaster with too much enthusiasm. He slid his gaze along every corner, every plane. When he closed his eyes to rest the sting of the white, he listened harder. Through the hush he found a thing he could use, faint enough he wondered if he had invented it, the smallest human sound, carried thin along metal, a breath that did not belong to him.

He pressed his thumb to his pulse to steady the count. It raced. He let it. He did not reprimand his body for wanting to run. He thought of last afternoon in Max’s study, the warm sprawl of wood and books and the ash of a candle Max would not throw away because Charles liked the smell. He thought of Oliver’s hands, large and careful, cupping his face like a reliquary, his husband mouth soft at the corner because he was trying not to smile and failing, promising, “Tonight. We will talk, we’ll finally sleep again in each other’s arms.” “I will be there.” Kimi had left with the taste of that promise on his tongue, the bitter taste, he didn’t come back. They clawed up now, raw and tender.

“Ti amo. Dio mio, ti amo, Oliver. You have given me your words ans ever since my life looked worth living. I am yours, and you are mine, and I forgot to say it out loud.”

The lock clicked. The sound was not loud. It was final.

Toto Wolff entered as if time were something his family had bought a majority share in. Immaculate suit, dark enough to drink any stain. The cuffs flashed discreet wealth. In one hand he balanced a velvet box as if he were about to make a presentation at dinner, as if the blood outside the door belonged only to servants on a bad night. His smile had been drawn with a ruler and then taped in place. He set the box on the table with an air of generosity and did not sit.

“Good evening, Andrea,” he said, voice dipped in honey left too long in the sun, viscosity turned rancid by heat.
When he saw that Kimi refused to speak he continued talking “Did you really think running would take you anywhere. You have always been a little thing that believes in miracles. It only made me want you more, my sweet. Your father sold you to me years ago. You are my property. I always collect my debts. I collect them with interest when they look this exquisite.”

Kimi refused to gift a sound to that speech. Oliver would tell him, starve the poison. He gave Toto a gaze he had learned from Max, the kind that told men they had made a mistake they would not be allowed to correct. It slid off Toto’s suit like oil from marble.

“My wife should drink,” Toto said, and he nudged the glass with his knuckle as if they were in a hotel suite between a conference and a gala, as if the gardenia and the glass and the soft rug were not another kind of chain.

“I am not your anything,” Kimi said. The words emerged dry and cracked, but they came. “I am Oliver Verstappen Leclerc’s. In all the ways that count. By blood and by law of my house.” He lifted his chin and bared his throat, not as surrender, as testimony. The thin faint line rested there where jaw met softness, the line Oliver had drawn in blood with Kimi’s hand under his, whispering the vow between them while guns shook in other hands.

Toto’s gaze pinned to that place like a nail. He stepped close enough that Kimi smelled expensive cologne cut with cold metal, that false mix of old world and factory floor. Two fingers trailed the scar as if assessing a purchase. The touch felt like a glove of ice. Kimi refused to move, refused to give the body a flinch. He imagined instead Oliver’s thumb there, warm and reverent, how Oliver would never take, always ask, always wait for a yes like it mattered more than the answer.

“A pretty mark,” Toto murmured, eyes never rising to meet Kimi’s. “Thin bones. Easy to break. But I am a forgiving master when my wife forgets herself. Once.” His other hand settled on Kimi’s waist. The palm lay flat and heavy, not stroking, not squeezing to bruise, proprietorial. Possession is a temperature as much as a force. He applied it as if stamping wax, as if pressing a seal. A slow squeeze followed, not painful, deep enough that Kimi knew he would feel the print hours from now and want to scrub it away with hot water and a clean shirt he owned.

“That boy could not protect you,” Toto added, tone almost wistful. “Do you know why. He is a boy. He plays at the next head of house while men do work. He is twenty. I have thirty years on him, and the thirty came with lessons he will not live to learn. I know how to tame my lovers. That is why you will not leave me. You will be mine, wife, from now and for as long as I care to look at you.”

Bile lifted, burning, a tide pushing up Kimi’s throat. He kept his stance. He made roots out of his feet and ran them into the rug. He put Oliver’s hands over Toto’s in his mind, remapping touch, replacing it. He pictured the morning glare through their bedroom curtains, Oliver’s mouth at Kimi’s nape, the way he laughed into Kimi’s skin when Kimi called him an idiot. He taught his body to remember that one. He let it drown out this one.

“You will learn to answer when your husband speaks,” Toto said. The word husband in his mouth fell like a stain that kept spreading no matter how you scrubbed.

“My husband’s name is Oliver,” Kimi answered. “He doesn’t own me because I’m not a cattle up for sale, but if he entertained the idea even a little it’s because I gave myself to him. Because I chose him. Because I bled for him and he bled for me. Your hands cannot touch that. I will never be yours.”

The line of Toto’s smile did not move. Power that old did not bother with expressions. His thumb pressed for a second at the notch in Kimi’s throat, firm enough to command a swallow. Kimi swallowed because swallowing proves you still own your throat. Toto stepped back as if he were indulging a skittish colt that would eventually be broken to bridle. “We will see how long choice matters,” he said. “I like it when my wives are feisty. It makes the taming worth the time.” He straightened the velvet box with two fingers until it sat perfectly parallel with the glass. “Tonight you will be quiet, Andrea. Tomorrow we will discuss your duties.”

He did not look back when he left. He never did. The door sealed. The white hum returned, the same volume as before, the same pitch, a lie of continuity.

Kimi stood until his knees forgot the choreography. The chair took him before the floor could. He stared at the gardenia. Too white. Too pure in a room smirched with purpose. He had to put a hand over his mouth because his body wanted to heave poison up and there was none to give. He could still feel the print on his waist where that filthy hand had sat. He could still feel the cold at his throat and wanted to pull at his skin to remove it like a collar. He wanted a shower that scrubbed to bone. He wanted Oliver’s voice in his ear, rough hand on his shoulder and to crawl under their covers and press his ear to Oliver’s heartbeat until the room stopped pretending to be anything but a box.

He left a thing for Oliver because if Oliver ever walked this room with his eyes, he would do it in a way that noticed. He slipped the red thread bracelet from his wrist, the one Oliver had tied there standing under the lemon trees at the manor when nobody else had been watching, he tied three small knots with careful fingers, one, four, three, and looped it back on tighter. He took it off again and tucked the knotted portion under the lip of the vent grate where metal wanted to catch wool. If Oliver saw this place, he would see that before he saw Kimi. I love you. Alive. North vent.

He lifted the gardenia and plucked three petals. He folded them into a heart, clumsy because his hands shook, and slid the heart under the rim of the water glass. The weight made a halo on the white. Oliver would pretend not to look for hearts. He always looked.

He turned the glass a half inch so the mouth faced the vent and not the camera’s wall. He placed the velvet box on the other side of the glass and angled its edge by a degree so that anyone who understood him would know that this was not gift, it was threat, and he refused it.

He moved to the narrow bed tucked like an apology into the far corner. He peeled back the thin mattress and found staples that had been hammered carelessly along the underside. One staple wobbled when he worried it with a nail. He pried it free and tucked it under the edge of the baseboard where the rug folded under. Broken metal can become a tool if you teach it to. He slid two slivers of gardenia stem alongside the bed frame where paint had bubbled. Green on white. Oliver would see it in footage if footage ever left this house. He would laugh at Kimi’s stubborn romance and then cry alone where no one could see him do it.

“Andrea,” the vent breathed. So faint he thought he had invented it again. He pressed both hands to the paint around the grate and leaned his forehead there and tried not to shake the wall.

“Papa,” Kimi whispered. “Papa, is it really you?”

For a second there was only the hum. Then, soft as breath over skin, “Oh, mon bébé, c’est moi.” Charles’s tone poured over him like a blanket that had been left on a radiator for just long enough to be warm without scalding. “There you are. That is a good boy. Breathe with me, bébé. In. Out. Again. Tell me.”

“ I-I’m ashamed, Papa, h-he…” Kimi let out a shaky breath feeling disgusting.

“ Bébé, hey, calm down it’s okay, it’s okay. Tell me when you are ready.”

“He,” Kimi swallowed, felt the edge of glass on the way down, “he put his hands on me. He called me his w-wife. He told me he’s going to collect his debt and he will tame me. He touched my throat where Oliver marked me. He touched my waist. I told him I belong to Oliver, I swear I did! I told him he cannot own what is already spoken for. I can still feel him. I can still feel him and I want to tear my skin off.” babbled Kimi words barely making sense.

“Oh, mon garçon,” Charles said. The love in the words did not tremble. It was the kind of love that wears armor under a coat. “My brave, loyal boy. Listen to me. He can say whatever he wants, he can touch your skin but it doesn’t mean anything. I know it’s not what you want to hear and if I had been there I would have torn his hands apart for daring to put his hands on you. But, Kimi, you have to listen to me, are you listening?”

“ Si, Papa, I’m listening, I’m here.” whispered Kimi back.

“ You have to stay still when he does those despicable things, you have to dissociate in that moment because we don’t have weapons, we can’t fight him like this. The only weapon we have is our minds, go in a far corner of it and lock yourself there, try to not give him a response he loves the fear he inflicts on people, don’t give him satisfaction. When he touches you he touches a shell. Inside, you are already occupied. Your heart is wearing Oliver’s hands. He cannot get in. He cannot. Do you understand me?”

Kimi melted against the wall because the body knows when a voice tells truth. Tears came, stubborn and hot. He let them. He did not bother to hide them from the camera he could not see. “Yes, Papa,” he whispered. “I understand.”

“Good,” Charles said, and Kimi heard the smile ghost through the duct like a secret. “Now you do what we do. You are very clever. You leave what can be found. You keep breathing. When you need to, you think of Oliver’s hands, not his. Think of how gentle he is with you. Think of how he would refuse to speak for a whole day if he ever frightened you, even by accident.”

Kimi let out a sound that tried to be a sob and a laugh and did both badly. “I did not tell him,” he said, small as he felt. “I did not say it back that afternoon. I wanted to. I thought I would have later, I tought we had more time. I want him. I want my husband.”

“He knows,” Charles said. “And you will tell him yourself. Very soon.”

Kimi pressed his cheek to the paint until it cooled the heat there. He told Charles about the vent, the knots, the gardenia heart, the staple he had stolen from the bed, the glass turned toward the vent and away from the invisible eye. He listed them because listing turned panic into plan. Charles listened and hummed once when he approved, low in his throat. He promised his son in law everything he could so that his breathing would turn to normal, so that Kimi could finally stop crying.

~~~~

The concrete tasted like filth and damp and the burned sweetness of his own breath. Lando woke into it for the third time, or the thirtieth, time had folded down to a thin sliver and kept cutting him on the same edge. His shoulder rode the wall, his bad side rode fire. The bandage had been wrapped with insult instead of care, tight enough to stop a river, not clever enough to respect ribs. He lay still because stillness made the pain feel just a little less intense. He thought if he could keep it as that, he could step over it.

There was a vent set into the wall not far from his face, a square mouth clogged with old air. It hummed in fits, an old machine resenting duty. When it was quiet the whole building felt like something dead in winter. When it coughed to life, the sound threaded a path he could follow with his mind to keep from floating away.

“I finally asked you and you said yes, you muppet,” he told Oscar in his head, because talking made the room less cruel, because that was the only room he trusted not to spy on him. “You hear me. I said yes, you said yes. You’re stuck with me. I’m going to come back to you, Osc, I promise. We have coffee to ruin and a plant to kill twice. We-we have to get married, I’m not leaving this earth without having you as my husband, that’s a promise.” he made that vow to himself, he would do anything to survive for his boy.

The vent hummed, coughed, died. He put two fingers to the concrete and tapped once so the world would know he was still here.

“Lando,” Kimi breathed through the metal, voice small and fierce at once, “Lando, can you hear me?”

Two taps. Then, because he needed it to mean more than Here, he let his nail tick the seam again. Here. Here. I’m here Andrea, God how happy I am to hear your voice.

“Okay,” Kimi whispered, relief breaking and remaking him in the same syllable, “okay, it’s me, Andrea. You are going to be okay. Do you hear me. You are not alone.”

The pain cracked and hissed when he tried to speak. He swallowed hard and gave the words as if they cost nothing. “High on the side,” he rasped, more air than voice, “bandage tight. Burns.”

“You are alive,” Kimi said, and Lando felt something unclench in both their chests, “you are alive, fratello. Listen. You have to stay awake and you’re not making much sense so please, please stay awake. Think about Oscar. Think about how he said yes. Think about his hands when he puts your ring on. Think about the way he looks at you when the world goes quiet. Tell yourself you have to get back to that.”

And Lando wanted to laugh that’s what he has been doing, imagining Oscar right there next to him, his face his touch. He could almost feel him laying down next to him, head hurried under his chin.

“ Lando? Lando can you stay with me please?” Kimi kept talking like a rope, hand over hand, drawing Lando closer to the surface. “Oscar is the only good man I met before this family, before I met you guys,” he said. “He saved me once, I think I told you. Before we all… before Monaco, before Oliver. He pulled me out of a very ugly night. He will pull you out of this one too. He always comes. He’s probably planning how to kill Toto in five different ways all extremely painful.”

Lando made a wet little sound that wanted to be a laugh. The vent let it out and thinned it. The fan coughed, wound up, cut off. He matched the cycle with his breath until breath turned into numbers and numbers turned into calm.

“Andrea, tell me something,” Lando said, and he did not know whether he had said it aloud or if the vent had learned to carry thought.

“ What? What do you want to know?” whispered Kimi right back.

“ Anything, talk about anything, tell me something stupid.”

Kimi accepted the assignment like a lifeline. He talked about the suit rehearsal that went wrong when Oscar tripped over the trailing end of Charles’s scarf and tried to pretend he had meant to bow, how they all laughed until tears sprung from their eyes. He talked about Oliver watching people sleep as if it were a job, not a compulsion, the way Oliver counted eyelashes as if they were a code to crack, the way he touched Kimi’s knuckles like prayer beads when Kimi’s hands shook after a nightmare. He talked about Max’s terrible pancakes, how Max burned them in a way almost artistic, how Charles always burned his mouth anyway on syrup because he wanted to prove the ritual mattered more than pain. “He goes ‘ah’ like a little yelp,” Kimi said, fond, and Lando saw the scene so cleanly his throat went hot.

Every so often, Lando tapped one for still here, two for hurts, three for Oscar. When the pain sent him drifting, Kimi kept talking without him the way you keep hold of someone’s hand even when their head goes under for a second and you pretend it did not.

On the other side of a different wall the duct shifted its breath. A latch rolled. Boots. The click of a door. The tenor of the air changed and Lando felt it even down here in concrete. He heard Charles’s voice, not words, tone, a bow put away, glass laid out.

“Whatever comes, mon cœur,” Charles said, and Lando could picture his mouth as he said it, the way it tightened when he pulled fury back on a leash, “we breathe.”

A pause. The scrape of shoe leather on the cheap polish of a floor that considered itself expensive. Then Toto again, the syllables of his voice polished and clean, the kind of clean that never touches water. “Monsieur Leclerc,” he said, as if greeting a guest to the opera. “It has been too long.”

“Toto,” Charles answered, in that mild tone he saved for men who mistook his quiet facade for submission. “You look the same.”

Toto paced around Charles’s air the way a buyer walks the perimeter of a piece of art he cannot afford but wants to own as a trophy. “When you were young,” he said, and he wore the words like a compliment he did not grant freely, “I used to watch you, so beautiful, so soft. Principessa di Monaco. You would have made a perfect wife. Until you married the brute. Marriage will do that. Harden a man.”

Silence stretched thin. Lando held very still, waiting for the move he could trust. He did not have to wait long.

“Being Max’s husband gave me everything I needed,” Charles said, and his voice wrapped around the words like an oath already sworn. “It taught me who I am. It taught everyone else what I will do to protect my family.”

“Family,” Toto repeated, almost affectionate. Papers rustled like skin. “Which is why I have a practical solution. Annul the blood oath your boy made with my promised. Quietly. You are a man of forms. Nullify it and I will take Andrea in name and in law and we avoid spectacle.”

In the white room Kimi’s stomach turned. Lando could feel the wave of it through the duct like the way you feel thunder in your own ribs when a storm is very close. He pressed his fingertips harder to the floor and tapped once, just to send back the thing he had to give.

Charles inhaled. The building heard it and learned what steel sounded like.

“Go fuck yourself,” Charles said, with the measured calm he used when he ordered tea “You are right about one thing,” Charles said. “I do have a taste for forms. I am going to use them to register your house a graveyard. When my husband arrives, you will have to make a choice very quickly. It will not matter which one you make because his going to tear you to pieces.”

“I confess, I never pitied Verstappen until now. To carry a wife who answers back, what a burden. And now you teach my wife to do the same. Andrea speaks with your pretty mouth. I will teach him how to close it, he will be put in his place. Do you know he shivered when I touched his throat. Like a skittish colt.”

“Touch him again,” Charles said, and he did not raise his voice, the temperature of it was the threat, old and careful, “and I will pull your eyes out with my hands.”

Toto’s shoes pivoted. “We will speak soon, I enjoyed playing with you my dear,” he said, as if scheduling, and left. The lock made a polite sound. The room held its breath and then let it out.

“ Papa?! Papa are you okay?” Kimi’s voice felt like a benediction after Toto’s.

“ Hey, hey, I’m okay, everything is fine. He doesn’t scare me, he disgusts me. I feel sick hearing him talk about you like that, mon bebe. But you have to know, Kimi, I’d rather die than let him have you so don’t think about that, ok?”

“ O-ok, yes, I trust you, Dio, I’m so happy I have you on my side Papa and Lando too. I don’t know how I would have survived alone in here.”

“ You’re not alone, you’re right. You have us. How is Lando? Has he said anything?”

“ Lando? Lando can you hear me?” Kimi’s voice felt raw and as the seconds ticked and he didn’t hear anything, not even taps coming trough Kimi started to panick. “ LAN? Lando please, you can’t fall asleep, please, please-“

“ Bebe? He’s not answering is he? Merde!”

Lando closed his eyes. He let the breath count him in and out. He kept his fingers near the seam and tapped one when the dark tried to unmake him. He would learn the guard’s footsteps. He would learn the schedule of lights. He would learn where the bolt gave and where it didn’t. He would save his anger because it was a tool, not a flood. He would let Kimi lace his head with story and let Charles weight the room with presence. He would keep saying yes to a man who could not hear him yet and trust that the yes would carry. He heard them, heard Kimi’s pleas and felt Charles’ worry? but the sleep pulled him tight under.

He did not break. He refused the room that pleasure. He made the pain into a line and stepped over it again and again. He counted the seconds. He measured the distance to the vent with the length of his forearm twice and the last knuckle once and he smiled because Oliver would mock him for that when he confessed it later. He would survive, he swore it to himself, he would be back into the arms of the man he loves.

~~~~

The file landed without a whisper. No subject line. No sender. Just a single attachment sitting at the bottom of the inbox like a dead thing waiting to be found.

housekeeping.mp4.

Lewis opened it. He didn’t ask permission. Just clicked, jaw tight, the scar at his temple a livid stripe of restraint. The room had gone quiet the moment they’d seen it, like something in the walls recognized what was coming.

They were all there. They’d been waiting in silence so thick it tasted like rust on the tongue.

Carlos paced the perimeter like a wolf who’d already scented blood. Sebastian stood stone-still, both palms braced against the table as if holding himself down was the only way he wouldn’t combust. Max stood behind the desk like a statue chiseled from wrath, chin high, one hand clenched at the edge of the marble. Oscar didn’t sit. He never had, not since they’d vanished. He stood just behind Max’s left shoulder, one hand resting on his father’s back like he could stop him from flying apart just by touching bone.

Ollie was by the monitors. Eyes open, lashes still. His breathing was soundless. His pupils had narrowed like a hawk’s.

Then the video began.

No introduction. No voiceover. No preamble.

Just a hallway. Narrow. Dirty. The kind of fluorescent overhead lighting that made shadows stretch too long and walls look diseased.

Three doors. And time.

Lando came first. Dragged between two guards, neither of whom flinched when he kicked. He got one of them good—a hard, desperate knee to the groin that made the man grunt. For half a second, Ollie thought maybe, maybe he was going to make it out.

Then the other one elbowed him in the side, sharp and fast. The side he was shot in. Those fucking bastards.

Lando folded. Sound caught in his throat. He didn’t scream—he just sagged. Something about that silence made the scream worse.

Oscar’s breath stuttered, chest jerking. He didn’t say anything. His mouth opened, and Lando’s name dropped out in a whisper so small it vanished before it reached the floor.

Then came Kimi.

He was upright. Walking. One man had his hand gripped high on Kimi’s bicep, the other pressing between his shoulder blades, the angle obscene. Kimi fought, of course he did—twisted like something born wild. Then the taller guard leaned down and whispered something low into his ear.

The effect was immediate. Kimi froze. Every muscle. Froze like a child taught that movement brings pain. The second hand slid along his waist as they shoved him toward the center door.

Ollie’s throat closed. He couldn’t move. He felt everything in him still, lock, and brace. His fingertips went cold. His body knew what his mind refused to understand: that someone had touched his husband. Touched him like he owned him.

Sebastian swore. It wasn’t soft. It tore out of him in a guttural German snarl that made Lewis’s eyes flick to him, just once. Carlos, who had finally stopped pacing, struck the wall with an open palm.

Once. Twice.

The sound was sickeningly human. Skin on concrete. Something red bloomed and left a smear.

The video didn’t care.

Then came Charles.

He wasn’t dragged. He walked.

No one touched him, but two men flanked him like a threat they still hadn’t measured properly. He moved like ice poured into a mold. Elegant. Controlled. His head turned just slightly as he passed the camera, revealing the soft lines of his cheek.

But Ollie saw the tightness in his jaw. The dangerous angle. That wasn’t a calm man.

That was murder in progress.

The camera feed cut to black.

No credits. No time-stamp. No audio watermark. Just void.

“Bastards,” Lewis whispered. No inflection. Just violence folded into a single syllable.

Max didn’t speak. His exhale sounded like it could split the air in two.

Oscar’s hand slipped down from his father’s shoulder and curled into a fist at his own chest. He was shaking, but only slightly, like the edge of a blade rattling before it split a body clean.

Ollie hadn’t moved.

He hit rewind.

Again. And again.

The screen flickered. Shadows walked and fell. Pain played on repeat.

But Ollie wasn’t watching pain. Not the same way the rest of them were.

He was listening. He was measuring.

The camera hum had a pitch. He caught it.

The light buzz wasn’t standard. He filed it.

There was a faint second sound in the background—low, guttural, rhythmic.

“Basement pump,” he said quietly, not to them, not yet. “Old model. Not office. Somewhere with groundwater.”

His voice snapped them to attention.

“Ollie,” Max started, reaching slightly forward.

Ollie lifted one hand without turning. Not refusal. Not rebellion. Just absolute certainty.

“Dad. Please. If I can only just-“

His voice was so steady it felt cold.

This was the thing he could do. He can hack into the cameras live feed, he knows it.

They had been taken.

Now it was Ollie’s turn to do something about it.

He slid to the keyboard. Monitors shifted. Windows opened and closed. Code flickered like fire across his retinas.

He was looking for handprints. Residue. Carelessness.

He found it.

Watermark firmware left by a lazy upload process. A VLAN hop that wasn’t sanitized. A secondary port that someone forgot to shut after exporting the video for humiliation.

He tunneled. Spoofed credentials from a salted domain and slipped in like blood down a drain. One of the monitors blinked to static. Then gray. Then light.

Then video.

A grid.

Sixteen feeds. Four already black. One static. Eleven live.

Ollie’s hands moved without hesitation. He tapped one quadrant. Expanded. Punched the resolution.

A room blinked into view.

Kimi.

Cross-legged on a cheap cream rug. Shoulders curved in that telltale way that meant his ribs ached, or he was pretending not to cry. He’d taken a white shirt—his own? Charles’s?—and twisted it into a perfect O, gardenia threaded through the center like it belonged there.

A water glass sat near the lens.

Letters ghosted across the glass, written in reverse from the inside.

I LOVE YOU.

Ollie choked. His mouth opened but nothing came. His hands didn’t falter. He cataloged it. The glass. The rug. The stitching on the corner of the curtain—Italian linen. He mapped every visible point of ingress. Every camera angle. The ratio of light to shadow.

Then he kept going.

Next feed. Empty room. Bolted chair. Carafe placed perfectly at a seam in the table. Every object aligned with brutal precision.

“Charles,” Sebastian said, barely a whisper. “That’s his hand.”

They all knew it. The symmetry. The control.

Ollie logged the camera number. Moved again.

Next feed.

Lando.

On the floor.

One arm around his ribs. The other dragging a finger slowly across the baseboard.

Two circles. Overlapping. The smallest edge of a third.

The symbol for home. For Verstappen-Leclerc. For “we’re alive.”

Oscar made a sound that wasn’t a sob but came from the same place. His whole body had curled slightly forward, like he needed to shield Lando from pain across a screen.

Carlos turned away from the wall and dropped his bleeding palm flat on the desk. “They’re sending messages.”

Ollie nodded. His voice had changed. It wasn’t robotic. It wasn’t even cold.

It was clinical. Autopsic.

“They know I’m watching.”

He looked up, just once. His eyes were red.

“I’m going to find them.”

No one said anything.

He turned back to the screens. Zoomed in on Lando’s wall. Shifted pixels. Isolated color bleed. Then he paused.

Kimi’s room again.

Napkin in the background.

Knots.

Five. Then one. Then two.

Morse.

Charles’s feed—numbers drawn in fog on his cufflink glass. One faded faster. Breath patterns. A countdown.

“I know what you’re doing,” Ollie whispered. “I see you.”

The room was dead silent. Only the fans, whirring from three different rooms, in three different rhythms.

Their boys.

Their heart.

Their reason.

Ollie looked at all of them—his family.

Then back at the screen.

“I found you.”

It came out like a promise. Like an oath.

“Now I just need your coordinates.”

His fingers danced.

“I’m coming.”

And then, so softly it barely registered:

“Your family’s coming.” And he would not stop until the world burned or they came home. Whichever came first.

~~~~

The first game arrived on a silver tray.

No guard entered. No voice or cleared throat in the doorway. Each door sighed open halfway on a polite breath and stopped, like a host pausing to let a guest admire the room. A low trolley nosed in and nudged, gentle and obscene, the toe of Charles’s polished shoe, the leg of Kimi’s chair, the heel of Lando’s bare foot where he lay curled against concrete.

There were three trays, three offerings, three little altars to control.

Kimi’s tray held a covered plate with condensation beading under the stainless dome, a place setting laid with unnecessary ceremony, a thin stemmed glass of water with a single convex bead trembling on its lip, and the velvet box from last night, unopened, patient as a threat that believes in itself.

Charles’s tray carried one thing that mattered and one thing that didn’t. The blanket was regulation grey, army thin, woven to itch, not to warm. The card was white, thick, and edged square for a camera to read easily. The words were machine neat. “CHOOSE WHO DESERVES THIS.” In the lower right, a red eye blinked like a toy.

Lando’s tray offered gauze, tape, a small bottle with a childproof cap, a preloaded syringe sunk in foam. No instructions except another white card printed with a smaller, meaner sentence. “AVAILABLE WHEN ANDREA DINES.”

The building didn’t crackle to speak. That would have spoiled the illusion. The intercom came on like a string quartet in a hotel lobby, warm and expensive and curated.

“Breakfast is served, Andrea,” Toto said, pitching Kimi’s name in a velveteen register that wanted to be mistaken for care. “Join your husband.”

The word cut Kimi from throat to ribs. He stared at the note with disgust. Antibiotics meant time, not mercy. Infection here would not be a fever, it would be a calendar with its days crossed out slowly. The idea of Lando burning while he sat in a chair set for two made Kimi’s stomach rock.

“Breathe, bébé,” Charles said through the vent. The voice came low, pared down to the scaffolding he used on fevers and night terrors. “In for six. Out for six. That’s it. Again.”

Kimi did it, cheeks hollowing, chest steadying, the water glass on his tray trembling anyway.

“Lando gets the medicine first,” he said to the ceiling, and hated that his voice shook and loved that the sentence stayed whole. “Then I’ll eat.”

“Such a loyal spouse for such a parasite like the Norris boy, you don’t know him that well-“Toto purred, the smile audible.

“I don’t care, give my brother the medicine first then I’ll eat whatever you want.”

“We will indulge you—once.” came Toto’s ugly timber trough the speakers.

In the concrete room two men entered with gloves, scrissors that kissed tape and not skin. Voices pitched to neutral.

They peeled back brown gauze and old blood and air touched Lando’s side like salt. He grunted, ground the sound between his teeth until copper bloomed under his tongue, and looked at the crack in the floor that ran from drain to wall because looking at their faces would make him do something stupid. The needle slid. Cold fire spiraled inward. He did not flinch. He counted. He tought of his Oscar smile. You have to survive, he told himself again and again.

They wrapped him tidy and tight, almost gentle. It was the gentleness that made his jaw lock until the muscle ached.

“ You should thank master Wolff for his kindness or else you’d be dead by night, you insect.” laughed one of the man looking down on Lando who only imagined how he’d gut them and pull out their hearts to chew on.

“ Fuck you and your master.” he said under his labored breath only managing to get himself kicked.

“Now then,” Toto said in all three rooms at once, the tone bright as china. “Andrea.”

Kimi stood because he had already decided what his fear was worth.

They had laid the white room as if for a seduction, which meant they had laid it as a weapon. Table squared to the camera. Two chairs too close. A fresh gardenia bleeding sweetness into the sterile air. No chain, because humiliation did the binding better.

Toto rose when Kimi entered. The suit was immaculate, the smile practiced, the eyes weighing, not admiring. He pulled Kimi’s chair out as if the noise the metal made on the floor were a kind of music. Kimi sat because there was a syringe given to Lando, a slight chance that they’ll get out of here.

Toto took the seat beside him rather than across. He did not touch the plate, did not touch Kimi, and still the room felt like his hands were everywhere. The covered dish lifted with a small showman’s flourish. A breakfast like you see in the movies where no character eats anything and they all play with the food, everything looked out of a home magazine but to Kimi it meant nothing, he would not enjoy having breakfast with this man in any shape or form.

“Eat,” Toto advised, conversational, boon companion, palm hovering near Kimi’s spine without landing. “A spouse must keep his strength. You’ll need it when you’re useful.”

Kimi picked up the fork. It clinked against porcelain because his hand shook once; then it didn’t. He lifted his fork and took a bite then another. He tried to keep it down even if bile was raising up by thinking of Ollie’s slightly burnt pancakes, by thinking of how Ollie would skip it all together, the breakfast, in favour for a black coffee and some reheated pizza while he plays with some codes. His smart man, his husband.

“I enjoy simple rhythms,” Toto murmured, companionable, eyes on Kimi’s throat like it was a clock. “Order suits you. Clear rules suit you. When I want obedience, I will open doors. When I want silence, I will close them. When I want you, you will be ready. It’s efficient. You’ll be grateful once you stop pretending you are special.”

Kimi swallowed the acid with the pancakes and smiled a small, bright, homicidal thing he had learned from watching Max. “I’m not pretending anything,” he said. “I belong to someone else who sees me as special and not only that but he treats me like I am special, but I wouldn’t imagine that you know how to do that.”

“Ah,” Toto said, delighted, as if a guest had complimented his wine. “The boy.”

“Oliver Verstappen-Leclerc, not the boy, he’s a man.” Kimi said carefully, because names cut when you sharpen them. “You know why I deeply want to get back in his arms?because I gave myself to him, so desperate to get away from you that I jumped into his arms willingly. I’m his by oath. By blood.” He tilted his chin and let the light find the faint mark where Oliver’s palm had pressed cut to cut and made a circle at Kimi’s throat. “I will die with this.” He showed his mark again in hopes that this monster would understand that he would never wear his.

Toto let the silence sit long enough for the camera to decide it was a choice and not an accident, then set two fingers at the point where the mark lived. He did not press hard. The gentleness was the ugliness. He traced the edge as if he were reading it, then rested his fingertips where Kimi’s pulse flared. Kimi kept his face in profile, angles clean, eyes averted, the way one learns to stand during royal charity visits and funerals. He made himself a line drawing. He gave the lens nothing but shape.

“So soft,” Toto mused, the compliment wrong in his mouth. “So elegantly made.” His hand slid from throat to jaw and closed, not cruel, calculated. Pain budded under Kimi’s chin, two small suns. “I am patient,” he said. “You’ll call me husband soon enough. You’ll call me everything I require, you’re mine after all.”

Kimi looked him dead in the eye with the steady contempt of a man who has been taught by gentlemen how to ruin a room with a raised eyebrow. “You’re not my husband,” he said. “In every way that counts, I am Oliver’s.”

Toto’s smile did not change. The temperature did. He released Kimi’s jaw like he was deciding not to break it. Then he shifted back to his hospitality trick, luring Kimi into a false sense of security. One fingertip traced the bow of Kimi’s mouth and didn’t touch at all. Kimi curled his hands into the napkin under the table to keep his fingers off the vein winding sweetly in Toto’s wrist.

“Open the present,” Toto said mildly, nodding to the velvet box.

Kimi cracked the lid. A thin white-gold chain lay on satin as if it had been born there. It could pass for delicate from far away. Kimi shut the lid.

“ Do you like it?”

“ I’ve had better gifts, thank you very much” said Kimi not withholding his contempt, the chain from Oliver stood at the base of his throat, he never took it off, he couldn’t.

“ Than I’ll just have to impress you further, I love a challenge my sweet.”

Under the table he knotted three tiny bumps into the napkin hem, small as teeth, one, four, three, and reversed the fold the way Oliver liked his handkerchiefs reversed—wrong to anyone else, a signal to him.

He ate because Lando had been given a syringe, and one bite had already bought them that, and another might buy them another hour without a fever. He kept eating until his hands stopped trembling. He kept his eyes on the plate so that when Toto’s palm set itself lightly at his waist for one breath and rolled his thumb a half-inch through fabric he did not flinch but catalogued, patient and clinical, where the print would sit and how long it would take to vanish.

They made a ritual out of it. Nine minutes. That’s all it took to disgust Kimi to his core.

Toto talked in polite future tense. You’ll rise when I enter. You’ll kneel when I ask. You’ll eat when I put food in front of you. You’ll sleep when I close your eyes. He spoke like a host drawing parallels between hotels and homes, between obedience and elegance, between captivity and good breeding. He never raised his voice because none of this was about anger. It was about appetite groomed into ideology. It was about that fucking hand that caressed his skin like he owned it, like he had the right.

Kimi let the words tap him like hail on a window. He thought about the scissors he would ask for at the first opportunity under some pretense of grooming. He thought about the length of the chain, how it would sit, where it would snag if a hand got under it at speed. He thought about Oliver’s laugh when he told this story wrong on purpose years from now in their kitchen with coffee steaming and the dog hair on the dark trousers and the ruined, blessed normalcy of it all. He thought about Lando counting breaths on the other side of a wall and made the fork lift again.

When he stood, the room tilted on an axis that was not the world’s and Toto steadied him by the shoulder as if the touch were a kindness. Kimi moved out of range so quickly the movement looked like grace.

“At dinner,” Toto said at the threshold, leaning in enough that Kimi felt breath, not enough to accuse the camera. “We’ll find your rhythm.”

“I already have one,” Kimi said lightly. “I intend to keep it.”

Toto laughed, genuine, and waved him away like a good sport.

Kimi waited until the door sealed and the white hum returned before he crossed to the sink and gripped porcelain and quietly emptied everything he had eaten. He did it with his back square to the camera, shoulders even, not hunching, a man rinsing his mouth after a meal, not a man heaving his stomach up on top of a terror. He washed his hands, folded the knotted napkin small and precise, and tucked it into the mattress seam where the stitching had been done in a hurry. He pressed his palm to the mark at his throat until heat rose. You belong to Oliver. No one gets in.

“ Petit Andrea, what happened baby? Are you okay?”

“ P-papa, it’s horrible. I want to fucking kill him, I hate the way he touches me, he’s not allowed, I don’t want him too. The only man allowed to touch me it’s Oliver and he just acts like I’m already his. He keeps bringing me presents, I don’t want any of them! Papa, I-I would rather kill myself than be his!”

Charles’s answer is like hot iron. “You listen to me, Andrea,” he murmurs. “ Never talk about taking your life away my petit, we’re going to get out of here you hear me? We never give up, we’re Verstappen Leclerc’s si?”

Kimi’s throat closes around a sob. He presses his forehead to the vent and imagines it as Charles’s shirt.

The intercom smooths in. CHOOSE WHO DESERVES THIS.

There’s a breath from Charles’s cell that is not quite a flinch. Toto doesn’t ask if—he demands which.

Kimi reacts first because love runs faster than shame. “Give it to Lando,” he blurts, panic cracking the words. “Please. He’s burning from the inside, he’s cold and I know it. He—he needs it.”

Thuds under Lando’s floor. He’s tapping No. It’s messy, desperate. He doesn’t want to be the reason Kimi freezes. He coughs hard enough to see sparks. He taps again anyway.

“ Papa, I will never forgive you, do you hear me? I’ll never forgive you, give it to Lando, please, give it to him!”

Charles shuts his eyes. When he opens them, his voice is cool enough to frost glass. “You will not make us barter love,” he tells the ceiling. “But if you force a triage, then I choose the wounded man. The blanket to my Lando.”

“Spoken like a commander,” Toto says, amused. “Or a coward.”

Kimi bites down on his knuckle until he tastes skin. “It’s okay, Papa,” he whispers when the locks click in Lando’s room. “He needs it more. Don’t feel guilty please, i would have done the same, I begged you to do it.”

Tears kiss the corners of Charles’s eyes and don’t fall. He swallows guilt like a stone and stores the hurt like a weapon. “You’re a good boy, such a good boy…” he says, the words so soft Kimi has to strain to hear them.

They draped the grey over Lando. It scratched. It smelled like metal and dust. He pulled it up to his chin because Oscar tucked blankets that way and if he did the same then something about the world might line back up. He pretended it smelled like clean cotton and citrus. After a minute of steady breath, it did.

“Tap if you get dizzy,” Kimi told him, voice to the vent, temple to paint. “I’ll keep you awake with the stupid story about how Ollie tried to make pancakes at three in the morning and nearly burned the manor.”

“Tell me now,” Lando whispered. He curled on his side under the scratch, pressed his ear to the wall, watched the two circles he had drawn gather dust and meaning. His mouth trembled once, then didn’t. “Please.”

So Kimi told it, not because the story mattered but because the sound did. He described flour on Oliver’s cheekbone like war paint, and Max padding in barefoot to confiscate the spatula with the sternness of a king addressing parliament, and Charles burning his tongue on a test bite and lying about it in three languages because pride is strange, and the smoke alarm that Lewis ripped off the ceiling because its shriek made Oscar’s hands shake. He told it in too much detail because detail was a rope. He left spaces for Lando’s taps, and when the rhythm faltered he filled it with the sound of his own breath and the repetition of a name like a psalm. He hid tears in the space between sentences where microphones won’t look.

Above them, Charles leaned his head back against white paint and spoke the way a man speaks when he refuses to let his voice tremble in the presence of an enemy.

“Petit Andrea,” he said into the vent after Kimi had finished the part of the story where the dog stole a pancake off a plate and Oliver chased it around the kitchen on absolute principle, “listen to me closely. You will eat only when it buys us something. You will drink only when your head needs it. You will not give him expressions. You will give him lines and angles. He cannot own what he cannot read.”

Kimi made a soft sound that could have been a laugh and could have been a sob. “Yes, Papa.”

“Lando,” Charles added, gentler, because Lando had always been gentler, the child in him loud even as a man, “Tell Lando we are here. We are here with you. Your family will come.”

Lando’s hand moved under the grey and tapped three, the little code they had made into prayer. For Oscar. For promise. For yes.

Across the hall in the room with the drain, Lando closed his eyes and pretended the soft scratch at his jaw was Oscar’s hair brushing his throat, the stupid too-long fringe he threatened to cut every spring. He said “yes” under the blanket again like a man says a creed, he tought about that morning again, the morning he waited his whole life for and how they took him before he could ask Oscar if it was real, if that “ yes” was real. He listened to Kimi talk about pancakes and felt the burn in his side pulse like punctuation and decided that kindness from enemies was dirtier than cruelty and that he would survive both out of spite.

“Tell me another,” Lando asked after a while, voice thready and ordinary in a way that made it heroic. “About Oscar. The stupidest one you have.”

Kimi smiled into his sleeve and obliged, because stupidity was a thread and threads make rope and rope makes bridges. He told the one where Oscar got in a fight with a self-checkout kiosk because it refused to recognize an onion. He told it until the shape of Oscar’s annoyed mouth made laughter sit under his own ribs like a cat curling into sleep. He told it until Lando’s taps slowed and smoothed and steadied into the pattern that meant sleep without fever. He told it until his throat rasped. Then he rested his cheek against the wall where it was cool and pretended that on the other side Charles had leaned his head in the same place, that their skulls met through concrete, that there was bone-to-bone understanding stronger than anything metal could frame.

Up in the white room with the table and the chair and the gardenia and the knotted napkin hidden in the mattress seam, the camera stared as if sight were understanding. Kimi stared back like marble. He had eaten because it bought a syringe. He had stepped into a ritual because it bought time. He had let a stranger put two fingers to his throat and had refused to give that stranger what he wanted. He had breathed because his father had told him to. He had left the smallest trail of wrongness for his husband to translate.

He pressed his hand to his throat again and felt the circle there answer him under skin. “You belong to Oliver,” he whispered, not for the microphone, for the mark. “No one gets in.”

The building kept humming. The tray sat in the door. The card, somewhere, blinked its little red eye at someone who believed in toys.

The first game was over.

Kimi waited for the next.

~~~~

Ollie did not blink, as if blinking cost time and time cost blood. He had learned the hardness of attention from Max and the mercy of precision from Charles, which is to say he had learned to aim twice before pulling anything.

He watched Kimi’s jaw notch and un-notch. He watched the exact angle of Toto’s hand when it sat, proprietary and deliberate, on the narrow flare of Kimi’s waist to steer him to the chair.

He watched the way Lando’s fingers refused to tremble when he pressed gauze into place, how he took the kind of pain you swallow only because someone else needs you to.

He watched the way his Papa did not look up when the red light in the card blinked to record his choice. The room did not hear the question, but they recognized the architecture of a test when they saw one. Choose warmth for one son, let another shiver. Choose and do it on camera. Let us measure how your love deforms under weight.

Ollie hated the perfection of the trap. He hated how clean it looked, how polite. He hated that when Kimi came back from dinner his lips were the exact wrong color, that he was straight as a blade and a second away from shattering.

He hated most that Lando—Oscar’s Lando, their Lando—looked like an afterthought to the men on the other side of those doors. Like a problem set aside to solve later with a boot.

“How long until we have a door to break,” Max asked. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. He had learned that volume is for strangers.

“Dad,” Oscar said, a low warning, a hand tightening on his father’s shoulder in warning, Ollie was doing everything he could.

“How long,” Max repeated, softer, which made it sharp. The softness was permission to tell the truth. It was also a blade.

“I’m not a miracle worker,” Ollie said frustration laced into his voice, and the line broke something in the room like a glass dropped on tile, small and total.

Max’s hand curled. Knuckles whitened against wood. He kept his gaze on the screens. “I’m asking my son what he needs to get us there faster.”

“What I need, Dad is for you to stop breathing down my neck, Godverdomme! What I need…” Ollie said, and the crack in his voice was rage, not weakness, “is for the laws of physics to bend.”

The sentence went into the room like a thrown match and did not catch. It hung there instead, smoking, a thin ribbon of possibility no one had noticed until it was said out loud.

Silence moved in. On the left monitor Kimi’s water glass caught a strip of light and threw it back in a warped oval. The curve of glass turned something he could barely notice in his smoking gun.

Ollie’s eyes cut to it because movement was the only thing keeping him from picking up a gun and leaving the room full of people who loved him.

“Say that again,” Max said, odd gentleness tucked in his voice, finally hope. “The laws.”

“Reflection,” Ollie said. “Refraction.” His finger froze above the trackpad, then dropped. “Back ten seconds.”

The feed slid backwards as if time had agreed to help for once. He paused at the breath before the glass stopped catching the angle and did not use magic. He did not need it. He used a sledgehammer—exposure, contrast, saturation. The green block in the curve bloomed. Letters lived in it like fish you glimpse and cannot name yet. Not a uniform. Not a guard. A square. A poster.

He took a screenshot and flipped it because glass lies backward. He straightened the curve by forcing the oval to behave like a rectangle, a crude unbending that pulled shapes into sense. The text was still smudged, but it learned to speak.

PLAN D’ÉVACUATION — FONDERIE SAINT-ROMAN.

At the bottom, small and tidy, a vendor stamp. PlanÉvac 2011. The E looked like it had lost a tooth. He knew the broken E because he had once downloaded every municipal template in the department and organized them by misprint because boredom, because insomnia, because preparing to become the kind of man who saw everything you could use later, even if you did not know yet what it was for.

“Is that,” Oscar breathed, like a man who had forgotten for a second how to use air.

“It’s the Saint-Roman iron foundry outside La Trinité,” Ollie said, voice flattening the way he only let it when the part of him that wrote code started doing the writing. “Shuttered. City never pulled the signs. I downloaded municipal templates two years ago because I was bored.”

His fingers were already dragging a transparency of the standard evacuation schematic over the frame. He lined up the little running man with the arrow that curved in the wrong way in Kimi’s warped reflection. The corridor shape kissed the overlay. It was like pressing a leaf into the outline of a leaf and feeling the veins click into place.

“This orientation matches the north side,” he said. “Kimi’s glass shows a fire extinguisher behind him—there, that dot—so he’s near Stair Three. The vents are third-column spacing; that’s how the older plans in the department standardize the ductwork.”

He spoke to the screen like it and not the room had asked the question. The room listened like parishioners.

“Power draw on their camera system is cycling at fifty hertz, not sixty,” he added, a small, vicious smile cutting across his mouth for the first time in hours. “French grid.”

He scrubbed to Lando’s feed. When the guard left, he had opened the door a fraction wider than training taught. The lens had taken a slice of the world outside that door. Salt streaked the concrete there in long, pale tears. Rust bloomed like islands.

“They’re coastal,” Ollie said. “Saint-Roman backs onto the culvert that drains to the sea.”

“Coordinates,” Max said, already moving toward the map table, his body remembered before his mind got to the line.

Ollie dropped a pin with the force you put into closing a coffin. “Here.”

The room detonated in the way rooms do when no one wants to startle the boy working miracles and everyone wants to go to war. It was quiet and total.

Seb bowed his head once and whispered something that sounded like gratitude and a promise, the rosary cross a raw crosshatch in his palm now.

Carlos laughed once, short and savage. It shivered in the air a second and died with purpose.

Lewis’s lips thinned with the kind of joy wolves get when someone finally opens a door they were going to rip off its hinges anyway.

Max looked at his youngest and did not say good boy. He did not need to. The pride in his eyes landed on the back of Ollie’s neck like a hand—heavy, claiming, holy. Ollie felt it settle into him like a spine locking into place. He did not turn. He swallowed and kept working.

Oscar leaned into Ollie’s shoulder, forearm braced against the console. He put his mouth near his brother’s ear and said, “Let’s bring them home.” His voice had been broken on the teeth of the night and come back sharper.

“Tonight we plan,” Max said. “Tomorrow we gather our men. We are going to destroy the entire German syndicate and every man who touched ours.”

“Tonight, fuck, tonight we plan.” Lewis echoed, which meant no one in this house would sleep and that was correct.

~~~~

The light in the ceiling does not flicker, but Charles imagines it does. He imagines a faint shiver at the edges, a hum if he stares long enough, a single careless blink that would crack the pane of his control and spill everything he has locked inside. So he does not blink.

He lies flat on the slab they call a bed, arms crossed on his chest, spine pressed to cold metal through a thin mattress. His lips are dry, his eyes red, his throat scraped raw by words he has not allowed himself to use. The camera above him sits in the center of the ceiling like an unblinking third eye, patient, constant, hungry.

Let it watch.

Silence is the only thing he owns that they cannot cut out of him. They want noise. They want breaking. The quiet terrifies them more.

His mind is not blank. It runs in measured layers, grief stacked under memory, memory pressed under tactics, tactics humming against rage. His fingers twitch and he thinks of Max’s hand finding his without words, anchoring him to the floor of a world that tried to tilt. Max is always warm. Max smells like leather and safety and the old cologne that lives in the seam where Charles keeps his face.

He swallows the ache. He does not get to miss Max. Longing is a luxury. Weakness is a trap. Love, sharpened and turned into a weapon against them, is the trick of this place.

They got it wrong.

Love is not his weakness, it is his anchor.

He repeats it in his head until it is a bar of iron. He thinks of Ollie’s hands flashing over a keyboard, of the quick music of keys turning into maps and doors. He thinks of Oscar’s laugh, bright in a radio that used to crackle with bad reception and good news. He misses his boys, God how he misses his boys. He failed them, both Oscar and Ollie. Made bad decisions for the love of their lives, he got them here, tortured and starved, played with and in Kimi’s worst nightmare— in Toto Wolff’s hands. He is a failure as a papa, as a papa in law and as a husband.

He steels himself on a final thought. Pillars do not get to fall. He can’t fall right now, if he falls who’ll take care of his boys? He has to be strong, pull yourself together Charles is what he repeated again and again in his mind.

The night, if it can be called that, arrives as a change in the pressure of the air. The silence thins. He feels it in the skin of his teeth. The door does not open. There is only a small mechanical breath, a slit of movement, and a tray gliding through.

He smells it before he sees the note. Soup, rich and hot. Chicken, maybe, or pork and rice and ginger. Fat glistens at the surface as if warmth could be a kindness and not a trick.

Yesterday there was no bowl. Yesterday there was only a question.

Tonight there is a new question, printed smaller, neater, more cruel.

One of your sons was cold. You chose who got the blanket.
One of them is starving now, choose who eats and who doesn’t.
Choose your favourite son in law.

No names. No time. No second chances. The same knife, turned one more degree.

He looks at the note until the letters blur. His throat moves. He makes himself speak so low it will not count as sound.

“I refuse.”

He sits, and the hours gather into a knot that draws tighter and tighter in his chest. He can’t do this, he can’t choose again, not for this, not who deserves to eat and who doesn’t. He’d rather put a bullet in his head now.

They weaponize time. The silence in the cells vibrates like a taut wire. The concrete sweats. In Kimi’s room the scent of mildew sits in the corners and clings to the bedframe. In Lando’s there is rust and the dry iron taste of blood, thin and old. In Charles’ room the stool has a splinter raised along its edge, enough to snag a palm if he forgets himself and drags his hand there. He does not. He clasps his fingers together, knuckles whitening, chin lifted like a man in a courtroom who will not answer the judge.

They wait for the blow.

It lands as a sound.

Lando’s scream threads through the vent, faint at first, then ripped raw, a torn thing. Kimi flinches like he has been struck.

“No, no, no,” Kimi gasps, scrambling to the wall, pressing his ear to the metal grille, fingertips seeking a seam he knows is not there. “Lando, Lan, answer me, please answer me.”

Another sound from Lando, more breath than voice, the kind of pain that opens and opens “ I’m fine, Kimi, it’s okay! It’s o-okay.” But Lando was definitely not okay, they were killing him for God’s sake.

Charles stands so fast the stool topples and skitters away. “Lando,” he calls before he can stop himself, the name breaking him open.

The speakers crackle. Toto’s voice slides in, clean and level, the kind of calm that comes from a man who mistook cruelty for discipline long ago.

“I told you to pick,” he says, almost gentle. “You refused. This is the cost of indecision, Charles. The price of your pride will be paid by your sons in law.”

“You monster,” Charles breathes.

“Oh, do not be so dramatic,” Toto replies, the softness sharpening. “It is only hunger, for now. One will eat. One will not. Choose.”

Kimi slams his hands against the wall. “Papa, do not, do not, do not,” he begs, voice fracturing, “give it to Lando, I am fine, I can last, he is already hurt, please Papa, please.”

Charles puts his forehead against the cool concrete where he imagines Kimi’s is pressed on the other side. “Mon bébé,” he says, because it is the only prayer he trusts.

“I said I am fine,” Kimi cries, breath hitching, “he is all bones and his wound is not healing, please, Papa, I cannot lose him, Oscar can’t loose him, think of that, please don’t choose me!”

Through the vent, weak and stubborn, Lando speaks. “Do not listen to him,” he whispers, each word dragged out of heat, “feed Kimi. Keep him alive.”

“No,” Kimi chokes, and it comes out like a vow, “no, you do not pull that with me, if you die on me I will kill you myself when I find you again, do you hear me.”

Charles closes his eyes. They are both trying to save the other. They are both right. Love is a blade in his hand and in their hands and in the hands of the man on the other side of the speaker, and only one cut can be made.

He does not have the right language for this. He does not have any language at all that can carry the shape of it. He is a father and he is a husband and he is a man under a lot of pressure to make the right decision and he is failing all three.

He swallows. He chooses.

“I pick Lando,” he says, so quietly it feels like a sin, “God forgive me. I pick Lando. I’m sorry, my Andrea, I’m so sorry, baby.”

Silence. A long one.

“That was not so hard,” Toto murmurs.

Charles’ knees loosen. He lets himself fall. The floor does not move to meet him, it simply is where it is, and his palms slap it, and the world steadies, cruel and solid.

Footsteps speak outside, efficient and pleased.

Toto appears in the window slot with two guards at his shoulder. His smile is small and sincere in the way of a man who has convinced himself that what he likes to do is necessary. His hands are folded behind his back, his chin lowered to show concern.

“You broke,” he says softly, as if he has earned the right to be tender with the words. “You were always meant to, Charles, but it’s okay, you’re just a father, weak and driven by sentiment now. You wear principle like armor, but underneath, there is still the pretty thing I saw in Monte Carlo, the one I nearly claimed before Verstappen put his hand on you first.”

“Do not dare say his name, he will kill you, he will do it slowly and I’ll be there enjoying it.” Charles answers. The quiet is steady now, the earlier crack sealed with something colder.

Toto ignored him, ignored the direct jab.

“Oh, but why not,” Toto says, almost laughing, “he took what I wanted. You should have been mine, soft, pliant, willing to learn. I had plans.”

“You are sick, Sebastian would have killed you and your entire syndicate.” Charles says with venom and Toto just laughed at the idea.

“And now,” Toto says, eyes brightening the way collectors brighten at the thought of an unopened crate, “I have Andrea. A better model. Fresh. Timid. Pretty. Easier to shape and break, the things I’m going to do with him? To him? Ah, I’d wish I can promise to keep you alive just to make you watch what I’ll do to the boy you desperately call “your son in law”. It’s going to be my pleasure to break him.”

Charles moves before thought arrives. He slams his shoulder into Toto’s chest. The impact is real and satisfying and stupid. The guards shout. Pain arrives like a blunt answer. A fist makes his jaw ring, the taste of copper floods his tongue, a second blow drives breath from his ribs and puts the floor under him again in a sudden, hard tilt.

In the walls, the vents carry the world.

“Papa,” Kimi screams, high and wrecked, the word jumping the metal like a spark, “Papa.”

“Charles,” Lando cries, hoarse, then louder, “stop it, stop it, leave him alone, you coward, touch him again and I swear.”

Boots thud. A knee comes into his back. A hand fists in his hair and forces his cheek to the concrete. Toto’s breath is above him, controlled, clinical.

“Look at you,” Toto says, not breathless at all, “still thinking you mean something here. I didn’t kill you Charles because for some reason the kid likes you. But here you’re no powerful wife to the head of your house, you’re just a meaningless body to throw around, you will learn that.”

“Come in here without your men, I’ll fucking show you how meaningless I am, I will kill you disgusting piece of shit!” Charles says, because he cannot help himself even now.

“We both know that is not how this works,” Toto answers, almost kind. He leans closer, enough that Charles can smell soap and austerity. “Sign the annulment next time. Save your boys some pain.”

The weight lifts. The guards step back. Charles stays where he is and listens to the shape of the room. He hears Kimi pounding at the door with open hands. He hears Lando’s breath scraping in and out, a stubborn saw.

The slot closes. The footsteps recede. The quiet returns and there is no comfort in it.

Kimi slides down his own wall and folds over his knees. His chest shudders. He presses his cheek to the vent because it is the only point of contact he has with anyone he loves. He stares at the floor until the line where wall meets ground steadies into a horizon.

“I will not let him win,” he whispers. The words are small, but they land and hold.

In the next cell, Lando pulls air the way a swimmer pulls water after a wave has thrown him. His fingers are trembling, but he finds the rhythm again, in and out, in and out, and he talks to the darkness because he does not know if the vent carries every word and he will not risk the ones that matter going unheard.

“Charles,” he says, “ please, please stop fighting, you have to get out, you have to save Kimi, forget about me please.”

Charles lies on the floor and lets the pain in his ribs tick while he whispers a quiet “Never.” He won’t ever abandon one of his own. He listens to them. He listens to the camera hum. He tastes blood and keeps his mouth closed around it. He will not cry for the lens. He will not speak for it. He will not give Toto the sound he wants.

Silence is still his.

He thinks of Max, and the thought is not a weakness, it is a weight. He thinks of his husband smile. It pins him to the ground so he does not float away. He thinks of Ollie and the bewildering, terrible beauty of a mind that at first he could not understand, he feared they won’t be speaking the same language all of their life, but loving Ollie was the easiest thing he has done on this earth. He thinks of Oscar, his first boy, his sun and moon, how the world softens first in that boy’s voice before it softens anywhere else. He can’t loose them, he just can’t. He thinks of Kimi and Lando, their stubborn love aimed at each other and at him and at the future they refuse to surrender.

He breathes. He sets the bar back across his chest. Pillars do not get to fall. They hold until the house is rebuilt.

“Tomorrow,” he says to the floor, so quiet the camera will not bother to record it, “tomorrow I refuse again.”

He closes his eyes, not to sleep, but to look at the anchor that lives behind them, the one that smells like leather and safety and old cologne, the one that presses its forehead to his and says, without speaking, get up, love, get up.

He will.

~~~~

They do not bind his hands.

That is how Kimi knows this is not mercy but theatre. The guard’s grip on his elbow is light, almost courteous, a pantomime of escort rather than restraint, and when the door opens he is shown a room dressed like a promise. The table is long and white, linen ironed flat, cutlery arranged with deliberate precision as if etiquette could launder cruelty. A decanter sits in the center, wine throwing a deep red line against the crystal, two glasses already waiting, plates empty, knives gleaming. It looks like a wedding feast staged in a morgue.

Kimi walks because he is made to walk, but he does not drift the way they want him to. His throat still hurts from the last lesson, the place where a knuckle pressed until his voice went out like a candle. He holds his chin level. He forgets how small he is supposed to look. He remembers only that he belongs to people who taught him to stand straight, to look a lie in the face and name it. Fire lives behind his teeth. He keeps his mouth closed on it for now.

Toto rises as if he has bad joints and good manners. He smooths the napkin at his lap, he places it on the table with care, he opens his hands like a pastor greeting a penitent. “Andrea, come,” he says. “Tonight is a celebration.”

Kimi stops a step from the chair and does not sit. The guards slide to the edges of the room as if they are watching a play they have already seen too many times. The air smells like roasted meat and a sweetness he cannot place, something expensive and chemical that clings to Toto’s wrist. Kimi concentrates on the smell so he does not think about how he wants to take that knife and slit his throat open for touching his Charles and his Lando. He keeps his eyes on Toto’s mouth so he does not have to look at the decanter that sees him the way a camera does, with too much interest and not enough feeling.

“What is there to celebrate,” Kimi asks, and his voice scrapes but it holds, “you starved Lando and my Pa-you starved Charles so that he had to choose. Choose wich one of us to eat and the other to starve and you know what? my Papa chose right. He chose Lando. I have nothing to celebrate, you monster, not when you touched them.”

There is a tremor in the last word, a raw telling on the edges that he cannot sand down. He lets it show. If he covers it, it will sound like fear. If he leaves it, it is rage.

Toto folds his napkin again, slower this time, as if he is considering how to place the next piece on a chessboard. He pours the wine, half glass for himself, a fraction for Kimi. He does not push the glass across. He lets it sit on Kimi’s side of the table like a dare. “That was all your precious Charles,” he says. “He chose him, his precious son in law, not you. I suppose you are not so important to him as you think. He has chosen Lando twice now. Perhaps you should think about that. I could not let you starve, that is why you are here my sweet wife.”

He does not touch Kimi. He lets the watching do the work first. He lets words brush where hands will later. Kimi feels the heat rise in his chest and he is grateful for it, because heat keeps the room from sinking into him. He shakes his head. He hears the sound his curls make when they move, the small whisper at his neck. He remembers Ollie turning those curls around his fingers, soft and certain, laughing, calling him beautiful and unbearable in the same breath. He fixes that memory like a pin inside his throat.

“You are wrong,” Kimi says. “You do not know anything about Charles Verstappen Leclerc. You dared to put your hands on him, and you do not even know what is going to happen to you.”

For a second Toto watches him the way a man watches a candle gutter in a draft, with mild interest and mild hope that it will go out on its own. Then he changes direction without warning, like a driver taking a side street to avoid a protest.

“Tomorrow,” he says, voice almost tender, “you will be moved. We are leaving this place. To Germany. To a home I prepared. Tonight is your last night here, and we will mark it properly, together. A ceremony before a marriage.”

The word lands small and heavy. It is not a romance word in Toto’s mouth. It is a claim. Kimi hears the guards shift their weight. He watches Toto reach for a small black folio and slide it open like a magician revealing a familiar trick. Inside there is thick paper, bold print, blank lines.

“Of course,” Toto continues, “we will need your father in law’s signature before the bond is dissolved. But if he resists,” he smiles, too many teeth, too much glee for a face that pretends restraint, “I will sign it with his dead hand. Charles is of no interest to me anymore. Do not think I would not kill him to get what I want. And what I want, Andrea, is you, my promised.”

His hand found Kimi’s knee slowly rubbing there, hand caressing his tight climbing slower to a place he would never let Toto touch him, he would rather pull his eyeballs out with his fingers than let him touch him there. Kimi’s fists close. Bones stand out under his skin. He does not realize he has moved until the tendons pull tight. Toto keeps talking.

“Your father sold you to me,” he says, conversational now, leaning back as if they are already three glasses in, “you were fifteen. Do you remember. Of course you do not remember the details, you were busy being a child, but the papers exist. There is an agreement, and I am only collecting what is mine. Your little family cannot save you. Oliver can try. I hope he does. So I can snap his neck in front of your beloved fathers. I will mount his head in the foyer next to your little wedding photograph.”

He is still talking when Kimi moves.

The motion is a snap, fast as a striking match. Kimi steps in and drives his forehead into Toto’s nose. The crack is loud, wet, correct. The decanter jumps. A glass falls and bursts and the wine writes a wound across the tablecloth. Toto reels, hands flying up, and the guards take a breath and take a half step and stop when he snarls at them without words.

Kimi is breathing hard. He tastes metal at the back of his tongue and cannot tell if it is his blood or the smell of the wine. Toto dabs at his face with the white napkin and pulls it away colored. His eyes flash, stripped of the soft pretence, the careful calm. The smile that comes is empty of warmth.

“You have a great deal of nerve for someone who will spend the rest of his life in chains, my wife,” he says.

Kimi spits at his shoes. His chest bows and lifts. The tremble is visible, he does not hide it. He is not trying to be a statue, he is trying to be a man.

“You are not my husband,” he says. “You are a predator, a pedophile! You do not own me. Oliver will open you from throat to belly. My family will bury your syndicate under the ocean and piss on your ashes. You will choke on your own arrogance.”

The truth is he is shaking. The truth is his vision blurs and sharpens and blurs again around the edges. The truth is rage is keeping him from tipping over into something else that lives right behind it. He stands on rage the way you stand on a burned floor because the boards have not failed yet. He uses it to stay tall.

Toto’s hand moves so fast it is like a film cut. The slap lands across Kimi’s mouth. White light bursts and then red. His lip splits and the taste answers his doubt. He stumbles, catches himself, swallows what he can and lets what he cannot spill. Toto watches, head tilted, breathing back under control, his hand came up on Kimi’s throat and applied pressure so hard that he started to choke slightly.

“I like them feisty,” he says, “but not disrespectful. You will learn your place soon. It will be a pleasure to destroy you, piece by piece. I will send your boy back to you as a lesson, bone by bone.”

He does not raise his voice when he calls, “Guard.” he takes his hand off his throat and Kimi gulped the air hard, his lungs spasmed.

The man who enters is new. He wears gloves that do not need to be worn for clean work. They shine a little and his mouth does too. He is the type that enjoys. He looks at Kimi the way some men look at cars, calculating the cost of repair and the fun of the crash.

“Chain him,” Toto says. “Tomorrow night, he will be whipped in front of his family. And then, when he is bleeding and broken, I will bring them in and I will kill them, one by one, while he watches.”

The guards move as one body. One takes Kimi’s left arm, one his right. He thrashes out of instinct and principle. His heels skid. He kicks and catches a shin and hears a hiss and feels the answering weight on his shoulders, the fingers in his hair, the yank that makes his eyes water. He bares his teeth. He tries to bite the hand that is too far away.

Toto crouches without hurry. His nose is wider now, swelling, a bright line of blood at one nostril. He is smiling again. It is worse than the calm.

“Remember, Andrea,” he says, soft as a bedtime story, “this is your fault. You made me angry. You chose this.”

There is a click. Cold around his wrists. Metal tight enough to complain against bone. The guards haul him upright and his shoulder pulls and burns. He angles his body to make it as hard as possible. He does not give them limpness to drag or neatness to admire. He is all edges. He keeps his face up so he does not look at the floor he will be made to learn later.

“Take him away,” Toto says. “I do not wish to see him again until his wrists are bleeding.”

The door shuts on the last smear of red on the cloth.

The corridor back to the cell is a long, grey throat. The air cools as they move. Kimi breathes through his mouth because the copper taste makes his stomach pitch. The guards say nothing. Their hands are efficient. He hates them less than he hates the one who smiled. He hates them in the way you hate a tool.

The cell takes him back without surprise. The light is the same white as the tablecloth. The bed is the same sheet of metal. The air has the same stubborn damp. He sits down because he is pushed. He lets his head touch the wall because his neck shakes. He concentrates on the concrete, on the way it holds cold like a memory. He breathes and feels each place that hurts announce itself. Lip, scalp, wrist, shoulder, throat. The pain keeps him from lifting a hand to wipe his mouth. He likes the mark on his face because it is a boundary he can name. It is the shape of a line he did not let be crossed.

He starts to cry. It is not loud. The sound gets lost in his breathing. It is not fear that breaks him, not here, not now. It is fury with no place to go. It is grief that arrived without warning and sits down across from him and folds its arms. His eyes flood and clear and flood again. He does not wipe them. He does not swallow them. He lets his body do what it needs to do while his mind finds the shape of him again.

He leans his cheek to the vent. The metal is rough and kind. He closes his eyes and counts his own heart. He imagines the air moving between the rooms like water under a door. He imagines it carrying his breath and his words the way a river carries small, stubborn things downstream to where they are needed.

“Petit Andrea,” Charles says from the other side, voice too fast and too careful, the sound of a man trying to be calm while drowning, “what happened, baby, what happened.”

Kimi presses his split mouth to the grille and tastes iron and dust. “He said he is moving me tomorrow,” he answers, breath thin, words slow so they do not tangle, “to Germany. To start our marriage.” He swallows, winces, pauses. “He wants to kill Oliver. He wants to kill all of you.”

There is silence. The room holds it like a lung holds air. Then there is a noise that is half a growl and half a sob. Charles’ voice returns ground down to a promise.

“He will not,” he says. “I will not let him. I swear to you, bébé, your Papa swears on his life, on everything he has, he will not touch you again. Not before I get to him first.”

Kimi breathes that in and it is better than food. He lets it sit in his chest like a weight that holds him steady. The shaking slows. He turns his face to press more of his skin to the metal because contact is the only medicine they cannot dilute. He closes his eyes and sees a garden, a hand at his back, a voice saying take what you need and then take twice. He feels a different hand, Ollie’s hand, quick and clumsy and sure at the same time, pulling him into a kiss in the dark, swearing he would never give him back. He hears Lando laughing from a kitchen as if a pan had told a joke. He takes those sounds and stacks them like bricks where the wall inside him was cracked.

“Tell Ollie,” he whispers, careful with the name because it is holy, “that he was my favourite person, the first person who treated me like I’m human. No matter what happens tomorrow. Even if I am dead, I will wait for him.”

The words take the last of his breath for a moment. He leans his forehead to the vent and the metal answers with a small, steady chill. He can hear Charles breathe. He can hear a distant tapping that might be Lando trying to say I am here with the only instrument he has left.

The last thing he says before he lets his mouth rest is quiet enough that the camera will not hear it and loud enough that the people who need to will. “I am not afraid,” he tells the vent. “I am angry. That is different. I will do anything to get back to where I belong. In Ollie’s arms.”

~~~~

The footage kept looping, a cruel pendulum that swung the same way every time, Kimi’s lip split and shining, Charles’s eyes rimmed red and steady, Lando biting a scream into his teeth like he could swallow pain if he just tried hard enough. Max did not move. He stood with his hands behind his back the way he had taught himself to stand when he was eighteen and everything he owned could fit in a rucksack, he stood and watched his life hurt in three frames, he stood and tried to breathe around it. His chest stuttered, then stalled. Something fragile in his throat gave, the room tilted by an inch, and one step backward was all it took for his knees to go dumb. His hand found the edge of the table without seeing it, knuckles blanching as if bone wanted out, and he folded, not with a sound, not with a curse, not with the easy violence that used to keep fear away, but with the quiet collapse of a man who had carried too much for too long.

“They touched him,” he thought, and the thought did not have words at first, it was a bruise that bloomed and kept blooming, “they are hurting him, Charles. My Charles. My Kimi. My Lando.” His mouth opened as if speech would save him. No sound came. He felt the empty shape of a cry that refused to be born, then what came instead was smaller, thinner, honest as a prayer dragged over gravel. “I failed him,” he whispered. “I failed all of them.”

Ollie reached him first. The boy was fast when he chose to be tender, he slid in from Max’s left and wrapped an arm around his back, palm splayed over his father’s chest in a hard, steady hold that told a panicking heart where to beat. Oscar was there a half breath later, kneeling, not breaking eye contact with his brother, hand locking around Max’s wrist with precision not letting their father collapse. Their bodies caught the fall and turned it into a bend, they gave him a place to fail that was not the floor.

For the first time since they were children, they saw him as a man before they saw him as a shield, a man whose love was so absolute it ate him alive when it could not protect.

“I should have stopped them,” Max said, each word thick with shame that did not fit in his mouth, “I should have known. What kind of head of house lets his husband be taken, lets his sons in law be dragged away like they are nothing.”

He dug under his shirt with shaking fingers and closed a fist around the chain Charles had given him on their tenth anniversary. He had worn that chain through peace like a habit and through war like a pact, he pulled it free now as if the metal might cool the fever in him. The clatter of the small pendant against his wedding band was a sound he had heard for years without hearing, now it rang like a bell that called him back to himself.

“I was not enough,” he said, and he hated the words even as he needed to say them, “I thought I was untouchable. What is the worth of power if I cannot protect what is mine.”

Ollie leaned his forehead against his, the touch firm, intimate, a bridge thrown across a chasm. He did not speak like a boy begging for comfort, he spoke like a soldier giving it. “You taught me how to fight,” he said, voice low and fierce, “you taught me that we burn for the ones we love. You are not weak, Dad. You were outnumbered and you were not expecting it. We are still here. Still fighting.”

Oscar’s breathing was even, the breath of someone who had learned to make calm an instrument. “You did not fail us, we don’t blame you for this.” he said, fingers tightening on Max’s pulse for one measured beat, “you gave us your name. You gave us a family. We are still your sons. We are still here. So get up.”

Max pulled air through his teeth like it hurt and like it healed. He filled his lungs with the steadiness of his boys the way a drowning man fills them with oxygen, and when he stood it felt like something massive, old, and sacred taking its rightful place, Atlas remembering that the sky had always been his to hold.

The loop kept running on the wall, the same three rooms in the same pain. Max looked once more and then looked away, not out of denial but out of discipline. He put a hand to the back of both his sons’ necks, heavy and grateful, then let go. He straightened his shirt, he slipped the chain back against his chest, he rolled his shoulders like a fighter stepping back into a ring he had no right to leave. In the corner of the room, a candle burned down with a stubborn flame that refused to gutter, the scent of wax mixed with metal and sweat and the thin, sour note of fear that haunted any place where men planned to kill and to save in the same breath.

In the hallway a commotion was heard, people talking loudly and shouts whispered under breathe, Ragan’s voice was heard trying to stop someone from coming in, all of them got their hands on their weapons ready for any fight coming their way, they were blood thirsty anyway, they would end the poor son of a bitch that dared to threaten them now. “ Sir, you don’t understand-“

“ No, you don’t understand who you’re talking to. I’m here to see your Master let me trough.” a French tilted accent was heard and Max exhaled slightly, he knows who’s on his doorstep.

“ Ragan, let him in he’s always welcome here.”

Louis stepped in as if the manor already knew his weight, trench coat buttoned, posture perfect, eyes full of the old kind of anger that does not raise its voice because it never needed to. Antoine came a half pace behind him, sharper in his quiet, elegant in a way that said steel hides well under silk, right hand closed around something small.

“We came in person,” Louis said. He did not offer platitudes, he did not try to soften a room that could not be softened. “Words on a call are not enough. We stand with you.”

Max rose to meet him. The tremor was still in the line of his shoulders, but command had come back to his spine like heat to a limb. He nodded once, gratitude restrained because anything more would crack him open. “Thank you,” he said, the words carrying more weight than many vows said at altars.

“Don’t thank me, Antoine insisted in coming in person right away, he’s the one impressed by this family’s way of loving.”

Antoine did not linger on ceremony. He turned away from the table and went to Ollie, stopping close enough that the air between them felt tactile. “I saw you with him in the garden,” he said, voice pitched for Ollie and no one else, “the day he stormed away. The jealousy, the anger. And how you ran away with him on your shoulder like your heart would fall out if you did not.”

Ollie’s eyes flickered, a pain that was not shame but remembrance passing through. Antoine’s gaze softened with recognition that did not condescend. “You did not know I was still watching,” he went on, quiet, “but I was. It struck me like lightning, the way you loved. The way he loved back, even through anger.”

He opened his hand. In his palm lay a small pocket knife the initials on it A.V.L —Andrea Verstappen-Leclerc— Oh God, fuck he felt tears spring in his eyes at seeing it, it was his gift to Kimi after their first training session, when he learned that Kimi was fighting a lot more beautifully with a knife than with a gun. “He dropped it that day,” Antoine said. “I took it, because I thought one day I might understand that kind of fire.”

He set it into Ollie’s hand with a care that made the gesture feel like a ritual, not a gift. “Now I do. I brought twenty of our best men. And I brought our loyalty. You and Kimi burn like myth, and I would rather be in the chapter where you survive.”

Ollie did not cry. He had not cried since the clip with Kimi’s mouth torn open, and even then it had been one brief, brutal tear that he had crushed with the heel of his hand like an oath. His voice broke on the thank you anyway, the two words scraped down to their truth. “Thank you,” he said, closing his fingers around the pocket knife like it was the most precious gift in the world. And it was.

The manor filled. It filled without noise and without hurry, the way a river fills its banks, inevitable and right. The drive disgorged cars with different plates and the same purpose, men who had once guarded mountain passes and palaces, men who had stitched wounds in basements and wrapped rosaries around fingers before pulling triggers, men who had learned their step from Lewis and could melt out of a hallway and back again like smoke. The air grew dense with bodies and intent. The war room swallowed them and made a map out of them.

Oscar stood in the middle of the movement and watched. He took stock without needing to write. He counted who had answered what favor, who had called back a debt, who had flown without asking how long or how far. He filed names the way a surgeon files instruments. Carlos stepped to his side, rosary hidden in his fist, thumb rubbing the bead that always came before courage, and pressed fingers to Oscar’s shoulder once, the way you say I trust you and also I am here.

“You built this network, mijo,” Carlos said. “Let it carry you now.”

Oscar nodded. The ring at his throat tapped his sternum with each breath as if to remind him that at the end of every corridor there was a person, not a symbol. He looked at the screen again and let Kimi’s blood and Charles’s eyes and Lando’s bitten jaw harden him without turning him to stone.

Max took the head of the table because that was where he belonged when it was time to draw a plan that would make or break a dynasty. The blueprint of the Saint Roman foundry unfurled under his hands, the paper loud like wings. Ollie had annotated it until there was no space left that did not carry knowledge, vents and cameras, choke points and blind corners, guard rotations and emergency exits reduced to ink and certainty. Three red circles marked the rooms where the people they loved were being dismantled.

“They are split into three rooms,” Max said, tone gone razor, all edges useful. “Northeast, basement level. Kimi is being moved tomorrow night to the extraction point. That is when we hit.”

He did not glance at the screens now, he did not need to. The pain was in him already, written into muscle memory. He set his palm on the map and felt not paper but responsibility. “I want eyes at every exit. Guards neutralized without noise. Charles is the priority target, not Kimi, he will keep Kimi alive as his “prize”. If they kill him, the rest become leverage, and if he dies, the game is lost.”

The plan had the shape of something inevitable by the time they were done, not because fate cared, but because men with enough love and enough skill can make inevitability out of what others call impossible. Max looked around the table not as if he were counting soldiers, but as if he were counting the reasons this house had not already fallen.

He rose and spoke without bark, the way a father speaks when he needs his children to hear not an order but a promise. “Tomorrow night, we end him.”

Faces met his, faces that had weathered different wars and carried the same lines. Oscar with rage banked into coals that would give heat for days, Ollie with his jaw set so hard it might crack, grief behind his eyes like glass that will not break because it knows it would cut where it falls, Antoine steady as a vow beside them, Carlos tasting words against his rosary, Louis giving a small nod that carried an entire country’s worth of sanction, Sebastian cold and still, fury quiet as snow.

“Toto Wolff laid hands on what is ours,” Max said. “He stole our peace, our blood, our sons. We will not ask. We will take them back. And we will erase the name that dared to threaten the Verstappen-Leclercs.”

Oscar stepped forward a fraction, enough to make the room breathe in. His voice came soft and sharpened to a point. “They think pain will break us,” he said. “They forgot we were raised by fire.”

Ollie did not smile. He did not need to. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we bring hell.”

The house hummed around them, a live thing that had chosen to be a fortress for the night. Men peeled off to their assignments, radios checked with a tap, weapons laid out like sacrament, med kits inventoried with the reverence you give to the tools that keep breath in bodies. The screens dimmed until the loop was smaller, not because the pain was smaller, but because they had given it a frame.

Max stayed in the war room when the rest broke to prep. He needed one minute alone and he took it standing, palms on the table, head bent. He could smell the leather of his watchband and the faint heat of the laptop and the ghost of Charles’s cologne that had soaked into his shirt collar with time. The chain at his throat warmed against his skin. He was not a man who prayed in the way churches expect, but he had learned to speak to the things that decided whether a bullet found bone or air, and he spoke now, not with words that asked, but with words that declared.

“I am coming,” he told the map. “You can make me crawl if you want, you can ask me to dig with my nails, but I am coming.”

A hand slid onto his forearm, then another, smaller, warm. His boys, one on each side, silent, not to comfort but to anchor. He raised his head and met their eyes and found back in his chest the certainty that had been knocked out of him by the loop. The certainty was not that men like them could not be hurt. It was that they would not be left in hurt.

“Listen to me,” he said quietly, and they listened like they always had when it mattered. “There will be noise. There will be smoke. People will try to be heroes in the wrong places. Do not mistake bravery for usefulness. You bring them back. You do not avenge anything without my word. You do not die trying to be a hero. I want all of my boys back home, you have to promise me, both of you. Do I have your word?”

Ollie’s mouth tightened. He nodded. Oscar did not nod, he held Max’s gaze until Max believed him. It was not lost on any of them that Max was speaking as a father who had almost fallen and needed to remind his blood that his body still had all its strength in it.

Ollie stayed a breath after the others drifted, the pocket knife still in his hand. He looked at his father, at the lines around his mouth that had been etched by love as much as by war, and he said what he had not said out loud since the day he learned what loyalty costs. “I am scared, Dad.” he confessed, soft, blunt.

Max did not pretend he was not. “Me too,” he answered. “I would have been worried if you weren’t actually. It’s your family’s life at stake, your first mission where everything depends on how well you manage your feelings. Are you ready, mijn prins?”

“ I’m ready to bring them home where they belong, I’m ready to see him again, smell his warm vanilla scent, I’m ready to marry him Dad, God, we were supposed to get married tonight, but I guess fate had other plans for us, huh?”

“ Oliver, look at me, baby. We will get th back, you’ll get your wedding, you’ll get your boy back you have my word son.” Ollie hugged his Dad tight, before being his commander he always was his father first. “ Thank you, Dad.” whispered Ollie in his shoulder squeezing just a little too tight finding comfort in his father’s arms.

They were not enough as men to stop the world from doing what it does. But they were enough as this family to make the world pay for every inch it tried to take from them. And that would do for tonight. That would carry them until the doors of the foundry opened and their boys will be back.

~~~~

The courtyard had never looked so clean. Moonlight washed the stone and left it colorless, as if the night had scraped it down to bone. Air moved through the olive trees and made a soft sound like a sleeve pulled over skin. Somewhere to his left a lemon, long past ripe, had split where it fell and the scent of old citrus rose and faded with the breeze. It was past midnight. The manor pretended to sleep. Men lay in borrowed rooms with their eyes open. Doors closed softly and stayed closed because there was nothing inside that would help.

Ollie stepped out alone. His hands were still smeared with ink from the map table, the blue and black gone grey in the moon. The screens in the war room were still running, numbers crawling with the patience of machines, but none of it mattered with his heart refusing to beat in a way that let him stand upright. He crossed to the low steps where the stone held a memory of daylight and sat, elbows to knees, fingers sunk in his hair to keep his skull from splitting under a grief that did not know where to go.

“I am supposed to be brilliant,” he said to the courtyard that had heard his laughter a hundred times and his anger twice. “I am supposed to solve everything.” The words snagged. He swallowed and kept going. “But I cannot code my way into a body and stop pain. I cannot hold him from here.”

He put his face in his hands. Air stalled in his chest, then came in hard, shallow pulls like his lungs were trying to learn a new way to be lungs. The stillness did not comfort. It pressed. He closed his eyes and saw spreadsheets, power grids, the lattice of a foundry roof overlaid on a city he could navigate with his eyes closed, and none of it contained Kimi. The body remembers in ways the mind cannot authorize. His palms still carried the weight and warmth of a waist he had encircled a few times but those few times felt enough, right hand riding the small slope of spine, left hand splayed over ribs he had kissed in the dark. That damned night, the night that ruined all his progress with Kimi. He did not regret losing control and half claiming what was his, he regrets how he acted right after, making Kimi feel like shit, causing the rift between them, he still rembers the dirty looks and the coldness that came from him all of last week and it leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, but he also rembers how they tentatively made up, how Kimi fell asleep on his chest after Oliver promised that no one would lay a hand on him… whip him like he thought they would in form of punishment. And now that bastard, that pedophile who tortured his boy psychologically wants to put his hands on his husband? Whip him in front of his family? Ollie would rather cut off his own eyes than seeing that happening, not after he promised him that no harm would fall on him. He rembers how sweet and pliant Kimi got into his arms and how they kissed goodbye almost like they knew they won’t be seeing each other soon. Godverdomme, Toto fucking Wolff he deserves to die, if Ollie could he would rip him limb from limb hearing him cry out, seeing his blood pour out. That would make Ollie fucking happy.

He tried not to imagine the room where Kimi was. He failed. He had taught himself to think in angles and shadows when thinking in images hurt, but tonight the images had found him anyway. The too bright light. The white wall. The mouth split and swelling. The wrists red. The chin lifted because that was one thing Kimi had never learned to lower. Small and proud and holding on by his teeth. He pressed his fist against his heart the way people do when pain starts from the inside and you know there is nowhere else to push.

He did not intend to pray. It came without his permission, the way a name comes when you smell a shirt that still holds someone. He bowed his head and spoke into his hands.

“God,” he said, and the word felt foreign and also like a word he had said as a child when he still believed upstairs meant a place, “I know you are listening. Or if you are not, I am going to pretend you are, because I cannot do this alone. You have given me more than I earned. If you are listening, please. Give me my boy back.”

His voice shook and the stars smeared. He swallowed hard and let the ask widen because once he had started he could not stop. “Let Lando live long enough for Oscar to hold him again. Let Papa stay strong long enough for us to pull him from the dark. But my Kimi, God, my Kimi, bring him home.”

Tears came, finally, not the violent kind, not the storm, something quieter and more honest. His shoulders shook with them anyway because his body had been holding still for too long. “He is so little,” he said, and it felt like a betrayal to name it, “so proud, so smart. He always walks like he is untouchable, but he is not. He is not. And he is mine. He is my husband. I did not tell him enough, I didn’t get to hold him enough, spoil him enough.”

He pressed knuckles hard to his sternum as if there were a door there he could hold shut against a thing spilling out. “If you bring him back, I will marry him again. Every day. I will put a ring on every finger if I have to. I will kiss the ground he walks on. I will not raise my voice again. I will not doubt him. I will give him everything.”

A breath that hurt to pull, a whisper that felt like laying a body down. “Just return him. Please. I will worship him for the rest of my life. Let me hold that waist again. Let me kiss his mouth and see that fire in his eyes. Let me hear him curse in Italian and call me names with that sharp tongue. I will take all of it. All of it.”

He kept saying it because the saying kept him alive. “He is mine. He is mine. He is mine.”

It did not sound like possession. It sounded like promise. He lifted his head and wiped his face with the heel of his hand and felt ashamed for the part of him that wanted to put grief away like a tool when he was done with it. He had been born with a brain that liked to turn every problem into a plan, and he hated it for a minute for not knowing what to do with a problem that looked like a boy locked in a room. He pictured the moment the lights in the foundry would go out, the ninety seconds he had carved for them with a virus he had written with his own hands, the way he would count them down into the dark. He could give them that. He could give them silence and confusion and doors that thought they were closed when they were not. He could give them a path. It would have to be enough until he could give Kimi his body back.

He stayed until the cold found his ankles and climbed, until the stone gave back no warmth, until guilt nudged him to go inside and try to sleep like a dutiful soldier who had memorized his lines. He stood slowly, knees stiff from a war he had not fought yet, and looked once more at the place where Kimi had fallen asleep on him not even a month ago. He smiled without humor.

“ If God had heard me, we’ll meet again here amorino, you’ll sleep there in my arms and drool on my shirt and complain about the bugs. I will pretend to hate it.”

He went back in because he loved the man too much to be tired at the wrong moment. He did not look over his shoulder. He did not have a superstition to soothe him and he would not start one now. He kept the prayer like a coin in his mouth, something to roll against his teeth so he would not bite his own tongue when the doors finally opened and the lights went out.

~~~~

The room was dark in the way of rooms where the dark is a choice. The window was open and the night had taken what it wanted, a corner, the ceiling, the edges of the wardrobe. Silence climbed the walls and sat in the corners, not empty, humming the way old things hum in houses that have been asked to hold more than they were built for. Oscar sat on the floor because the bed had grown too large, too clean, too unlike the thing it became when Lando was in it, sheets wrinkled into topography you could read with your palm, the air warm with breath and sleep.

He had not been able to keep The Ghost in his cage all day. The Ghost had paced in the long hallway behind his eyes, counting, cataloging, sharpening. Every image the house fed him had soaked into the Ghost like fuel and the voice that lived with it had pressed against his teeth, let me out, let me handle it, let me do what you are afraid to do. Oscar had said yes. He had said yes with his all heart, waiting for that question in what seemed like forever. But in the last days instead of celebrating with his family he had stood in the war room and been the son his father needed, a soldier watching the love of his life fight for his life, literally. Now, alone, he had to be his own man, and the man was tired.

His hands trembled in his lap. He pressed his fingertips together and pointed them at nothing the way you stack your hands when you do not want them to reach. He did not mean to pray. He did not understand prayer like Ollie and his Papa did, but for Lando? He would beg God to bring him back.

He bowed his head.

“Please,” he said, and the word was so small and so sincere it broke itself on the way out. “Please do not take them from me.”

At first he said it to the floor. Then to the window. Then to the ring. It was still on his finger, the one he did not know had been waiting its whole life to carry weight. Lando had slid it there that morning, warm band on warm skin, eyes stupid and certain. Oscar took it off carefully, cradled it in both palms and bent his head until his mouth touched metal. He kissed it like it could conduct something beyond electricity.

“Think of me,” he whispered, voice torn up and tender. “Think of us. Think of the promise you made me. Survive God damn it, if you don’t I’ll come right after you Lando, I promise this, I will not live to see another day without you. It will be meaningless.”

His breath caught on the edge of a sob. He swallowed it. He had taught himself not to sob when men could hear him. He could have sobbed now. The habit was stronger than permission. “Come back to me.”

The bed looked like a stranger. He looked away and stood. His body felt older than it was for a second, like grief had slipped years into his joints when he was not watching. He crossed to the wardrobe barefoot, the floor cool, the familiar route that he could walk blind, and opened the door. He knew what he was reaching for before he reached. He had laughed at it a hundred times and stolen it a dozen. Lando’s jumper. The oversized ridiculous thing that made Lando look like he was made of cloud and sunlight. The thing Lando brought him after dirty jobs, pulling it down over Oscar’s head even while Oscar pretended to protest, come here, babe, I smell like espresso and clean sheets, your favorite combination.

Oscar held it like it held breath. He pressed it to his face. Inhaled. The salt burn in his eyes changed shape. There he was. Shampoo and something vanilla Lando never admitted to, and under it the warm impossible scent that belonged to Lando and to no one else. Oscar’s knees loosened. He let himself fall onto the bed, not under the covers because that would have felt like pretending nothing was wrong, but on top, curled around the jumper as if he could make a circle around emptiness and turn it into presence.

“I love you,” he said into the cloth. He did not like the way his voice sounded. He said it again. “I love you.” He had not said it enough in the last days because he had been busy preparing for his baby bear’s wedding. “You are the only person I ever let see me. The only one who touches me and I do not want to pull away.”

He closed his eyes. “I prayed for you tonight,” he admitted, almost embarrassed. “I never thought I would pray. But I did. To God, to the stars, to whatever is out there, to the part of me that is still a boy. I asked them to give you back to me. Just one more time.”

The fabric took his tears the way skin takes rain, without judgment. “If they do,” he said, and the words steadied him as he built them, “I will never let go. I will marry you tomorrow. Tonight. I will kiss you so hard you forget what pain tastes like. I will carry you out myself if I have to. I will tear the door with my hands.”

He laughed once, quiet and raw. “You have to hold on, Lan. Fight. For me, for us, for that stupid plant you overwater in the kitchen.” He could see Lando’s face when he found the spill, the way his mouth did that guilty curve and he tried to distract with a kiss. “I will never yell at you for that again.”

He lay still. The house whispered around him. The jumper warmed under his breath. He pressed the ring to his heart and held it there until the pulse found it. He felt The Ghost rise, not like an enemy but like a tide you have known your whole life and sometimes used to carry you. He did not push it away. He did not give it the wheel. He let it be a strength in the body of the man who loved.

“You saved me from him once,” he told the room, and the room knew who he meant. “I need you to do it again.”

He closed his eyes. The laugh came like a trick of memory, a flash of dimple and sound, so faint it might have been the house settling. He did not open his eyes to chase it. He did not weep again. He was not The Ghost. He was Oscar. Lando’s Oscar, Lando’s boy.

He turned his face into the jumper and breathed until breathing felt like something he could control again. The ring warmed under his palm like an ember. He did not sleep. He did not need to. He rested the way warriors rest before they are asked to be miracles, eyes closed, body still, mind already inside the building where the lights would fail for ninety seconds and a door would open and a boy he loved would be inside.

“Hold on,” he said, words slow and sure. “I am coming my love.”

~~~~

The hallway felt colder tonight, as if the house had pulled its heat inward to protect the rooms that still held breath. From the war room, a wash of low light pulsed like a distant heartbeat, monitors changing frames in patient intervals, the sound of servers a steady hum under the skin of the manor. Ollie stood with his fist lifted and hovering above Oscar’s door, the knuckles whitening, then easing, then whitening again. If he knocked too hard, something might crack. If he did not knock at all, something else would.

He was wearing Papa’s hoodie, the one Dad had pressed into his hands at Christmas with a grudging smile, grumbling that no one needed that many hoodies for a man who wore suits to breakfast. It still smelled like sugar from the kitchen, like the clean coffee Charles made when he could not sleep, like the cologne that lived in the hollow of his throat. Ollie breathed it in and let it hold him for a second, then he knocked, soft, once, twice.

“Oscie,” he said, small and careful, a sound he had not used since he was nine and afraid of thunderstorms.

Silence tightened on the other side. He turned the handle and went in.

The room was dark in the way of rooms that know why the lights are off. The window was open a finger’s width and the night had slid through, thinning the air. Oscar sat on the floor with his back against the bed, Lando’s jumper folded in his lap, the ring threaded through a silver chain in one hand. His eyes were red and dry, as if the tears had not been lost, only set deeper inside where no one could wipe them away.

Ollie did not speak. He moved the way bodies move when they remember a path without thinking. He dropped to his knees and collided with his brother and wrapped both arms around his neck, his face pressed into Oscar’s shoulder. He held him like he had always held him after nightmares, like the night terrors had names and teeth, like Oscar’s breathing could steady his own.

“We are going to find them,” he said into fabric and skin.

He felt the flinch, the small one, the involuntary recoil from hope. He held tighter. “You are going to hold Lando, Dad is going to hold Papa, and I am going to hold Andrea. I promise you this. But I need you, do you hear me, big brother, I need Oscar. Not the Ghost.”

He felt the throat work against his cheek, the swallow like ground glass. Oscar turned his head until their temples met.

“Always here for you, Bear,” Oscar said, and the voice came out as gravel over silk, torn and tender. “Always. We are going to fight tomorrow. Together. For our family. For the loves of our lives. Or die trying.”

Ollie pulled back enough to catch his face between both hands, thumbs under cheekbones, their foreheads pressed so close the shared heat felt like one pulse.

“No, Oscar,” he said, steady, the way a promise can be a command. “No. We will succeed. Without dying. No one is dying tomorrow, ok. Tell me you will be careful. Promise me.”

Oscar closed his eyes. “Ollie, listen.”

“No. You listen. You will fight. You will stay here. You will come back. By the end of tomorrow night you will have your Lando in your arms and your family behind you. And after this, you are done, ok. Done, big brother. It is your time for a happy ending. You deserve it. You have always deserved it.”

Ollie leaned in and kissed his forehead the way he did when things were too hard to hold with hands. “I love you,” he said, not as comfort but as truth. “I will forever love you.”

Oscar made a sound that was not a sob, something lower, something pulled up from a quiet place where men hide their first prayers. His shoulders shook. His hands fisted in the hoodie and he laid his face in Ollie’s chest like he had not done since he was a boy, and he wept, finally, salt and heat and breath and the release that follows when a body stops bargaining with its own grief.

“Ok,” he said into cotton and skin, voice breaking. “Ok. After tomorrow, I am done. I swear, Bear, I am done with this life. I love you, baby bear. Forever.”

They had always been like this. People saw it without understanding it. Two boys who moved like magnets, edging apart and slamming back together with the speed of heartbeat. They were not twins, but time had made them something like it, the years bending around them in ways that set them on the same line of sight. When one of them fell, the other bled. When one laughed from the belly, the other did not need the punchline.

Ollie remembered heat from summers when the city made the air taste unbearable. He remembered Oscar grabbing his shirt when a pack of older kids shoved him against a fence for a joke that felt like a prelude to cruelty, Oscar’s palm on his chest, voice low and even, say it again and you lose your front teeth, and how it had not been a threat, just a probable outcome. He remembered the way Oscar knelt in front of him that night after and said, you do not have to be brave for me, and he had cried into the shoulder that was already broad enough to carry more than it should have.

Oscar remembered the year Dad was gone too long. He had memorized the lie of calm for Ollie’s sake and eaten it, then vomited it quietly in the bathroom where no one would hear. He remembered pressing a cold washcloth to Ollie’s forehead when a fever would not break, hums without words to hold a boy on the edge of sleep. He remembered teaching him the trick of breathing through a panic so the body would think it was safe again, in for four, hold for four, out for six, like counting down a detonation in reverse.

They had fought, the way people who love each other and are afraid do. Doors had been shut too hard. Words had been thrown that they had to pick up later with bare hands. But they had never left each other behind. Not in rooms. Not in years. Not even when Oscar came back from Vittore with a look in his eyes that made light bend around him like heat.

Ollie had met the Ghost and refused to flinch. He had set a glass of water down and said, “you can sit, or you can stand, but you will not scare me out of my own kitchen”, and Oscar had laughed for the first time in weeks and said, “you are an idiot” and Ollie had said, “you are my idiot”, and that was that.

Now they were pressed together on a bedroom floor that had held easier nights. Oscar rocked them without thinking. Ollie’s fingers moved through his hair as if they were counting, slow and sure. The war was waiting in the next room like a guest who could not be asked to leave. Here, there was only the sound of breathing and the small noises a body makes when it is finishing crying.

Ollie thought of Kimi the way you think of a painting you have memorized. He could call up the line of a wrist, the shape of a mouth, the exact weight that made his own balance correct when they walked side by side. He felt a new fear under the old ones, the fear that Kimi would be different when he came back, that some thin, bright part of him would have been cut away by hands that had no right to touch him. He hated himself for the fear, then forgave himself because fear was human, and he was doing his best to carry love like a shield instead of a knife. He pressed his forehead harder to Oscar’s, asking for courage without asking.

Oscar thought of Lando the way you think of a song you played too loud in a car with the windows down and then could not get out of your head for days. He saw the stupid, brave eyes, the way Lando looked at him like the world could be decided by two people if they agreed hard enough. He felt the old panic tapping at him, the one that whispered, what if you fail this time. He let it tap and did not let it in. He had made a promise, and promises, in this house, were not air.

The room shifted around them, softer now. The bed was an easy lean for Oscar’s shoulder and the carpet held Ollie’s knees without complaint. Time lost its sharpness. Minutes did what minutes do when the body has finished breaking for the day and starts to put itself back together in small ways that cannot be seen.

“Do you remember the night the power went out,” Ollie asked, voice low, not because the house was sleeping but because the question came from far back and did not like to be startled.

“Which one,” Oscar said, a smile finding his mouth without warning.

“The one where Dad lit all the candles and Papa read to us from the cookbook because his voice shook too much to read anything sad.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said, the smile staying. “You fell asleep halfway through the part about beating egg whites.”

“You put the blanket over me even though you were cold,” Ollie said, a little proud, like he had proof in his pocket.

“You drooled on my shoulder,” Oscar said, and they both laughed, quiet, a shared little break in the dark.

The laugh dissolved, not because it was forbidden, but because other things were waiting. They let silence return, not heavy now, but useful.

“Promise me,” Ollie said again, not in fear, but as a ritual. “Promise me you will be careful.”

“I promise,” Oscar said, and he lifted his head enough to make sure the words landed through eye contact. “And you promise me, Bear. No noise in the east wing unless you have to. No heroics for show. Genius first.”

“Genius first,” Ollie repeated. “Monster second.”

“Leave the monster to me,” Oscar said, and this time when The Ghost put his hand up, Oscar took it, shook it once, and let go. “He knows his job.”

They did not talk about Dad or Papa because those names sat like open veins at the center of the room and touching them would have undone the work the last hour had done. They did not talk about Sebastian or Lewis or Carlos or Antoine or the men who had chosen them and the men who would die for them. They did not plan here. They touched foreheads and breathed and knitted a net that would catch them tomorrow when the building inside the map became a building full of air and doors and hands.

After a while, the rocking slowed until it was just the rhythm of breath on breath. Ollie’s hand slipped from hair to neck to shoulder and stayed. Oscar’s chin found the top of Ollie’s head and rested there the way it had when he was twelve and Ollie was small enough to fit under his whole arm. They did not mean to sleep. They did not fear it either. They slept without lying down, the way exhausted men sleep after too long holding themselves upright for others, bodies bent around each other like vines, the warmth borrowed and shared.

Ollie shifted in his sleep and made a small sound, the kind that asks and thanks at once. Oscar’s hand spread wider between his shoulder blades, the weight of it an answer. The ring on the chain lifted and fell with his breathing. The jumper warmed under both of them. The hoodie held the smell of coffee and sugar and a man who had made vows with his whole life. The night thinned toward morning in a house that had decided to survive.

“For you,” Ollie had said without saying it, to the man who he missed dearly. “I will learn a new way to breathe for you, everything I will do from now on it would be to make you happy.”

“For you,” Oscar had said out loud, to the man who overwatered plants and saved people who thought they were beyond saving. “I will come back whole.”

~~~~

There was no sunrise.

Not that he could’ve seen it if there had been. The room gave no window to the sky, only a slat too high and too narrow to grant any hope. Still, he could feel the time pass in his bones, in the low ache of a body that had survived too many nights in a row. Morning didn’t come like a gift. It crept in like rot — cold and sallow, with no warmth, no promise.

Charles sat on the ground.

The concrete pressed up through the thin mat beneath him. His wrists were unchained today, but it made no difference. It only made the weight in his chest more real. The illusion of freedom was the cruelest torture yet.

He stared at the mirror they’d bolted to the wall — cracked, fogged, and permanent. A pane designed not for vanity, but for surveillance. If he broke it, it wouldn’t shatter. It would resist him the way Toto always had: cold, polished, unyielding.

In it, he saw a stranger.

Bruises bloomed like dying violets across his cheek and jaw, the skin split at the corner of his mouth. His curls — once combed neatly each morning by Max’s quiet hands — had been laying flat, unwashed. One side of his head lay shorn, the other matted with sweat and filth. But none of that was what hollowed him out.

It was the eyes.

Empty, even to himself.

There had been a time — not long ago — when he’d looked into a mirror and seen a father. A husband. A son. A man who wore linen shirts and pressed kisses to the hair of boys who weren’t his by blood, but by choice, and who needed him all the same. He used to believe softness was strength. That to raise a family was as noble as to lead a war.

That man was gone.

And all that was left… was the one who failed to protect them.

His fingers curled in the hem of his ruined shirt.

“Papa,” he whispered to the cell walls. “What would you have done?”

His voice trembled on the French, barely holding together.

“You always knew what to do. Even when I didn’t.”

He swallowed, throat raw from thirst. He wasn’t even sure when they’d last brought water. Hours ago? A day? The air down here didn’t carry time. It just smelled like mildew and something faintly metallic, like the memory of blood.

He glanced at the envelope again.

It lay on the floor where the guard had shoved it under the door just after dawn. No sound. No warning. Just paper scraping against stone like a death sentence.

He hadn’t opened it.

He hadn’t needed to.

ANNULMENT OF BLOOD-BONDED UNION
BETWEEN:
ANDREA ANTONELLI & OLIVER VERSTAPPEN-LECLERC

The words were burned into his skull now. They might as well have carved them into his skin.

He didn’t touch the paper. Couldn’t. As though if he never laid hands on it, the choice wouldn’t be real. But it was real. Everything was. The weight of it sat heavy across his shoulders, heavier than any chain ever had.

His boy. His sweet Andrea. Seventeen, and already caught in the war of monsters. A child raised on scraps and steel, who had finally found something that felt like home — only to have it ripped away and used against him.

Charles closed his eyes.

He was just a child.

He should be home.

He should be with Ollie — who was probably sitting in Max’s war room right now, trying not to fall apart, demanding answers with fire in his blood and his father’s knife in his hand. Charles could picture him — jaw tight, fists white, too much heart for one boy. He always reminded Charles of himself, back when he believed rage alone could protect the people he loved.

He hoped Ollie wasn’t watching the footage.

He hoped Max was keeping him from it.

Because if Ollie saw what they’d done to Kimi—

No. No. Charles couldn’t think about that.

He pressed the heel of his hand to his temple.

Tried to breathe.

Tried to believe in something other than the helpless, gnawing ache.

Outside, beyond the walls of this tomb, a war was stirring. He could feel it. Max was moving. Oscar was sharpening the blade of vengeance. Lando — dear God, Lando — he didn’t even know if Lando was alive. The last they’d seen, he was beaten. Dragged. Bleeding.

Oscar’s boy.

Charles’ boy, too.

His sons-in-law. Not by blood. Not by legal paper. But by vow. By the way they held each other in the worst of moments. By the way Kimi still called him papà in the softest voice, the one that made Charles ache with tenderness.

They were his.

And he had failed them.

All of them.

Because he hadn’t been strong enough. Because he had always been the soft one. The gentle one. The one who cooked dinners and told bedtime stories and whispered love into all the empty places Max had thought unworthy of it.

He was supposed to be safe. A harbor.

Now, he was a liability.

That’s what Toto thought.

That’s why he’d done this — taken Charles first. To break the spine of the family. To cut out the heart.

Because he thought love made Charles weak.

But he was wrong.

Charles stood slowly.

The pain in his knees made him grunt, but he didn’t sit back down. He walked toward the envelope.

He picked it up.

Tore the corner from it. Folded it once. Then twice. Then again. A crane. Just like Ollie used to fold from napkins when he was anxious. It was a habit he’d learned from Charles, who’d learned it from Sebastian.

Each fold was a prayer.

Each crease: a promise.

He placed the crane on the table.

Then turned to the cracked mirror and looked at the stranger in it once more.

“I won’t sign it,” he said aloud, voice flat but steady.

“You’ll have to kill me.”

He didn’t say it like a challenge.

He said it like a fact.

Because he knew who would be watching.

Toto always was.

He stepped back.

Faced the vent in the wall.

Sat on the floor with his back to it, legs stretched out, hands resting over his knees.

He didn’t say Kimi’s name.

Didn’t try to speak.

He just sat there. Breathing. Present.

Letting the boy know — without a word — that he wasn’t alone.

~~~~

Pre-dawn had a color, and in this house it was the blue of old porcelain, the shade of breath held too long. The manor had been awake all night in the way battlefields are awake, a watchfulness that made the walls seem thinner and the floorboards louder. Down the long hallway, beyond portraits that had watched generations harden and love and break, the war room kept its own weather. Screens glowed. Coffee cooled and went bitter in cups. Maps lay open like wounds.

Ollie sat at the far edge of the table as if it were a cliff. The laptop before him washed his face in cold light. It showed Kimi into that room. Grainy. Shaking. Curled around himself on concrete, his lip split, a dark thread of dried blood tracing the soft line of his jaw, chained like an animal, like something Toto could own. The image had no sound. The silence was worse than the audio had ever been. It asked them to fill in what sanity would rather not. It was horrifying to watch the man that you love in this state, Ollie’s mind is fucked for sure.

A cup appeared at Ollie’s elbow. Steam spiraled up and then faded. Antoine set his own mug down a measured distance away and sat, shoulders square, the kind of posture taught by fathers and tutors and rooms that are not safe. This close, the light turned his eyes almost silver.

“You should drink that,” Antoine said.

“I can’t taste anything anymore,” Ollie answered. “Not until he’s safe.”

He had intended to sound dry, controlled, clinical. It came out raw. He kept his gaze on the screen the way a man keeps his palm on an old burn. He could not stop touching it. He could not heal it by touching it. His pupils were blown and he did not seem to blink, not really, his lashes chattering over eyes that had not slept in thirty hours. Maybe more. Time had become a stack of sharp-edged minutes that he shuffled through by force.

Ollie lifted his hand without thinking and laid his fingertips against the projection. The gesture was absurd. The wall was cool and smooth. His fingers trembled the way they did after too much code and too little food. He drew them along the outline of Kimi’s shoulder, a small arc, a brief benediction.

“Look at him,” he whispered. “He is so small like this.”

Antoine did not answer at once. He had already learned that sometimes Ollie needed the space inside his own sentences. The air in the room hummed with servers in the next chamber and something sweeter, citrus and wax, the ghosts of dinners and anniversaries and normal nights when this table had held wine and laughter instead of armory manifests and satellite schedules. Ollie said, almost to himself, “He was supposed to be trying on suits this week. We were supposed to be arguing about ties, whether he would let me tie his for him on the day or whether I’d mess it up on purpose so I could touch his throat twice.”

He laughed under his breath and the sound was terrible. “Not this.”

Antoine’s gaze moved from the projection to Ollie’s hands. Genius has a shape in the body. In Ollie it lived in his fingers. They were quick and fine and always doing three things at once. Tonight they hooked into the table’s lip until his knuckles paled.

“I would trade places with him,” Ollie said. His voice softened, almost unrecognizable to himself. “I would take it all. The chains, the hunger, the fear. I would wear it for him. I would carry it.”

The cursor on the screen blinked once. A tiny rhythmic pulse against the frozen feed. Antoine watched the rhythm and then reached, slow enough to be refused, and closed his hand around Ollie’s. It was not a dramatic gesture. His palm was warm. His fingers were steady. It was the kind of touch you offer when you have learned that words sometimes make things worse.

Ollie went utterly still. Antoine felt the glassy tremor under the skin, the contained electricity of a boy who has never learned to rest because resting had always meant someone else might be hurt while he slept.

“Stop,” Antoine said, voice low.

Ollie blinked fast, confused, that small sharp animal look an injured thing gets when someone approaches.

“You are torturing yourself.”

“I have to watch,” Ollie said. He shrugged, a small helpless tilt. “He is alone in there. The least I can do is be with him however I can.”

“If it were me,” Antoine said, “I would not watch.”

Ollie stared at him. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “What do you mean?”

Antoine stood. He did not let go of Ollie’s hand until he had to. He reached across the laptop and pressed the lid down. The click of it closing seemed obscene in the quiet. Ollie’s expression cracked, disbelief first, then anger, then fear.

“Antoine,” he said, and the plea was already there.

“I would not watch someone I love be tortured,” Antoine said. “Not because I would not care. Because I would not survive it.”

Ollie’s chest rose too fast. “You do not understand, I need to keep my eyes on him. If something changes, if there is any sign, any signal, if he looks toward the camera again the way he did earlier, if he tries to… to send me anything… I cannot miss it.”

“You won’t,” Antoine said. “You think you will, and the fear makes it real, but you won’t. You’ve already taught three separate systems in this house to wake you if the pattern shifts. You wrote the script that watches his breathing for irregularities. You wrote the one that recognizes the guard with the crooked wrist and flags his presence. You built the net that will catch any message he sends. You are not watching to catch a change. You are watching to bleed.”

The words landed like the quietest kind of blow, the kind that does not bruise but changes the way the body holds itself.

Ollie swallowed. He looked young then. Younger than twenty. Younger than the cut of his jaw and the weight of his name allowed him to be. “What am I supposed to do if I do not watch?” he asked.

Antoine leaned his hip against the table and considered the boy in front of him. He had seen princes lose their countries more gently than this.

“You could drink the coffee,” Antoine said.

It was absurd and kind. Ollie let out a noise that might have been a laugh and might have been the beginning of a sob. He pulled the mug close and just held it for a second in both hands, feeling heat soak into the cold ache of his fingers.

“My Papa is treated like filth and humiliated,” he said, feeling disgusted that this is even happening. “My husband is going to be punished in front of the man who wants to own him. My brother is watching his fiancé die by inches. Tell me how to be anything else.”

Antoine’s face did not change, but something in him softened exactly the way fabric does when you let it fall from a line. “ You already did so much, Oliver, you’ve dedicated all your waking hours and more to the cause and your’re right to do so, it’s about your family, but you’ve already given so much, the boy who hacked into the feed with nothing but bare hands and a genius brain, the boy who read a reflection in a drinking glass like it was scripture. The man who can black out that building for ninety seconds and make ninety seconds feel like a miracle.”

Ollie’s throat worked. He set the coffee down and wiped his palms against his jeans as if to dry them of something that had never been liquid. “I do not have a miracle tonight.”

“You do,” Antoine said. “You have small machines and good men and a family that knows how to suffer without breaking. You have a father who will carry his husband out on his back if he has to. You have a brother who has already made himself into a blade. You have me.” He let that sit for a breath, and then said it again with a little more gravity. “You have me, mon ami.”

Ollie looked at him and for a second did not see the heir of the Allard line, did not see the meticulous suit or the inherited composure. He saw the boy underneath. Twenty-two and alone in a way power does to people. He saw hands that had learned to write treaties before they learned to throw punches. He saw the delicate seam where softness had been stitched back into a body that had been warned against it.

“Why are you being so kind to me?” Ollie asked, the words falling out in a rush once the dam broke. “You have met me what, twice, maybe three times in rooms crowded with adults who never see us. And now you are here in my home, watching my husband hurt, and you… you keep finding the right thing to do.”

Antoine went very still. He slotted a stack of documents together with surgical neatness and set them down. He did not look at Ollie right away. When he did, the silence around him felt chosen rather than empty.

“Because I made a vow to your family,” he said. “A real one. My father took me to your father once when politics was sharper than it is now, and Max looked at me like a person rather than a pawn. He told me there would be a day when I could choose whether to be a blade or a bridge. He said a house as old as mine could stand to learn how to love like yours. I have wanted to repay that debt for years.”

He paused. His mouth tipped at one corner. “And also, Oliver, because I like you. You remind me of what you get if you temper fire with loyalty rather than shame. You love like a man who thinks promises mean something. You make me want to believe that it is not naïve to want the people we love to live.”

Ollie blinked. The compliment did not know where to land. It hovered above his shoulder like a hand that had forgotten how to rest. “That cannot be all,” he said, because it was easier to interrogate the kindness than receive it.

Antoine exhaled. The ghost of a laugh moved through his chest. “It is not all,” he said. “It never is.”

He straightened and, for no audience, told a small truth. “There was someone. Years ago. A person I loved in the quiet way that is the only safe way when your last name can end careers. He did not choose me. That is his right. He chose the path he thought would save his name. He was not wrong. I loved him anyway. Maybe I still do in the way you keep loving your childhood home even after it has been torn down.”

Ollie listened the way he coded, with all his attention turned in one direction like a field of sunflowers at noon. “Do you still love him?”

“I think I always will,” Antoine said. His eyes did not leave Ollie’s. “But I am trying to get better at loving people even more for the way they love. That is why I am here. Your love makes me want to win on your behalf.”

Ollie let his head tip forward a fraction. The lights made a clean line along his cheekbone that had not been there when he was thirteen and all shoulder and elbow and math. He reached for the coffee again and finally drank. It was awful. It was everything he needed. He coughed and set the cup down and scrubbed his hand over his mouth.

“ You think I love like a blind fool” he said, embarrassed even as his mouth tugged upward, a reflex in a face built for laughing in rooms he could not laugh in anymore.

“I think you love like a man who knows what power is for,” Antoine said. “Which is rarer.”

They both looked, without meaning to, toward the blank screen. Kimi’s absence was a physical thing. It bent the air. It made the light uneven. Ollie turned the laptop a fraction as if angling it might somehow change the fact of it being closed. He did not open it.

“What if I fail him,” Ollie asked. He sounded almost academic about it, like he was testing a proof. “What if I am as brilliant as they say and it is not enough. What if, at the end, there is a door and it stays locked.”

Antoine’s fingers tapped once against the table, a habit he would deny if accused. “Then we break a wall,” he said.

Ollie huffed, a tired, unwilling smile. “You think it is that simple.”

“No,” Antoine said. “I think it is that brutal. We do not need simple. We need honest. You will open what can be opened. You will darken what must be dark. You will make ninety seconds and we will make those seconds mean more than most men manage with a lifetime. And if there is a wall at the end, we will break it down because family is not the kind of word you say only when it is easy. Do you need anything right now,” Antoine asked quietly, “that you do not know how to ask for?”

Ollie almost laughed. “Everything,” he said. “I need everything.”

Antoine nodded. “All right. Then we will take what we can, and we will steal the rest.”

He gathered the thick stack of papers he had brought and flattened them with his palm. The movement was spare, practiced. “Your father will want us in fifteen minutes,” he said. “I want to walk you in there with a list in your mouth. Not apologies. Not ifs. Not maybes. A list. What do you need from me so you can give him that.”

Ollie pulled the laptop back and lifted the lid halfway, hesitation inside the hinge. The feed leaped back alive into the room and with it the ache. He shut it again before the image formed. The restraint cost something visible. He breathed once. Twice. He set his hands on the keyboard and did not open the screen, only let his fingers find the home keys by muscle memory.

“Forty more men at the east outbuilding,” he said, almost instantly himself again. “Silent walkers. Your men. They move like water. I need them to be ghosts. No radios unless I say. We’ll reroute the false feeds from grid C to grid A, I discovered a time drift in C that could give us away if they’re not idiots. I also need your signature on a supply request I am about to forge. Yours will get past French customs in a way mine will not.”

“Done,” Antoine said.

“I need hard copies of the evacuation filings for the decommissioned Saint Roman plant. I already matched the vendor stamp in the reflection from Kimi’s glass to a municipal order from 2011. If I can get the blueprint itself in front of me on paper, I can triangulate the parts of the complex not shown on tourist records.”

Antoine was already pulling his phone. “My aunt’s legal counsel did half the shutdown paperwork in that district. I can have certified copies brought by courier in an hour.”

“A courier before dawn.”

“Before dawn,” Antoine said. “I am not new to being inconvenient.”

“Good,” Ollie said, and the word warmed the air between them in the smallest way.

“Anything else.”

Ollie paused. A corner of him he did not look at too often pushed forward. “Yes,” he said. He surprised himself.

Antoine looked up. “Tell me.”

“I need you to keep looking at me like that,” Ollie said, color coming and going in his cheeks. “Like I am not going to miss. Like I am capable of doing the impossible on command. My father will give me orders. My brother will give me his faith. I need someone next to me who will give me a mirror I am not afraid to look into.”

Antoine held the request with reverence. “Then look,” he said. He did not glance away. “I see a man who is going to open the door for his husband. I see a boy who became a weapon because he loved first and not because he hated. I see the only person in this house who can write the kind of code grief cannot corrupt. And if you fall, I will lift you by the back of your neck like a scruffed cat and put you back in your chair. You can hate me later.”

Ollie laughed. The sound was a thin line of light across an oil-black sea. He reached, without thinking, and set his hand over Antoine’s on the table. “Thank you,” he said. “For being impossible too.”

They stood in the same breath, a kind of choreography the room taught them. Antoine shrugged into his coat as if it were armor. Ollie zipped up the old hoodie he had not realized he was wearing until now, the one that smelled like Charles’ coffee and Max’s aftershave, the one he stole more often than asked for. He pushed the laptop into sleep and tucked it under his arm. They were already moving toward the door when Ollie stopped.

“Antoine,” he said.

“Yes,” Antoine said, and the word was easy, as if he had been waiting for the name to be said like that.

“ I don’t have the right words to thank you” Ollie said. “But thank you, truly. Your friendship is a lifeline right now and I will forever be grateful for it. After- after this, I want to be a husband again. That is all I have ever wanted. To be a husband. To be his husband.”

Antoine’s face changed in the smallest way grief changes faces, softening the edges without dulling the blade. “You don’t have to thank me, mon ami, truly. And you will be,” he said. “Tomorrow, by sunrise, you will hold him.”

Ollie pulled a breath in and let it out very slowly, as if he was teaching his lungs something he expected to forget otherwise. He nodded once. They stepped into the hall.

~~~~

The strategy room was carved from stone and silence.

It sat buried in the belly of the Verstappen-Leclerc estate, a converted war-time study with blackout walls, dim tactical lighting, and the oppressive gravity of a place where hope could not afford to look soft. No windows. No distractions. Just breath. Steel. Blood waiting to be spilled.

At the head of the long oak table stood Max Verstappen, not as a father, not as a husband, but as the general of a family that had been broken once already and would not be again.

He was already in his vest. Black, strapped tight across his chest, the Glock at his hip loaded with custom rounds. A small blade was sheathed beside his ribs. Across the table, a map—drawn in arteries of red and veins of blue—showed the fortress where Charles, Kimi, and Lando were still shackled.

In the center: a glowing crimson circle pulsed on the screen.
THE VAULT.

“Three breach points,” he said. The room settled around the words. “Three teams. No mistakes. We get in. We get our family. We leave a graveyard behind us.”

No one spoke.

“By dawn, Toto Wolff will cease to exist,” Max said. He did not raise his voice. “That is not a hope. That is a fact.”

Max’s gloved hand moved, and the map broke into sectors.

“East,” he said. “The Black Gate.”

A new panel brightened, all lattice and passwords, the nervous system of the fortress. Banks of cameras, intelligent locks, redundant power. The kind of thing someone builds when he trusts no one and believes his own paranoia will outlive him.

“Ollie,” Max said, and the boy was already there, eyes rimmed with sleeplessness, mouth set to a thin white thread. He wore Papa’s hoodie for warmth, sleeves shoved to his forearms, ink and coffee stains on his knuckles like he had tried to write his way out of the night. Antoine stood at his shoulder, spine straight, one palm on the back of the chair not as possession, not even as comfort, but as pledge.

“You did the impossible before, my boy, I’m going to need you to do it again,” Max said. Pride did not soften the sentence, but it warmed it from within. “You will write the virus that dismantles it now.”

“Yes,” Ollie said. The word came out like the click of a safety. He did not look up from the screen. He did not need to. He knew where his father stood by the pull in the room.

“You are not just my son,” Max said. “You are the key.”

Antoine’s hand shifted, barely, a pressure that said I heard it too. His voice, when it came, was quiet. “I will keep him standing.”

“You will guard him with your life,” Max said, gaze sliding to Antoine’s. “If he falls, we all do.”

Antoine inclined his head, a monarch’s grace tucked into a soldier’s nod. “Il ne tombera pas.”

Ollie flinched like the words had weight. He didn’t like the idea of being protected. He liked being useful. But when his father said it like that—like trust, not weakness—he swallowed and kept coding.

Ollie’s screen filled with gates opening in his mind. “I can scramble their encrypted comms with a narrowband EM storm,” he said. “Fifty hertz grid means their clock drift is trash. I spoof the cameras with old footage from the last shift change, we are invisible in their lenses for ninety seconds at a time. I chain those windows to your movement. If you are late by a breath, they see you.”

“We will not be late,” Max said.

“I will assign three extraction routes on the fly,” Ollie went on, fingers moving faster as he spoke. “One for each of them. Color coded. If I say Red, you carry Papa through Stair One and the northern culvert. Green is Kimi, Stair Three to the service corridor behind the casting floor. Blue is Lando, Stair Two to the generator trench. If I lose grid power, I will ghost us on their backup satellite backbone. I need Antoine in my ear calling guard positions in the east tech wing. I need the French team to keep bodies off my back without bullets wandering into server racks we might need.”

Antoine did not smile, but his eyes warmed. “I brought five men who know what a quiet death looks like.”

Max nodded once. “Do it quietly,” he said. “Do it clean.”

Ollie’s mouth moved, a prayer under his breath that wasn’t to any god.

“I am coming, Andrea,” he said, the vow small in the roar of machines, and all the more terrifying for it. “I am bringing you home.”

Antoine leaned in, cheek almost brushing Ollie’s hair. “You are brilliant,” he whispered. “You are fury. Finish this, mon roi.”

Max’s hand cut the air and the map swung south.

“South,” he said. “The Blood Path.”

“Oscar,” Max said, and the second son stopped pacing. He was a quiet storm contained in a man’s frame, muscles held as if by wire. He wore Lando’s jumper under his combat jacket, soft blue, absurd and holy. The ring on its chain thumped once against his sternum in answer.

“You were trained by Carlos,” Max said. “You move like water. Tonight you burn like fire.”

Carlos stepped from the shadows with the curve of a grin that had teeth in it. Rosary tucked around his wrist like a live wire, tattoos fading into the cuff of his shirt. He had taught Oscar to break a wrist with three fingers and to walk away from an explosion without looking back. He had also taught him to cook paella for a family of ten and to hold a crying boy’s head so the sobs could come without choking him. He was both things and neither; he would be whatever the boys needed.

“Oscar,” Max said, and this was not an order but a trust, “you lead from the south. Ten men. Noise without mass. Smoke, light, the smell of hell. They will think a battalion is on their lawn.”

Oscar swallowed. “If we fall,” he began, but Carlos’s hand was on his jaw, firm.

“No,” Carlos said. “We fall only if Max does.”

Across the table, Max’s eyes did not move from the map. Still, Oscar felt the truth of it land like a coin in his pocket.

“And he never will,” Carlos added. A promise laid over another promise until they braided.

Tasks lit up in ruthless bullets: phosphorous grenades to paint the hillside like dawn, smoke bombs rolled on the wind, truck bombs at the decoy line, a controlled burn of their generators to bleed the Vault’s timers into uselessness. The kind of violence that keeps men busy looking at the wrong door.

Oscar pulled the chain out again, the ring cool against his lips. “For you, Lan,” he said into it, no performative bravado, only the raw smallness of a man talking to the one thing that makes him better. “I will tear down the world.”

Carlos’s thumb tapped his cheek once, not gentle, not cruel. “Make sure it burns right, sobrino.”

The map turned north under Max’s hand.

“North,” he said. “The Silent Flame.”

“Seb,” Max said.

Sebastian lifted the blade to the light, inspecting the edge like a jeweler inspecting a gem. He was older now, but the calm he wore had not dulled; it had simply thickened with time. He had once taught Max to breathe through a chokehold, to count to three before pulling a trigger, to make mourning a private craft.

“Lewis,” Max said.

Lewis slid the silencer home and the click rang as clear as a bell. He had the quiet people mistake for gentleness, and the steel they never saw until it was too late. He moved like the last step before a fall, weightless and inevitable.

“I do not need to tell you what he did,” Max said. “To me. To Charles. To our sons.”

“ We will bring you Wolff and we will make sure to break a few bones before he gets in your hands, brother, that’s a promise.”

“Make it slow,” Max said smirking.

The plan blinked complete in the north: infiltrate the tunnel, kill all private elite, reach Toto’s quarters, blade and bullet, empty the room of future.

Max reached the last panel and did not need the map to see it. He knew the weight of that door without touching it. Charles was held there.

“This breach is mine,” he said.

The room understood. No one offered him a different fate and no one suggested he share it. The Vault was a sentence that ended with his name.

“Two from the Monaco Royal Unit,” Max said, ticking the pieces into place. “A field medic. Charles’s original bodyguard has returned, he knows the old codes of the men who took them and their habits when they get bored. We time the Vault door to Ollie’s window. We use gas inside the guard chamber, silent, fast. If the gas misses and they move for their alarms, we cut them down.”

He paused. He let himself breathe then. Not for show. For strength.

“We carry Lando out,” he said. “He will fight us and we will carry him anyway. We cut Kimi’s chains, he will be shaking and he will try to apologize, do not let him. Put a blanket around him if there is one. Charles…”

The name broke out of him like a small animal blundering through brush. For a half-second he was not the head of a house, he was a man with a soft voice in his ear saying mon coeur, a man whose wedding ring sometimes stung like a brand. He put his palm flat on the table, felt oak and gravity, came back.

“Charles is mine, I will carry him,” he said. “It was always going to be me.”

Silence rolled back through the room and folded itself into the angles. Outside, the manor was still, a sleeping animal curled around a wound it meant to heal with teeth. Inside, the map kept breathing for everyone who could not afford to waste a breath.

“Recap,” Max said.

He ran it like a blade along a whetstone, not to see if it could cut, to make sure it would not fail when pressed.

“Ollie and Antoine, East tech wing. EM disruptors, false feeds, overrides on internal comms and doors. Kill quiet, not clever. If you have to choose between elegance and speed, choose speed. I want three tagged extraction routes in my ear before the first detonation.”

“Yes,” Ollie said. His voice did not wobble. Antoine’s fingers tightened on the chair, once.

“Oscar and Carlos, South hillside. You paint the world with fire and make them count ghosts. Hit the generators, turn their timers into dead weight. Time your first burn to Ollie’s blackouts. If the wind turns, you adjust. No heroics. I need you alive at the end.”

Oscar nodded, throat working. “We will make them deaf to anything but us.”

“Sebastian and Lewis, North tunnel. You know the rest. Keep your footprints inside the shadows. I want Wolff at my feet before he knows why the room got so quiet.”

Lewis slid a knife into an ankle sheath, needless habit. “He will not know his last thought.”

“Royal Unit with me,” Max finished. “Doctor stays at the mouth of the Vault unless I call him forward. We move on Ollie’s ninety-second windows. We do not speak unless it is necessary. We do not stop unless it is to pull one of ours off the ground. If a man reaches for a button, you break his arm at the elbow.”

He let the last command hang like a weight from the ceiling. He watched them receive it, not with fear, with relief. There is comfort in a man who tells you exactly what to do when the world thins and tears.

Across the table, someone’s phone buzzed, a tremor against wood. Antoine silenced it without looking. Carlos cracked his neck left and right. Sebastian folded the handkerchief, once, along the same crease he had trusted for years. Ollie exhaled, then inhaled on a new rhythm, the coding trance finally holding him like a clean current. Oscar tucked the ring back under his shirt, pressed it against his skin until the metal warmed.

Max looked at each face and saw not soldiers, not even family as a noun. He saw the strands of a net that had taken years to tie and would not break tonight. He saw the boy Oscar had been, stubborn and hungry, who had made a game of learning the names of every guard at the gate because he believed people loosened around their own names. He saw the child Ollie had been, furious with the world’s slowness, the one who had cried at the end of a movie because he realized stories could hurt and begged Max to tell him if life would too. He saw Lewis teaching Charles to hold a gun like a thing you intend to put down again, and Sebastian plucking a dandelion from the lawn to tuck behind a child’s ear like a crown.

“So be brutal,” Max said. “Be surgical. Be unstoppable.”

He straightened. The chair at the head of the table remained empty, as it had been since Charles was taken. It would be filled again. He made the thought contractual by not saying it out loud.

“We do not leave any of ours behind,” he said. “Not tonight. Not ever again.”

He put on his gloves with the same care he had once used to button Charles’s collar in a mirror before a party where everyone who would smile at them would also sharpen the knives they hid under napkins. He checked the magazine one last time. He turned his ring again, not as an indulgence, as a calibration of gravity.

“Move,” he said, and the room rose.

Above them, the manor held its breath as if it knew. The olive trees in the courtyard moved a little in the black wind. The sea was out there somewhere, working at the shore the way it always had, patient as a god and as relentless.

Max stepped into the corridor and closed the door softly behind him, as if not to wake anyone. He adjusted the strap of his vest. He listened to the sound of his family’s footsteps fanning into the night. He listened for something else too, as foolish as a child pressing a seashell to his ear for the sound of the ocean. He listened for Charles laughing, for Kimi’s irreverent murmur, for Lando’s bright voice breaking Oscar’s quiet. He did not hear them. He heard the wind in the olive leaves. It sounded like yes.

By dawn, he told himself without words. By dawn, the house would have its names back. By dawn, the red circle would be an absence, not a wound. By dawn, the man who had taken what he loved would be a story he refused to tell.

He started walking.

~~~~

The lights had gone dim hours ago. Not off, never off, just dimmed to a rancid twilight that stripped the room of edges and left only movements, shivers, the smear of a shadow where a wall should be. The bulb hummed, a high thin whine that settled in the back of Lando’s head and matched the burn of his fever. The floor was cold. Damp in places where the concrete wept, slick in others where something from the ceiling had fallen and dried to a salt ring. He sat with his back against it, shoulder blades finding the same two pits they always found, one arm locked around his abdomen as if he could hold himself together, the other hand hovering near the blade of a cracked tile he had eased loose yesterday. A weapon. Crude, but his. It fit his palm like a promise he did not want to make and could not afford to break.

When the fever climbed, the concrete pulsed under him with a heartbeat that was not his, the chain at his ankle grew heavier, the air turned thick with the breath of the walls. Sound stretched and thinned. Sometimes the drip he heard was water; sometimes it was time. Sometimes he could not tell the difference.

He had been talking less, and then not at all. There had been a day when he begged the camera to blink, when he whispered nonsense just to put a human shape back around his voice. Then there was a day when he practiced breathing like Oscar had taught him, slow in, slower out, five counts up the ribs, five counts down. Now there were only counts, and the way they broke whenever his leg spasmed or the heat rolled over him in a new wave and he had to bite his sleeve to keep from making the sound his body wanted to make.

Oscar’s name lay on the inside of his teeth. It tasted like copper and salt.

He had sworn once, on a quiet morning that smelled like coffee and clean laundry and the vanilla lotion Oscar always forgot to rinse properly from his wrist, that he would never die on him. The oath had been a ridiculous thing to say on a ridiculous morning when the worst problem in the house had been the plant on the kitchen window oversaturated with love. It did not feel ridiculous now. It felt like a nail he had hammered into himself and had to hang from.

The door did not open. No slam. No keys. Just a texture change in the sound of the corridor, a different weight in the air. He would have believed he imagined it if not for the small, anxious squeak of a wheel that needed oil. He tensed so fast his vision went white around the edges. His injured leg shrieked, a hot tearing sound he felt rather than heard. His hand closed around the tile. He tucked it along his forearm to hide the glint, raised it enough to be useful and not enough to be taken.

She did not look like the men who hurt him. That registered first. Not their boots. Not their smell. Not the jagged laughter they wore like knives. She was small, thin in the way of someone who eats fast because she has learned food can disappear. A dark braid tucked into a surgical cap, eyes too big in a too-pale face. The cart behind her was dented and patient, the kind of hospital thing that should have belonged to kindness and had learned to live with cruelty.

Lando went backward on instinct, scraping his spine against the wall, body curled around the pain the way the sea curled around rocks. The tile lifted. The breath he took burned all the way down and hit the fire in his belly like throwing a match into petrol.

“Stay away,” he rasped. The sound startled him, how small and broken it was, how quickly it frayed at the ends. “I swear, I will stab you. Do not come near me.”

His words did not carry the weight they once had. His body had made too many noises he did not choose in the last days. Men who liked that had laughed. But something in his eyes must have still been sharp enough, because she lifted her hand, palm out, fingers spread in a slow, careful peace.

“Shhh,” she said, soft and urgent. “I am here to help you, Mr. Verstappen-Leclerc. But you need to lower your voice. If they hear me, I am dead.”

The sincerity scraped him raw. It came not like a line someone had coached her to say, but like someone who had been living afraid for long enough to know which fear had teeth. His grip on the tile did not loosen. He could not afford to let it. But his breathing staggered and then obeyed his count for the first time in hours.

“Why,” he asked, and the word fought him. “Why would you want to help me?! I said stay away!” He made a futile attempt at taking a swing at her with the broken tile but his hands shook too hard, he was useless, he can’t even protect himself.

“Because someone once helped me,” she said, kneeling without crossing the invisible line he had set. Her movements were deliberate, as if she had mapped his fear and agreed to live within it. “A long time ago. Your father-in-law. Max Verstappen.”

The name did not so much open something as it seared through a blockage and let blood move again. Heat broke along his spine. His hand shook, and he resented it. He had thought about Max in the abstract because Max was a mountain and you do not cry about a mountain when you are hurt; you plant your feet on it. To hear his name said in this room like he was a person with history and hands made Lando want to laugh, or vomit, or sob. None of those were useful. He swallowed and it tasted like iron.

“He helped me get out of something,” she said. “Something I would not have survived. He did not ask for anything back. He gave me a name if I ever wanted to return the favor. That name was yours.”

“Dad… he never said anything,” Lando began, thinly, and she shook her head.

“He would not,” she said, and her mouth trembled around something she did not let fall. “He does not talk about the lives he saves.”

He believed her. The belief hurt as it arrived because he had trained himself to not believe anyone who entered this room with quiet feet. He looked at her hands. They were shaking, but they moved the way a professional moves when she must. She pulled gloves on with a snap that made his skin crawl, then made a small, efficient world on the floor beside her with a vial, a syringe, gauze, a bottle of clear something that smelled like clean and cut through the rot in the room.

“What is that? What are you giving me?” he asked, more ragged than suspicious, and tried to sit up. Pain put its thumb in his side and pushed.

“You are running hot,” she said, voice all polish now, the way you talk over a bridge that might not hold. “Dangerously. Your body is trying to quit on you. This is acetaminophen. Strong. IV. You will need your head. Soon.”

“And the other,” he said, eyes on the second syringe.

“Pentazocine,” she said. “Not morphine. Strong enough to take the edge so you can think. So you can move.”

He could not stop his eyes from flicking to her face, to the door, to the chain at his ankle, to the needle again. The last time a needle found him, the world cut out, and when it came back he was a thing you could drag, a thing men joked in front of. Every muscle seized around the memory.

“What is in it for you?” he asked. It was all he had left, the single mean line he could throw to see if it snagged a lie. “No one does anything for free. Tell me what you want for saving my life.”

She looked at him for longer than was comfortable, as if not speaking was more dangerous than lying and she chose it anyway.

“Tell Max Verstappen that Ana Sanchez paid her debt in full,” she said. “If I am caught, I am dead anyway. Do not waste what I came here to do.”

The name sat in the air between them and turned into a bridge. He unclenched an inch. He let his head tip against the wall and watched her hands. He had always been good with hands, watching them on a steering wheel, reading them in a crowd. Hers were careful, competent. She checked his forearm for a vein and found one without hurting, swabbed with alcohol and waited for his flinch to pass before she inserted the catheter with the kind of patience you reserve for a creature that will bolt if you move too fast.

He tensed with everything he had left when the needle bit. He kept his body quiet because he still had a tiny sliver of pride stashed under his tongue and he would die before he let a sound out for no reason. The heat inside him broke into a different heat, the roiling kind that becomes a tide and then, if you are lucky, a receding line of damp on sand. The second injection was slower. It threaded itself through his leg, found the place where something had been done badly and wrapped itself around the ache like cloth.

“You will be groggy first,” she said, already unwrapping the filthy dressing.

The smell that lifted when she peeled the gauze away was a living thing. It hit him so hard his head swam. He clenched his teeth until he felt a crack along an old filling. She did not recoil. She went very still for a heartbeat, her lips pressing into a line, then set about the work like she had been angry with incompetent people for a long time.

“This was done wrong,” she said. “They did not clean the entry. You are lucky. You would not have made another day.”

Luck. He almost laughed. The sound came out like a thread fraying.

She irrigated, swabbed, set new gauze with hands that did not shake now that there was something to fix. He laid his head back and closed his eyes because watching was a power he did not need to spend if someone else, for once, wanted to carry a piece of the night. He listened to the small, careful sounds of care. He did not realize he had been starving for them until his chest went hollow with relief.

Footsteps slid under the door and froze both of them. She snapped the kit closed with the guilt of a child, went very still, eyes on the crack under the door where a shadow paused as if considering. Lando did not breathe. The medicine had smoothed the edges of pain, but fear filled the space as swiftly as water. He lifted the tile an inch, ready to put it in somebody’s throat and live with the guilt after.

The shadow moved on.

Ana let out a breath in segments. “They are jumpier today,” she whispered. “Someone must have spoken too loud.”

He did not ask who. He did not want to pack another face into the room to carry around.

She pulled off her gloves. She tucked something into his palm. Cold. Small. His body recognized it before his brain, a little click through his fingers, a hinge and a blade that was more idea than metal and more dangerous for that.

He looked at the penknife, then at her.

“Now I saved your life,” Ana said. “Good luck, Mr. Verstappen-Leclerc. God be with you.”

“Wait,” he said, panic flaring bright because goodbye had been something that meant loss too often lately. “My family. Do you know anything? Andrea, is he okay? What about my Papa?”

She glanced at the door, then back at him. The calculus played across her face and landed in mercy.

“ They are fine… for now. There’s a public whipping planed for your young one… I pray he survives that and word got around that right after that Toto plans your execution that’s why I’ve come now, you need strength to fight this, to escape.”

She put a sealed pouch of water on the floor by his knee and slid it toward him with her shoe. He had not realized how dry he was until his hands fumbled it like it was glass. He bit it open, the plastic sharp, the water sweet with the ghosts of things it had been filtered through, the best thing he had tasted in days.

“Do you need anything else,” she asked, voice already fading into absence, already preparing to be gone.

“I’ll tell him,” Lando said. The words came wrong at first, as if the medicine had made them heavier. He swallowed and tried again. “I’ll tell Max what you told me, what you did for me. I’ll tell him Ana Sanchez paid her debt in full.”

Her eyes softened.

He did not say thank you. It seemed like the wrong economy in a room like this. He nodded once, the nod of a man taking a thing he would spend well. She nodded back, and then she was gone, as if she had never been. The door settled into its frame with a hush. The humming light went on humming. The wet place on the floor where a drop had fallen from her glove dried to nothing.

He lay there and waited for the medicine to wake the rest of his mind.

Fever does not leave like a guest you thank at the door. It lingers in the doorway and reminds you it knows where you live. The first wave of relief bloomed with the slow bloom of heat into warmth into a thing that did not hurt. He felt it wash across his chest, down his arms, into his hands, unhooking the little clenching muscles that had been holding the world up. His leg settled into a manageable throb, the kind of pain that felt like a road rather than a cliff. The grogginess came and tried to pull him under, soft and heavy, the kind of sleep that promised salt rather than rest. He fought it in segments. He moved his right foot out and back in, inch by inch, to keep feeling in the ankle. He flexed his fingers around the penknife, learned its weight and hinge and the way it wanted to close on a careless thumb. He sipped the water. He counted five up, five down, and did not think about the numbers as anything but a ladder.

“Hold on,” he said, and it was not a plea now. It was a plan with breath in it.

He pressed his forehead to his arm and let the words settle where the fever had been. He watched the door.

“Hold on, for Oscar,” he breathed, and the name did not hurt this time. “ He’s coming for you, so you better hold on.” He muttered to himself so that he would believe it. Oscar would come, this can’t be the end, he refuses to go like this.

And even if he does, he’ll die happily knowing that he held on so tight just so that he could see his boy one last time. That’s it, he will hold on to see his boy one last time.

~~~~

He didn’t know what time it was.

But then again, time didn’t live here.

There were no windows in this place. No natural light to map the sky’s passage or let him guess at the hour by the angle of sun across stone. The outside world had become a myth, a thing for other people. Here, in this underground tomb that smelled of rust and wet rot and forgotten men, morning and midnight were the same. Just silence. Just damp air and metal sounds. Just that single bare bulb overhead, flickering like it too wanted to die.

Kimi lay on the cold floor, unmoving.

He didn’t have the strength to shift anymore, and he didn’t want to. Every inch of his body ached, like bones were splintering from the inside out. His spine had welded itself to the concrete. His shoulders burned with the weight of restraint. Iron cuffs chewed into his ankles, wrists rubbed raw and weeping. His skin itched with dried sweat, but there was nothing to scratch with. Nothing but bones and breath and a body that no longer felt like it belonged to him.

He didn’t cry. There was no water left in him to spare.

Only that low, aching silence in his chest. The kind that meant something was ending.

He hadn’t responded to Charles in hours. Not because he didn’t want to. But because speaking felt impossible now. Because even opening his mouth to say I’m here, Papa, I’m okay required strength he no longer had. His jaw had locked itself shut. His throat was sand. Every breath rattled inside his ribs like broken glass in a jar.

He wasn’t dead.

Not yet.

But he was somewhere between.

And he knew what was coming.

Tonight, they would drag him out. Tie him to a post like an animal. Expose him under harsh lights, in front of men who wore suits and smiled like violence was a sport. He would be made to kneel. Bare his back. Bite down on nothing. And take it. Take the whip, the shame, the lesson. Because that was what it was for Toto. A demonstration. A message carved into skin. Look what happens when you try to be loved outside my permission.

Kimi swallowed, though nothing moved.

He would survive. Probably. Because Toto was not stupid enough to kill him. Not yet. A dead boy couldn’t suffer. Couldn’t be paraded. Couldn’t scream when his love was threatened.

No, Toto didn’t want a corpse.

He wanted a trophy.

A broken one. He wanted Kimi stripped of every dignity, every flicker of hope he had left, he wanted a shell. A wife to please him.

Kimi turned his head with great effort. The floor was slick beneath his cheek. He didn’t know if it was water or blood, and he didn’t care. The cold was in his bones now, in his teeth, in the spaces behind his eyes. Everything throbbed. Even his memory.

And still, still, one thought lived there.

Ollie. God, Ollie. His boy. His husband. His love, the man he dreamed since he was a kid, the one that would rescue him from the Antonelli’s clan, the one who would come like a knight on a white horse swoop him and take him to his castle. And he did, God he did, even if he died tonight he would keep those precious memories tied to his heart forever.

That was what kept him breathing. Barely. The echo of Ollie’s voice in his mind, furious and soft all at once. The heat of his touch, like sun through curtains on a sleepy morning. The weight of his hand on Kimi’s hip. The way his eyes darkened when he was in love or in danger. The way he’d once said mine like it meant salvation.

Kimi let the memory drag itself across his ribs.

The night Ollie had knelt in front of him, forehead pressed to Kimi’s sternum, voice shaking as he whispered, “You don’t know what you do to me.”

The way they hadn’t needed anything else, not even sex, because it had already felt like too much. Too sacred. Too raw. Ollie had just held him. Had rocked against him, breathless, saying things Kimi didn’t know boys like them were allowed to hear. And when Kimi had come, shuddering and wrecked, Ollie had kissed his mouth like a man praying with his whole soul.

He would give anything to go back there.

He would give his voice, his blood, the rest of his sanity—just to feel Ollie’s lips on his shoulder again. Just to be safe in the shape of his arms.

But that part of him was already gone.

Because now—

Toto had touched him.

Toto had leaned in, breath thick with rot, and let fingers trace where Ollie’s mouth should’ve been. Had ghosted over Kimi’s neck, over his ribs, had whispered promises of how easy it would be to ruin him, to make him forget whose name he belonged to.

And Kimi couldn’t scream.

He couldn’t fight.

Because they were always watching.

Always recording.

Always threatening.

And somewhere deep down, in the dirt of his shame, Kimi had felt it.

Ollie would know.

Somehow, he would know.

And he would break.

“I’m sorry,” Kimi whispered. His voice was a paper-cut thing, fragile and bleeding. “I didn’t let him. I swear to you. I didn’t let him. I’m still yours. Please.”

There was no one to hear him.

But he said it anyway.

He said it for the wall. For the rot. For the sky he couldn’t see and the boy who might still be looking for him.

A sob caught in his throat and stayed there. It didn’t make it out. It just trembled inside, shook his ribcage, made his teeth chatter from the pressure of needing to weep and not having the strength.

He let his head fall against the wall.

Let it thud once. Twice.

Then—

“Papa?” he whispered, lips cracked and too dry.

Silence.

And then—

“Andrea?!”

Charles’ voice, frantic. Alive. “Amore, are you okay? You haven’t spoken. I thought—”

“Papa,” Kimi croaked. “I’m scared.”

He heard the breath leave Charles like it had been torn out.

“I know, baby. I know. But you have to stay with me. You hear me? You have to. You’re going to be okay.”

“I don’t think I will be.”

“You will,” Charles said, softer now. Fiercer. “Because you’re stronger than this. Because you’re mine. And Ollie’s. And that means you were born to survive.”

Kimi’s mouth twitched.

“What if he doesn’t love me anymore?” he whispered. “After this. After what they did to me.”

Charles was quiet for a long time. Then—“He will love you through blood, through war, through hell. He will love you because he has no other choice. Because his love is stitched into your skin now.”

Kimi closed his eyes.

A tear traced his nose, slid into the grime on the floor.

“I just wanted someone to choose me,” he said.

“He did,” Charles said, voice breaking. “Ollie did.”

Kimi sniffed. His throat scratched on the inhale and forgave him on the exhale. “Papa, if I do not survive tomorrow.”

“No.”

“Please.”

Another long breath. Then, letting him, “Okay, baby.”

“If I do not make it, tell him I loved him. Tell him I died loving him. Tell him that being part of your family, even for a little while, was the only heaven I have ever known.”

“Kimi.”

“Tell him I am sorry that the last thing he remembers might be me in chains. Tell him that I never gave anyone anything that belonged to him. Not my mind, not my heart. Not even when I thought I would break. Tell him I wanted to grow old with him. Tell him I wanted to go to the market with him on Saturdays and argue about olives. Tell him I wanted to learn the names of the birds in your garden. Tell him I wanted to sign the paper for our small house by the sea and paint the walls myself. Tell him I wanted to fight about nothing because it would mean the big things were safe.”

Silence on the other side that was not empty. Silence holding its breath. Kimi could picture Charles seated with his forehead against the vent, fingers pressed white on either side, as if he could make a passage from bone alone.

Tap, tap, tap.

Lando.

Kimi smiled, and it felt like it might break his mouth. “I did not forget you, fratello. I am sorry I did not say it more. You were the brother I thought I would never get. If there is a wedding again, if the world remembers how to be generous, you are my best man. If not, you are still my best man here. Now. In this.”

Tap, tap. Then a little scrape that meant yes.

Kimi closed his eyes. He pictured them as he loved them, not as they were. He pictured Charles sitting with his face turned toward light because Charles deserved a house with more windows than walls. He pictured Lando sleeping heavy and undignified on a couch because safety meant you could sleep ugly and know you would still be loved when you woke up. He pictured Max with his hand on Charles’s knee, a steady touch that meant everything is still what we said it was. He pictured Oscar at a sink, sleeves rolled, shoulders loose, humming because he could. He pictured Ollie.

He let himself stay there. He drew the outline of Ollie’s mouth without opening his eyes. He counted the lashes he had counted a hundred times. He heard the voice that got sharp when it was worried. He felt the shiver in his own stomach that came every time Ollie called him Andrea in that particular tone, the one that meant you are my favorite thing and also the thing that will ruin me, and I accept both.

The silence was thick.

Not empty—never empty—but weighted with breath that sounded too close to breaking. From the wall, Charles had stopped speaking, and Kimi could tell it was because he was crying now. Quietly. So as not to scare him further. So as not to unravel the last thread of strength he had left to give.

Kimi felt it anyway.

He felt it in the air, like the shift of a tide. Papa was weeping.

And that meant everything really was as bad as it seemed.

That meant there might not be a tomorrow.

Not for him.

Not the way he wanted it.

He blinked slowly. The world blurred. Not from tears—there were no more of those—but from the burn of exhaustion. The edges of his vision frayed like paper caught in fire. Even the light above him, that flickering bulb, looked like it was receding.

He was going.

Not all at once. But his soul had started to slip.

He thought of Ollie.

That was all he could do.

When his lungs shivered and his fingers felt like ash, when the phantom ache of Toto’s hand on his neck made his stomach clench and bile crawl up his throat, when the urge to scream got trapped in his ribs like a bird in a cage—he thought of Ollie.

He pictured the freckles on his shoulder.

The curve of his mouth when he was trying not to cry.

The way his voice cracked when he said I love you like it hurt to say it out loud. Like it meant too much. Like it wasn’t built to be spoken, only lived.

“I wish I could have told you,” Kimi whispered. His voice was slurred now. Mushy at the edges. “What this felt like. How it broke me. How I kept thinking of you when I wanted to disappear. I wish I could’ve told you I tried to stay clean. I tried not to let him near me.”

But Toto had gotten close.

Too close.

And though he hadn’t stripped Kimi’s dignity completely, he had smudged it. Pressed grime into it with every brush of his fingers, every word uttered like poison. He’d kissed the side of Kimi’s jaw and said, “You’ll be mine, you know. Once they give up on you. Once they realize you’re tainted.”

That was what haunted him now.

Not the pain.

Not the fear.

But the shame.

The sickening thought that Ollie might not be able to look at him the same way. That he might flinch. That he might not want to touch him anymore. That everything Kimi had built, every piece of trust he’d sewn between them with trembling hands and open wounds, might be torn apart by this.

He tried to push that thought away.

But it had teeth. And it bit down.

“Papa,” he said again, quieter.

A breath. A rustle.

“Yes, baby. I’m here.”

“I’m tired.”

“I know.”

“I’m cold.”

“I know, amore mio.”

“I don’t want to go out there.”

Charles didn’t answer right away.

Kimi could picture him now. Curled against the wall of his own cell, whispering into the grate like a father trying to call his son back from the edge of death. And maybe he was.

“It’s not fair,” Kimi said. “All I did was love him, I fell in love with Oliver so deep that I can’t imagine what life without him would be.”

“I know,” Charles replied, and the grief in his voice was unbearable. “I know, baby. I would’ve done anything to protect you from this.”

Kimi closed his eyes.

Let his head rest on the stone.

“If he doesn’t make it in time,” he whispered, “I want to die with his name in my mouth.”

Charles inhaled sharply. “Say it, then. Say his name.”

Kimi breathed in. It hurt. It cracked something deep in his chest.

Then he said, “Ollie.”

The word trembled out of him like prayer.

And again, softer, “Ollie.”

He imagined him. Hair messy from not sleeping. Fingers twitching over a keyboard or wrapped around a blade. Rage like a storm in his chest. He imagined Ollie running, sprinting, killing—doing whatever it took to reach him. He imagined him weeping. Collapsing into Max’s arms. Screaming at Oscar. Trying to decode one more message. Trying to find one more clue.

He imagined him seeing the marks on Kimi’s body and not looking away.

And still loving him.

Still saying mine.

It was a fantasy.

But it was the only thing keeping him from disappearing entirely.

From the other cell, a soft tap. Lando again.

Kimi’s throat tightened.

He swallowed.

“Lando,” he whispered, “I’m scared he’ll see me and think I’m ruined.”

Another tap. Slower. Then silence. Then, in the wall vent, the smallest whisper—

“Then he’s blind.”

It wasn’t much.

But it cracked something open in him.

He let himself cry again. Not with sound. Just with breath. Just with trembling limbs and the way his chest spasmed like it had been holding this in too long.

They were all here.

Lando. Charles. Him.

Alive.

For now. For now he would hope that Oliver would come and save him just like he imagined all those night before he met him that his knight will come he knows it in his bones that Ollie would come for him now too, he would do whatever is necessary to save them. To save him and it made Kimi smile for a little bit chapped lips pulling tight and breaking, but in his mind he already was in the love of his life arm and they were holding each other tight. This is the tought that eased Kimi’s nerves, Oliver would come for them he should not worry. His husband was on his way.

And somewhere not far apart, Oliver Verstappen Leclerc tought the same thing, he would not leave until he has his boy in his arms again, he would bring hell on earth to make it happen. He would not stop until they were home.

So let them run. Let them think they could keep him caged. Let them try to hurt what belonged to him.

Let them make the mistake of touching his husband.

It was his promise and his oath.

Kimi would live to see another day.

Even if that day had to be born in blood.