Donato MALDONADO
26 Laps
45
Not Finished 1st Lap
Galeno GIRÓN
0 Lap
57
Gustavo LIMÓN
0 Lap
28
GRAN PREMIO DE ARAGÓN
Alcañiz, Sunday, September 22
Pos
Pts
Rider
Time
World Rank
1
25
Santos SAUCEDO
44’18.296
250
2
20
Billy KING
3.741
259
3
16
Massimo VITOLO
4.028
218
4
13
Lorelai HARGROVE
6.935
163
5
11
Giovanni MARCHESA
11.885
147
6
10
Mason KING
15.465
143
7
9
Cesaro SOTO
19.038
40
8
8
Harleigh ELIN
29.797
57
9
7
Timo GONZALES
36.521
32
10
6
Donato MALDONADO
40.286
51
11
5
Galeno GIRÓN
51.335
62
12
4
Gustavo LIMÓN
53.761
32
13
3
Gregorio PAREDES
57.602
68
14
2
Elliston LAMBIRTH
1’05.189
49
15
1
Aurelio LOGGIA
1’17.674
69
16
Rainier HERRE
1’38.449
58
17
Diarmaid DEAN
1’58.036
32
Not Classified
Fredek SULZBACH
1 Lap
57
Deven HORSLEY
1 Lap
78
Cristiano ARELLANO
1 Lap
100
Chapter 21
Massimo Vitolo—September; Ravenna, Italy
Silverstone was a mess. It rained the whole week, everyone kept crashing during practice and qualifying, and it didn’t matter how hard I pushed it during the race. Lorina pushed back harder, and she beat me. Beat me bad. But that was Britain. I smoked her in Rimini and Aragón, and I am one more race from paying off Gabriele. I am so damn close.
Was so close.
I pull up in front of my mother’s house but park on the street instead of the driveway. We’ve been home for less than eighteen hours, and I’d planned on spending today sleeping, playing video games, and doing some laundry. Maybe grocery shopping, because there’s nothing to eat in the apartment. But all that went out the window when Vinicio texted me ten minutes ago saying I need to come to the house—alone—for a “development.”
I knew Lorina going for a run this morning was a bad idea, but I’m running out of excuses on how to keep us inside in Ravenna when the sky is blue and the weather is perfect. The worst part is, I thought it was working. Dabria still hasn’t raised a conflict of interest warning, and Angelo was just starting to back off. I’m playing by his rules on the circuit, and my eyes feel like they’ve shifted to the back of my head so I can catch Lorina before she’s anywhere near my garage. It’s the same with my RV on the paddock, in which I spend as little time as possible so she doesn’t come looking for me there.
She’s always looking for me, but I don’t know why. After she sits, she doesn’t talk. I don’t either. There’s nothing to say when being together puts her at risk. Something I was expressly reminded of this morning.
Time to get fired.
I slam my palm against the steering wheel, then get out of Chiara’s car and shove the keys into my pocket. Her transmission’s getting harder and harder to shift, and I already replaced the clutch. The master cylinder is next. I can do it without bleeding the wheels if I can get it on a hoist, but that means talking my way into a shop. At least I’ll have time now—considering it looks like I’m not going back to the circuit in a week.
The word default blares in my mind like the world’s ugliest neon sign, and I try not to puke on my way up the driveway. I don’t know how long I’m gonna make it, though.
“What’s the emergency?” I ask Vinicio in Italian, currently waiting inside the open garage for me.
He crosses his arms from where he’s leaning against the waist-high toolbox. It’s taking everything I have not to let the acid gurgling in my stomach show on my face, but he…doesn’t look nearly as pissed off as I expected. “Have you seen the breaker bar?”
I stop in place, gaping at him. “What?”
I was prepared for a lecture. Maybe a choked-up announcement that it’s over: Lorina and I got busted, Angelo’s had enough, and I’m getting replaced with a wild card rider.
“The breaker bar,” Vinicio repeats. “I’ve got a bolt that won’t come free. I need it.”
All my breath comes rushing out of me, a bead of sweat sneaking down the back of my neck. He couldn’t have just texted me that?
After I regain some kind of feeling in my legs, I walk the rest of the way into the garage and nudge him off the toolbox, checking two different drawers before I pull open the third and find the tool
he needs. But that’s not all I find.
Resting against the organized row of wrenches is a white letter envelope. Swollen thick.
“I knew where it was,” he says quietly. “I needed to talk to you. Privately.”
I look at Vinicio, my heart beating out of my chest again but for a brand-new reason. “No.” I close the tool drawer, shoving the breaker bar flat against his chest.
“You’re joking, right?”
I turn, walking back to the car.
“Damn it, Massimo!” he calls after me. “You are going to have to learn to listen to someone at some point. You cannot go through life thinking you know everything, that everything is your decision and your responsibility—”
I whip around, my temper raging in my chest. “This is my responsibility.”
“It doesn’t give you the right to refuse my help.” He points the breaker bar at me. “The worst part is that despite having one hell of an attitude problem, you’ve actually become a good man who has taken damn good care of this family. And it’s only made you more fucking arrogant.” Metal clangs as he throws down the breaker bar onto the toolbox. “But I don’t know why I’m surprised. You’re too much like Cesare that way.”
There’s a sadness in his voice that cuts right through me, strangling all my words in my throat. Sometimes, I forget that long before everything, they were friends. Good friends.
“Enough is enough.” He goes back into the third drawer in the toolbox, then walks toward me, placing the envelope in my hand.
It’s heavy. Heavier than any I’ve ever filled.
“You’re not the only one capable of making sacrifices for this family,” he says, his voice low with frustration. But his palm lands on the back of my neck, and there’s nothing frustrated about it. It feels like it did when I was little and he would crouch down next to me, teaching me piece by piece everything I know about racing. “And your mom and I…we want you to have your life back. You’ve done more than enough, more than we ever could, and it’s time this was over. You deserve to have a clean shot at a future with Lorelai, if that’s what you want. This was never supposed to be your burden.”
I blink, unable to feel anything but the warmth of his palm on my neck, the weight of the envelope in my hand. How real it feels, how very close I am to freedom, and how much I absolutely hate the idea of giving it to Gabriele. “I, um…” I shake my head, trying to think of all the reasons I need to give it back to Vinicio. “I don’t need it. After Thailand—”
“No,” he cuts me off, voice stern. “You need to do this now, Massimo. Don’t wait for another race, or two or three or however many it ends up taking. We may not have them.”
There’s no accusation in his voice, just a calm acceptance that Angelo could fire me at any time because I’ve refused to walk away from Lorina. It only makes me feel worse, because even with how much Vinicio’s fate is tied to mine, he’s never asked me to choose.
He’s never even brought it up.
His hand on my neck gently pulls me closer, his voice dropping lower. “Go over there and pay off that asshole today, and decide whether to stay with Yaalon on your terms. I will find someone else to sign you—don’t worry about that. But no one should have to live in fear, and I know you know that.”
I lock my jaw and glance away, no idea what to do. He’s been telling me that for as long as I can remember. And while everything in me is screaming to give the money back to him and my mom…I want to take it.
I want to be free from the debt pressing on me every day from the time I wake up until the moment I go to sleep. I want to buy an espresso and not feel guilty for not saving five bucks, forever caught between keeping up appearances and trying to survive. More than anything, I want my future back.
An actual, real future with Lorina where I can stand up to Angelo’s threats because they don’t threaten everyone else I love too.
“I will pay you back,” I tell Vinicio, my voice cracking, because there’s no way to stop it.
He shakes his head. “We won’t accept it.”
I don’t know what else to do. I hug him, Vinicio coughing out a laugh before he hugs me back. For a second in the quiet sunlit garage, he feels more like a dad to me than he ever has. But that’s probably my fault. I never really gave him a chance on that front. “Thank you.”
“Of course.” He claps my back, letting me go as I push back from him and stride back down the driveway, stuffing the envelope into my pocket and trying to wrap my head around what I’m about to do. All that it’s going to mean.
But there’s no way to do that when I’m finally going to get Gabriele out of my life.
***
I spent almost all day waiting in the alley across the street to make sure there was no one else inside, going over in my mind all the dozens of ways I imagined doing this through the years. The shit I’d say, the things I’d break.
In the end, the broken look on Gabriele’s face was more than enough.
He snatches up a piece of paper from the printer, then pushes back from his antique desk, going over to a file cabinet and searching through it. My phone vibrates in my pocket, and after I slip it out to check, I send Lorina straight to voicemail. I can’t tap into that part of myself right now, the soft part, and she’s fine—still back at the apartment with Chiara.
Gabriele pulls out a thick file, slides in the new paper, then hands it to me, sitting back down in his big leather chair. “Here.”
I don’t sit in mine. Way too wound up. “What’s the matter, buddy?” I glance into the folder in my hands. I’m not surprised to see my name on top. Very surprised to see the final numbers at the bottom. Part of me never thought I would. “Seems like something’s got you in a bad mood.”
“Divorce has a way of doing that.” My gaze lifts, and sure enough, that picture of him and his wife on a yacht is gone. “So what’s next? You gonna fire my nephew too?”
I close the folder and lean against his big old desk that I hate, unable to resist a dark smirk. “Haven’t decided.”
Gabriele shakes his head. “He’s a good kid. He doesn’t know anything.”
I suspected that might be the case. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy to purposefully do that, and it will be taken into consideration. “Why do I get the feeling that your wife didn’t know anything either?”
Gabriele clears his throat.
“But now she does,” I fill in.
“I was trying to…prepare her. For things changing. When you kept winning.”
I tsk and shake my head like I feel bad for him. “Gotta be tough, not being able to spend my money anymore.”
He flips me off. “Go ahead. Gloat. I lost my wife, my daughter won’t talk to me, I’ll probably have to close my business to afford my divorce, and you have your whole life ahead of you.”
Huh, I almost do feel bad for the guy.
“The fuck are you still doing here?” he asks.
I push off his desk and leave without another word, all the threats and warnings I’d planned on struck dead now that he has nothing left to lose. It’s better this way, cleaner.
Once I’m past the receptionist, I fold the file and tuck it into the back of my jeans under my jacket. Stiff-arm the door outside into the street, the sun already moved from one side of the sky to well below the horizon, streetlights coming on and the sounds of the world getting more aggressive. I let it feed me and fill me, and I still can’t believe I’m never going to walk into that office again. Never see that asshole again. Never watch my winnings disappear from my bank account before I could even count how much they were.
My heart stutters not two steps out of the building—not yet.
A Vespa cruises around me, but I barely hear it. I stride quickly across the street, ducking into the alley I’ve been hiding out in all day after I dropped off the car and walked here, getting up my
nerve to confront him for the very last time.
I’m breathing hard out of my mouth as I dart past the yellow glow of the streetlight. Once I’m in the dark, I fall against the wall of the building, my chest ballooning in staggered bursts as goose bumps prickle my skin and water itches at my eyes. And I finally let it hit me.
I did it. A strangled laugh chokes my throat, because it’s too much to hold in at once. Too much joy and anger and relief and rage after all the fear and the hate and the hate and the fear, and a roar tears from my lungs, echoing all around me—I’m fucking free.
His name is clear. My name is clear. I lost the shop, but I protected them in the end. Like I swore to him I would. They’re safe now, no matter what.
It’s finally over.
I gasp for breath in the pitch-black alley, my city’s stars shining bright above me, and there’s only one thing in the world that I can think of now:
I want to kiss Lorina.
Really kiss her, like I haven’t kissed her in far too long. Where she’s wrapped in my arms and I don’t know where we are and I don’t fucking care because I could get lost in her lips for years, but she hasn’t let me touch her for weeks. And I know she’s mad, and I know I deserve it. But she can’t stay mad at me forever, and I need to kiss her. Right now.
I shove myself off the wall and start walking back to my apartment. Jogging. Running through the streets and cutting through every back alley I know, pushing harder with everything in me the closer I get because I can’t wait to do everything with her I’ve been waiting my whole life to do. Starting with buying us that perfect three-bedroom villa and getting out of that crowded-as-hell apartment.
“Lorina!” I yell when I blow through the front door, flying so high, my boots barely touch the floor on my way to my room. I don’t even bother with English. “Lorina, get dressed. We’re going—”
I stop when I throw open the door, finding the room empty.
Bed made. Tigrotta’s not by the pillows. No hair ties on my nightstand, sitting on a stack of romance novels. No suitcase under the window. No…
Wreckless Page 28