❝They call him the Dutch Lion.❞
❝Yeah? To be honest, I think he's more like Scar from The Lion King, but whatever.❞
In the high-pressure world of Formula 1, Red Bull Racing is crumbling. Half the team has quit, morale is at an all-time low, and Max...
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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE;
Look After You
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Four days had passed since Emilia had been discharged from the hospital. The sound of her breathing filled Max's apartment like a constant reminder of everything that had happened. She was back, and for that, he was thankful—grateful, even. His apartment was the one place that had always felt like home, and now it felt like a fragile sanctuary.
Safe. She was safe.
But they? They weren't. They couldn't be. Not after everything that had happened.
There was an elephant in the room, a weight in the space between them that neither of them wanted to acknowledge. The silence that had settled around them was deafening. No matter how many times Max tried to bridge the gap, she refused to talk. And so, here they were, coexisting in a world that had changed for both of them, yet still, their words remained unspoken.
Max hated it.
He had always admired Emilia for her strength, for her stubbornness, for the way she could stand her ground and never let anyone sway her. It had been one of the things that had drawn him to her. But now? Now that he was on the receiving end of it? She was driving him insane.
The way she shut him out. The way she refused to talk about what had happened. About Luca. About what they had both endured. He was angry—angry and betrayed—and worse, he couldn't let it go. He wanted to scream at her, but something stopped him every time. He loved her, of course, but this—this—was different.
She had planned for Luca to find her. She had planned for that attack. And she had died for it. For almost a minute, Emilia had been dead in his arms. CPR had worked, of course. But Max still couldn't get the image of her cold, lifeless body out of his mind. And the worst part? She refused to acknowledge it. Refused to talk about it. She refused to even linger on it for a moment.
Max stood in the kitchen, his back pressed against the cool counter, staring blankly at his hands. His fingers throbbed with the lingering pain from the beating he'd delivered to Luca, but the ache barely registered. His mind was far from that moment, far from the anger and the fight. No, his thoughts were consumed by her—by Emilia.
She was just a few feet away in the living room, a quiet figure, a pale shadow of the woman she used to be. Her broken wrist was tightly bound in a splint, her ribs bruised and tender, her concussion slowly, painfully mending. But the visible wounds, though they were bad, weren't the ones that clawed at his insides. No, it was the things he couldn't see, the invisible scars that no amount of time could erase, that haunted him. The mental trauma—Emilia's fractured soul—was a weight Max couldn't touch, no matter how desperately he wanted to.
