Tyler's POV
The door slams behind me hard enough to rattle the frame, and the sound is the most satisfying thing I've felt all day.
My bedroom—the one space in this overcrowded mausoleum that's supposed to be mine—feels too small. The walls press inward, shrinking with each breath I take. I cannot stand still. I cannot think straight. I cannot stop seeing her face.
My hand finds the first object within reach. A glass trophy from some junior championship I stopped caring about years ago. I hurl it at the wall, and it shatters in a satisfying explosion of crystal and rage.
"Fucking bitch."
The words feel good in my mouth—sharp and violent and necessary. My cheek still burns where she hit me. I catch my reflection in the window, and the red mark blooming across my cheekbone makes my fist clench so hard my knuckles ache.
She hit me.
That pathetic, poverty-stricken, orphaned little nobody actually hit me. She looked me in the eye with those defiant brown irises and struck me like she had every right to do it.
I pace the length of my room, but the carpet absorbs my footsteps, denying me even the satisfaction of noise.
My father's face flashes through my mind—the way he announced her arrival as though it were already decided, as though my opinion meant nothing.
"Fuck you too, Dad," I mutter to the empty room. "Fuck your guilt and your charity project and your complete disregard for anyone else who lives here."
I told him I didn't want her here. Made that perfectly clear. But my opinion never matters when Zack McKinney makes up his mind.
I see things as they are. I always have. And what I see is this: a stranger in our house, an intruder, a disruption to the equilibrium I've spent years building.
The estate is massive—twelve thousand square feet of architectural excess. And still it feels packed with bodies. Staff everywhere—Mrs. Watts with her efficiency, Rafael clattering in the kitchen.
Veronica draped over furniture she doesn't own, playing house until my father gets bored of her. Derek with his relentless optimism, his desperate need to be liked, filling every silence with chatter that makes me want to claw my own ears off.
And now her.
I stop pacing and press my palms against the window, staring out at the ocean without really seeing it.
The problem—the real problem, the one I can't punch or shatter or outrun—is that I noticed her.
This morning on the patio, before she turned around. I saw auburn hair catching the light, gleaming copper and gold. Bare feet on the stone, delicate ankles, the vulnerable curve of her neck as she bent over her phone.
My chest seized when I saw her—tightened behind my ribs and refused to let go.
Then she turned. Then I saw her face—those wide brown eyes, that stubborn jaw, lips pressed together like she was holding back words she didn't trust herself to say.
Divine.
The word surfaced before I could stop it, and I hated myself for thinking it.
I spent the entire day trying to drown the feeling. Swam until my shoulders screamed. Drove the F1 simulator until my lap times blurred. Ran the beach until my legs threatened to give out.
And through all of it, one thought circled like a shark in shallow water: What would her hair feel like wrapped around my fist?
I hate this about myself. The obsessive tendencies. The way my mind latches onto someone and refuses to release its grip.
My mother noticed it first, back when I was young enough to still want her approval.
"You have a fixation problem, Tyler," she told me, her voice clinical, detached—the tone of a doctor diagnosing a condition rather than a mother comforting her child. "You should talk to a professional about that."
She suggested therapy the way she suggested everything—as an offering she had no intention of following through on.
Then she left. Packed her designer luggage and her settlement check and walked out without looking back, and I learned the real lesson she'd been teaching all along.
Attachment is weakness. Wanting is weakness. Letting anyone matter is just handing them the knife they'll eventually use to gut you.
"You have your father's obsessive nature," she told me once, near the end. "It will destroy you if you let it."
I was twelve. I didn't understand then. I understand now.
I hate my mother for leaving. Hate her more for being right about me. Hate myself most of all for proving her point, again and again, every time something catches my attention and won't let go.
I cannot afford distractions. Not now. The Monaco Grand Prix is in three weeks—the most unforgiving track on the Formula 1 calendar, the one that separates champions from pretenders.
The team is counting on me to deliver points, and the press is already circling, waiting for me to crack under the pressure of my rookie season.
My entire championship pivots on this moment. My entire career, maybe.
And here I am, pulse still racing, mind still circling back to auburn hair and bare feet and the sharp crack of her palm against my face.
She did slap me.
The thought keeps returning, keeps interrupting everything else. This girl who owns nothing and has nothing and should be grateful for every breath she takes under my father's roof—she looked me dead in the eye and hit me.
I was hard before I finished pinning her to the bookshelf. I'm half-hard now, just thinking about it.
There aren't many girls who would touch me before I tell them to.
The models. The socialites. The paddock girls and the sponsors' daughters who circle my world like moths around expensive flames—they all wait for permission.
They read my moods, anticipate my desires, arrange themselves into whatever shape they think I want. They bore me. They've always bored me.
This one didn't wait. This one looked at me with fury blazing in those warm brown eyes and struck me because I deserved it, because I pushed her too far, because she has a spine made of steel beneath that quiet exterior.
I push off the window and strip off my training clothes as I walk toward the bathroom. The shower turns on with a hiss of water pressure, steam already fogging the glass.
I know what I'm going to do in here. Know whose face I'll see behind my closed eyes, whose voice I'll hear echoing through my skull.
"I'd rather die."
All that fury and defiance wrapped in a body that trembled against mine despite itself. The way she gasped when my thigh pressed between hers. The heat that flooded her cheeks even as her words dripped with contempt.
I step under the water and let it burn. The memory of her body pinned against mine sends blood rushing to my cock.
I'm going to fuck her.
The certainty settles into my bones like gravity, like the pull of a hairpin turn at one hundred and sixty miles per hour, like the moment before the lights go out and everything else falls away.
I'm going to make her beg for it. And she will, eventually.
They always do.
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