All Chapters of Driving The Alpha' Brothers Crazy : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Adrian's POVIsadora found me in the workshop on Thursday, which I should have predicted because she'd been finding me everywhere since Wednesday with the kind of consistency that wasn't accidental."I've been thinking about the rune-suspension idea," she said, setting her bag down on the bench like she'd been invited.She hadn't been invited."It's a flawed concept," I said, not looking up from the panel I was recalibrating. "Rune stabilization requires a fixed reference point. A suspension system is, by definition, in constant motion. The math doesn't hold.""What if the rune moved with the suspension instead of against it?"I stopped what I was doing.It was a good question. That was the problem. Isadora asked good questions, the kind that made me want to actually answer them instead of redirecting her somewhere else, and I'd spent the last day and a half being annoyed at myself for finding her interesting."Theoretically possible," I said. "You'd need a rune that updates its refer

Audrey's POVI didn't sleep badly. That was the thing I kept turning over at seven AM, staring at the ceiling of my room with the early light doing its thing through the curtains. I'd expected to sleep badly. I'd expected to lie awake running the thirty seconds on a loop — the door opening, Margot's face, Luca's hands on her shoulders already pushing back — but I hadn't. I'd slept fine. Six hours, clean, no loop.Which meant I'd processed it. Which meant I trusted him. Which meant my stomach had finally gotten the memo my brain had been sending for weeks.That should have felt like a complete resolution.It almost did.I got up, pulled on the first hoodie I found — Theo's, obviously, it was always Theo's — and went downstairs.Luca was already in the kitchen. Of course he was. Six forty-five AM and he was at the stove with the timing reference list, the over-engineered eggs, the whole system running like nothing had happened.Except he'd made tea instead of coffee. My tea. The exact t

Audrey's POVI noticed it on Friday and by Saturday I was done being subtle about it.Friday was when Isadora showed up to the library at the exact time Adrian always studied. Not approximately. Exactly. Which meant she'd been watching his schedule, which meant this wasn't accidental, which meant I needed to seriously reconsider my policy of giving people the benefit of the doubt.She sat down across from him with a textbook she definitely didn't need and a smile she absolutely knew what to do with and within ten minutes they were deep in something that looked, from the doorway where I was standing, extremely like a study date.Adrian wasn't encouraging it. He was doing the Adrian thing — answering questions precisely, not making unnecessary eye contact, keeping his hands busy with his own work. But he also wasn't leaving. And every time Isadora laughed at something he said, which was often, something in my chest did an extremely uncharitable thing.I went to the garage and reorganize

Audrey's POVTheo suggested the town trip at breakfast on Sunday with the energy of someone who had definitely been planning it since Thursday and was pretending it was spontaneous."Fresh air," he said. "Normal human activities. Bowling. Food that isn't academy cafeteria food. We deserve this.""We literally had a rest day four days ago," Adrian said."That was recovery," Theo said. "This is living. Different category."Twenty three people ended up going which was how I found myself on a academy minibus at noon sitting between Luca and the window watching the mountain road unspool below us while Theo ran a playlist through the bus speakers that Coach would have definitely vetoed if Coach had been there, which he wasn't, because this was a civilian operation.Cece sat three rows ahead of me.She'd found me at six AM at the track like she said she would, and what she told me was not spy stuff, not empire stuff, not anything I'd been bracing for.It was so much more annoying than that.

Margot's POVHere's the thing about growing up in the Lyon circuit.You learned early that wanting something out loud was the fastest way to lose it. You kept your cards close. You smiled at the right people and raced clean and never let anyone see you sweat, not even when your hands were shaking inside your gloves at two hundred kilometers an hour.I'd been doing that since I was fourteen.So when I walked out of the boarding house common room on Sunday night with a new plan forming in the back of my head, I didn't panic about it. I didn't overthink it. I just let it settle, the way you let a racing line settle before you commit — feeling it out, checking the angles, deciding where to brake and where to hold.By the time I got back to my room I knew exactly what I was doing.Isadora was on her bed when I came in, laptop open, doing something that looked like coursework and probably wasn't."You were gone a while," she said without looking up."Common room," I said. I hung up my jacke