All Chapters of The Ice King and The Vixen : Chapter 11 - Chapter 19

Laura Jean POV He caught me outside the team offices the next morning. I heard him before I saw him, which was becoming a habit I didn't care to examine. I was balancing a coffee in one hand and my notebook in the other, trying to decipher my own handwriting, when his voice stopped me. "We need to talk." I looked up. "About yesterday." Something in his expression made my stomach tighten. "Okay." He turned without another word and headed toward the nearest office. I followed, and he waited until I stepped inside before closing the door behind us. Neither of us sat. For a moment, he stood with one hand still resting on the doorknob, his back to me as though deciding where to begin. Then he turned. Whatever I'd expected, it wasn't this. He was angry. Not the cold, controlled distance I'd seen before, not the clipped answers or carefully measured silence. This had been building since yesterday, and sometime during the night it had run out of patience. "You followed me," he sa

Laura Jean POV Josie sent the link at 7:43 that morning with no message, just the article. I was still in bed, my coffee cooling on the nightstand, when I opened it. I read it once, then immediately started over, hoping I'd misunderstood something the first time. I hadn't. The headline read When Access Becomes Intimacy. The byline was Evangeline Dame's, and it had gone live at six that morning on the biggest motorsport platform in the industry. She never accused me of anything. She opened with the history of embedded journalism, writing about the ethics of access and the thin line between proximity and bias. It was thoughtful, balanced, and impossible to argue with. By the time she finally mentioned me, she'd already convinced readers the question was worth asking. Laura Jean Renard, currently six months embedded with Jannis Laurence's team under an exclusive access agreement, has produced work that raises these questions in interesting ways. After that came the facts. The exc

Jannis POV The simulation was wrong. Not in any obvious way. It was the kind of mistake that hid beneath the surface, in the space between what the model predicted and what I already knew the car would do through the final sector. Around the strategy table, the engineers nodded as Jonathan walked everyone through the data. I let him finish before speaking. "Run sector three again." Jonathan looked up from his monitor. "Again?" "Again." He replayed the simulation without another word. I watched the telemetry instead of the replay. Three seconds later, I saw it. "Pause." The room fell silent as the replay froze on the screen. "The rear stability assumption is wrong," I said, pointing at the graph. "We're underestimating load transfer under braking by four percent. That carries through turns eleven to thirteen." My gaze shifted to Jonathan. "Correct the input, rerun the simulation, and have the updated model ready before the afternoon briefing." He frowned at the figures f

Laura Jean POV Nobody moved for so long it started to feel deliberate. Jannis remained at the entrance to the park, his gaze shifting between Ash and me with an unreadable expression. Beside me, Ash held her hot chocolate with both hands as if we were standing in line for coffee instead of in the middle of whatever this had suddenly become. Considering the circumstances, her composure was almost impressive. I looked at her, searching for some kind of explanation. She met my eyes without flinching. Please just go with this. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was the only one on offer. Then Jannis started walking toward us. He moved the way he always did, like the distance between where he was and where he needed to be was little more than a formality. When he reached the bench, he stopped beside Ash instead of sitting down, his attention settling on her first. "What are you doing here?" he asked. "Sitting," Ash replied, lifting her cup a fraction. "It's a bench. Public

Laura Jean POV The Silverstone paddock had a completely different energy from Monaco, and it took me about four minutes to understand why. Monaco performed. Silverstone didn't. It was loud, slightly chaotic, and completely unapologetic about it. Even the sky couldn't decide between grey and blue. I liked it immediately. I was setting up near the garage entrance when Jannis walked past without breaking stride. He tipped his head slightly. "You're in the wrong place." "Good morning to you too," I smiled. He stopped and turned back, a faint crease forming between his brows. "The media pen is on the other side of the garage." "I know where the media pen is. I've done this enough times." "Then you know you're in the wrong place." "I'm exactly where Antonio told me to be." He hesitated, just enough for me to notice, before looking toward Antonio's office. "Antonio told you to stand here?" I held up the notes I'd been carrying all morning. "He told me to shadow the eng