Rival Hearts - Chapter #3 - by itsvlada

"Almeida, your lap times are shit. Consistently shit for the past week."

My lead instructor blocked the garage exit like a bouncer, arms crossed, decision already half-made. Five days since the locker room massacre, and I was hemorrhaging speed like a severed artery.

"I'm aware."

"Are you? Two-tenths off pole last month," he continued, voice sharp enough to cut. "Now you can't hit a braking point to save your life. What the hell happened to you?"

I stared at him through the eye that wasn't swollen from yesterday's "accident" with Marco's elbow. Said nothing.

"You think this is a charity?" He leaned closer, and I could practically smell the disappointment on his breath. "There are dozens of hungry drivers who'd murder their own mothers for your seat. Fix whatever you're having, or pack your shit and go home to mommy."

And just like that he stalked off, leaving me standing in the doorway like roadkill.

Around me, the paddock hummed with normal life—engineers analyzing data, drivers laughing with their mechanics. The ecosystem continuing as if I wasn't slowly disintegrating in front of everyone.

Thirty meters away, Soren crossed the tarmac surrounded by his new pack. Marco's arm was slung across his shoulders like a claim of ownership.

They were all laughing at something—probably me.

Soren hadn't looked at me once in five days. Not once. In a facility this small, that took military-level precision. You had to work at erasing someone so completely.

The crude jokes I could survive. The gear hidden in bathroom stalls, the radio harassment, the way conversations stopped when I entered a room—all of it was just noise. Background static.

But watching Soren walk with them—easily, naturally, like he'd always belonged there instead of beside me—that was the cancer eating me from the inside.

Não aguento mais. I can't take this anymore.

That evening, I found him alone in the simulator room.

The door clicked shut behind me like a gun chamber closing. Soren's shoulders went rigid, but he didn't pause the virtual lap of Monza glowing on his screen. His body language screamed ‘go away’, but I was done taking orders from him.

The silence stretched until it felt weaponized. Finally, without turning around: "What do you want?"

His voice was flat, mechanical, like I was a telemarketer who'd caught him at dinner.

"Are you satisfied now?" I kept my voice steady, controlled—the tone I was learning to wear like armor plating. "Joining the pack, feeding them cruelty. Was it worth it?"

His jaw tightened visibly. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't." I stepped close. "Don't pretend you weren't there for every single thing Marco did to me. The tire storage ambush. The radio show. The piss-soaked racing suit. You watched all of it."

"I didn't do anything to you."

The sheer audacity almost made me laugh. Soren—who could read a room's emotional temperature from fifty meters away, who knew exactly how much power his approval carried—claiming innocence.

"Exactly," I said. "You didn't do anything. That's the point."

He climbed out of the simulator, still refusing to meet my eyes. When he finally spoke, defensive anger sharpened every word.

"You put me in an impossible position with that fucking letter. You made things weird. You should have kept your feelings to yourself instead of dumping that psychological garbage on me."

Impossible position. I let the phrase hang in the air between us.

"Is that what you call standing in a circle while your best friend gets dismembered?" I asked conversationally. "An impossible position?"

"What did you expect?" He grabbed his water bottle, finally looking at me with something like irritation. "That I'd… what? Hold your hand? Tell everyone it's fine?" His laugh was harsh, ugly. "Grow up, Nico. People protect themselves, that's reality."

"You didn't just protect yourself." My hands clenched at my sides. "You laughed with them. You volunteered cruelty nobody even asked you for."

Something flickered across his face—shame, maybe, or panic. Gone before I could identify it.

"They would have come after me too," he said, voice rising. "You don't get it because you've never had to—"

"Never had to what?" I cut him off. "Never had to think about it? I've thought about nothing else for two fucking years. The difference is I was afraid of rejection. You were afraid of association."

The distinction hit him like a physical blow and I watched him absorb it, process it, reject it.

"Our friendship was exactly as meaningful as it should have been at this age," he said, voice going cold and surgical. "Which is nothing."

Nada. The word sounded equally empty in both languages.

"Nothing," I repeated softly.

"You were convenient. Someone to kill time with when I was bored." He gripped the water bottle until his knuckles went white. "And became irrelevant the second things got complicated."

Irrelevante.

The word sat in my chest like a tumor and something inside me snapped as I moved before thinking. Shoved him hard into the simulator frame and his back hit metal with a sound like a car crash.

Soren came off it swinging before his fist caught my jaw and stars exploded across my vision. I tasted copper, bright and immediate. Grabbed his shirt and slammed him into the wall hard enough to rattle his teeth.

Then his elbow drove into my ribs. Air left my lungs in a rush that tasted like adrenaline and pure, distilled rage.

We crashed into equipment racks, controllers shattered against the floor like breaking bones.

We went down hard, trading blows without any technique—just desperate, ugly violence that had nothing to do with fighting and everything to do with years of friendship curdling into poison.

I felt his lip split under my knuckles, blood ran hot over my fingers. My left eye was already swelling shut. None of it registered as pain yet. Just satisfaction.

We separated eventually, both gasping like drowning men.

Soren pushed himself against the wall, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. When he looked at me, his eyes held a finality I'd never seen before—the look of someone burning a bridge so completely that not even ash would remain.

"You want the truth?"

His voice was steady now, calm, which somehow made it worse.

"You're not good enough to risk anything for. Not as a friend. Not as a driver." He paused, and I could see him selecting his words like ammunition. "You're just... not worth it."

The silence stretched between us like a chasm before he opened his damned mouth again.

"You know what the really pathetic part is?" he said, voice soft as silk and twice as cutting. "I actually felt sorry for you. All that desperate pining, writing love letters… I almost told Marco to back off."

Soren smiled then, and it was the cruelest thing I'd ever seen.

"Thank God I didn't waste the energy." He straightened, wincing. "Get out. Don't come near me again unless it's on track."

I stood slowly, every muscle screaming. Blood in my mouth, vision blurred, but my voice came out steady as granite. "You're going to regret this."

"I doubt it."

"I'm going to beat you." The words didn't emerge as a threat. They emerged as fact—something already decided, already inevitable, just not yet proven. "Every race. Every qualifying session. Every time you think you're finally fast enough, I'll be faster."

His smile faltered slightly as he really looked at me.

"When people think of Soren Lindqvist," I continued, quiet and absolute, "the only thing they'll remember is the driver who threw away greatness to fit in with mediocrity. You'll be a cautionary tale. A footnote in my story."

Something shifted in his expression. Surprise, or the first understanding that I meant every syllable.

I wiped blood from my split lip with the back of my hand, turned and walked out before he could respond, feeling something fundamental shift inside my chest.

Chega. Enough.

No more hiding. No more hoping people would accept me if I stayed quiet enough, small enough, apologetic enough for existing.

If the world was going to know I was gay, I would own it so completely that the word would lose its power as a weapon. I'd be so undeniably, inarguably fast that they'd have no choice but to say the driving first, the rest second.

And Soren Lindqvist had just become my primary target. Not a rival. An enemy. Every race would be about beating him specifically—proving he'd made the worst miscalculation of his life.

Every victory, a reminder of what he threw away.