THE ARCHER ™┆𝗟𝗲𝘄𝗶𝘀 𝗛𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗹𝘁𝗼𝗻 ¹²
"I've been the archer, I've been the prey, Screaming: Who could ever leave me, darling?, But who could stay."
『⩇⩇:⩇⩇』 • masterlist • The Archer Playlist
✩ smau / real life
✩ lewis hamilton x driver oc
⬅previous • next➡
SUMMARY: Both Sena and Lewis deal with the aftermath of Lewis’s decision in their own ways. While one is trying to move forward and rebuild something steadier, the other begins to realise that what he walked away from might be the only place he ever truly wanted to stay.
Warnings: jealousy, avoidance of commitment, unresolved tension
Word count: 5.6k
Author’s Note: Think of Chapter 11 as a season finale. I took a little break after that to reconstruct where the rest of the story is going and to make sure it feels right. I can’t promise consistent updates, but I can promise the story isn’t abandoned. It will come when it’s ready. Thank you for sticking around. Love you guys. Have a good read and let me know what you think. <3
Just a quick heads-up: this story is 100% fictional. I’ve twisted timelines, switched up careers, and added some characters to tell the story I want to tell. It’s all vibes, emotions, and a whole lot of imagination.
✧ Chapter 12 ✧
Liked by centralcee, taylorswift, and others
senafox baby I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake (I am actually freezing)
View All comments
livysmith: I offered her my coat. she said “it ruins the vision”
⤷senafox: vision secured though
faith.cartier: I wonder why oh maybe cause you refused to wear your jacket for the pics
⤷senafox: it was a necessary sacrifice
centralcee: need a jacket? liked by the author
user1: the waist in negative temperatures is insane
user2: somebody zoom into the comment section
⤷user3: I’m sat on whatever this is
Sena stood still long enough for the cold to settle into her bones, letting the sun fall across her face as if it were something earned. It was a strange kind of warmth, thin, almost fragile but against the endless white around her it felt like grace. Snow stretched in every direction, softening the world into something gentler than it had any right to be. The mountains were quiet, the kind of quiet that didn’t ask anything from you, didn’t expect answers or explanations. Just her and the slow rhythm of breath in freezing air. It had been a good trip so far. Simple. Clean. Undemanding.
She tried not to think about her birthday. About the photographs. About him. The image of candlelight in Barbados had faded into something less sharp, less immediate, though not harmless. She surprised herself with how steady she felt now. Not healed — she wasn’t naive enough to call it that — but stable. Contained. Maybe it helped that whatever they had never had a name. No official beginning meant no official ending. Maybe it helped that her friends hadn’t known the depth of it, or if they had, they’d been kind enough to pretend otherwise. Mercy disguised as ignorance. Let her pretend. Let her keep dignity where she could.
She barely touched her phone during the trip. That alone felt like progress. She called her father every now and then, and listened to him complain about the weather back home. That was enough. That anchored her. The only other time she unlocked her screen was that morning, to post the pictures from the trip.
But every time the screen lit up in her hand, that quiet, treacherous voice surfaced.
Check.
Just check.
See what he’s doing.
She had a rough idea anyway. She’d heard enough, seen enough in passing headlines and blurred notifications. But it was different seeing it yourself. It was different letting the image settle into your own eyes, claiming space in your memory.
For a split second, she almost did it. Almost searched his name. Almost let curiosity masquerade as closure.
But the thought alone felt like swallowing a rod pulled straight from flame.
There was still enough self-respect left in her to refuse that kind of pain. Enough instinct to shield her own heart from deliberate injury. Or maybe — if she were being honest — she wasn’t protecting herself from what he was doing. She was protecting herself from what it would reveal about her. About how much it still mattered.
She lifted the cigarette to her lips and inhaled, smoke mingling with the air so cold it scraped her throat on the way down. The burn was clean, immediate, almost clarifying. It filled her lungs sharply, like a reset button pressed too hard. She told herself that if she breathed deeply enough, if she let the smoke travel through her entirely, it might cloud whatever remained of him inside her. Erase him on the exhale.
She let the smoke leave her slowly, watching it dissolve into the white.
It didn’t erase anything.
All it did was burn.
The smoke didn’t numb him out of her system. It only made the emptiness clearer, more defined against the silence. And still, she stood there, eyes closed against the sun, steady on her feet, holding herself together in a landscape that didn’t ask her to be anything but still.
Her thoughts were broken by Olivia’s voice calling from inside the suite. “Sen! Come on, we’re going skiing. You are not spending another day out there pretending you’re not sulking over that man.”
Sena was already forming a protest — she wasn’t sulking, she wasn’t thinking about him, she was perfectly fine — when she turned and caught the look on Olivia’s face. Not mocking. Not cruel. Just knowing.
It confirmed what she had suspected all week.
They knew exactly who she had been waiting for that night. They knew who hadn’t shown up. They knew why, all of a sudden, she had insisted on flying to the top of the mountains and dragging them with her, as if altitude could thin out memory.
They hadn’t asked questions. They hadn’t cornered her with concern. They had let her perform normalcy because they loved her enough to let her keep control.
But the mercy wouldn’t last forever.
Sena held Olivia’s gaze for a moment, weighing whether she had the strength to deny it out loud. She knew that if she said anything other than okay, the careful silence her friends had maintained would dissolve instantly into interrogation and comfort and all the things she wasn’t ready to accept.
So she just nodded.
“I’m coming,” she said lightly.
She crushed the cigarette into the ashtray beside her, pressing it down harder than necessary, then pushed off the balcony railing and slipped back inside, almost skipping as if motion alone could prove she was fine.
Faith was leaning over the vanity when Sena walked back into the suite, one knee propped on the chair, eyeliner balanced carefully in her hand. The room smelled faintly of perfume and heat from the radiators, a sharp contrast to the frozen quiet outside. Faith caught her reflection in the mirror before she turned fully.
“Oh, there she is,” she said, tone light but edged with something observant.
Sena shrugged out of her jacket, fingers still slightly numb. “I was having a smoke,” she replied, not quite meeting her eyes, focusing instead on toeing off her boots near the door. She could feel Faith watching her through the mirror — not suspicious, not accusatory — just assessing. Taking stock.
She hated that they could read her so easily.
“So,” Sena added, brushing snow from the sleeves of her jumper as if that had been her only concern out there, “what are we doing today?”
"We're skiing,” Liv said matter-of-factly. “Properly this time. No more of you disappearing halfway up the mountain to stare into the void.”
Sena rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t staring into the void.”
“Yeah,” Faith muttered, capping her mascara and turning around fully now, leaning back against the desk. “You were communing with nature.”
“Very spiritual,” Liv added, deadpan.
Sena exhaled through her nose, the corner of her mouth twitching despite herself. “You’re both dramatic.”
They had planned it the night before — skiing all morning, then staying for the festival down at the base of the resort in the afternoon. The ski village had transformed overnight into something out of a postcard: fairy lights strung between wooden chalets, music drifting up from speakers half-buried in snow, people in bright jackets weaving between stalls selling mulled wine and pastries dusted in sugar. There was something intoxicating about it — the kind of atmosphere that made you feel temporarily suspended from the rest of your life.
A ski resort in winter had its own rhythm. Mornings belonged to the slopes — sharp air, adrenaline, the scrape of skis against packed snow. Afternoons belonged to laughter, to flushed cheeks and clumsy dancing in ski boots, to the easy warmth of crowded tents where strangers became friends for an hour.
Sena moved further into the room, perching on the edge of the bed as she reached for her gloves. “Fine,” she said. “We ski. Then we stay at the festival for a bit.”
“For a bit?” Liv scoffed. “We’re staying until you’re too tired to overthink.”
“I don’t overthink,” Sena replied automatically.
Faith raised a brow. “Sure”
She pulled her hair into a tighter ponytail, fingers moving with practiced precision. She liked preparation. Liked structure. The ritual of gearing up gave her something to focus on that wasn’t memory. It was mechanical. Clean. Necessary.
Outside the window, skiers were already cutting long arcs into the slopes, leaving temporary signatures in the snow that would be erased by nightfall. Sena watched them for a moment, feeling the familiar itch under her skin.
Faith stepped closer, adjusting Sena’s collar without comment. It was a small, wordless gesture. Protective without being obvious.
“You good?” Faith asked quietly, just for her.
Sena met her eyes then. Steady. Measured.
“Yeah,” she said.
It wasn’t entirely a lie.
Liv clapped her hands once, breaking the moment. “Right. If we don’t leave now, we’ll miss the best snow.”
They filed out together, laughter already spilling ahead of them down the corridor. Sena let herself fall into step between them, shoulders brushing theirs as they walked. She could feel the cold waiting beyond the doors, could feel the mountain calling in that silent, indifferent way.
Today, she decided, she would let it swallow her whole.
Lewis sat on the floor with his back resting against the sofa, legs stretched out in front of him, shoulders sinking into the familiar softness of home. At some point during the film his niece had curled into the corner of the couch, one small arm draped over a cushion as though claiming territory in her sleep. His nephew had lasted longer, stubbornly insisting he wasn’t tired, only to eventually tip sideways against his sister, the controller slipping from his hand. Now both of them were asleep, breathing slow and heavy.
The television still played quietly, the credits rolling unnoticed. The room was dim except for the low lamplight in the corner and the blue glow flickering across the walls. The house felt full in the way only a family home could feel full, layered with noise, memory and routine. It was warm, not just in temperature but in texture, in history.
Lewis leaned his head back against the sofa cushion and looked at the ceiling for a moment.
He loved this. He really did. These were the nights that had steadied him for years, after seasons that slipped through his fingers, after the kind of public scrutiny that turned everything into spectacle. He had always come back here and let the warmth recalibrate him. Let the simplicity of it remind him who he was without the helmet.
But the hollow in his chest remained.
Since Barbados, he had been seen more than usual. Photographed stepping out of restaurants, leaning too close to women he barely knew, smiling into cameras with that familiar composure people mistook for contentment. None of it had been accidental. He understood optics. He understood narratives. If there was going to be a break, if there was going to be distance, it needed to look deliberate. Clean. Undeniable. The world needed a story to replace the one it had started writing about him and Sena, and so he had given it one.
It had worked.
The rumours shifted almost overnight. Speculation turned into correction. People congratulated themselves for not believing in something that had never officially existed. Her name slowly detached from his in headlines. The noise redirected.
This is what’s best, he reminded himself. This is what protecting her looks like.
But protection had never felt so much like self-inflicted damage.
His sister watched him from across the room longer than usual before finally speaking. “You’re quiet today,” she said lightly, as if she were commenting on the weather. Not accusatory. Just observant.
“Just tired,” he replied automatically, running a hand through his hair before letting it rest against the sofa again. “Long year.”
His mum paused in the doorway, dish towel in hand. “You say that every year.”
He gave a small shrug. “Car wasn’t where we wanted it to be. Mentally draining, that’s all.”
It was an easy excuse. Racing was the perfect shield, technical enough to end conversations, complicated enough to sound plausible, familiar enough that no one felt the need to dig deeper. They all knew what a difficult season could do to him. It was not entirely a lie, just not the truth.
They did not push. They never did when they sensed the wall was deliberate.
His niece shifted slightly in her sleep, mumbling something incoherent before settling again, and Lewis found himself staring at the space between the two children on the sofa. His family’s voices blurred together for a moment, the room tilting slightly as his thoughts drifted somewhere he had been trying to avoid.
Sena would have liked this, he realised.
Not the chaos necessarily, though she would have pretended she thrived in it, but the intimacy of it. The unguardedness. The way no one here cared about headlines or speculation or strategy. She would have sat cross-legged on this same rug, speaking more than listening. The thought landed heavier than he expected.
He had told himself that distance was mercy. That removing himself from her orbit would spare her from being dragged into conversations she did not deserve. He had watched the comments spiral, watched strangers reduce her to something transactional simply because she had stood too close to him for too long. He could handle being dissected. He had built armour for it over decades. But watching her become collateral damage had done something sharp and violent to him.
So he had chosen for her.
He had decided what she needed.
He had assumed that hurting her once would hurt less than letting the world keep doing it slowly.
Now, sitting in a living room full of warmth that did not quite reach him, he was no longer sure he had been protecting anyone at all.
His phone buzzed against the coffee table and he looked at it instinctively, his pulse tightening before he could stop himself. It was not her. It had not been her in weeks. He did not know what he would do if it ever was again. The last message still sat in their chat like a sealed door.
Thank you, Hamilton.
He had read it so many times that the words no longer felt like language. Just shape. Finality.
He was thinking about the version of her that had laughed in that stable, arms wrapped around his neck, cheeks flushed from cold air and disbelief. The way she had looked at him like he had given her something sacred. The way he had promised, silently and stupidly, that he would never be the reason that light dimmed.
And then he had been.
The women he had been photographed with since then had been distractions at best, shields at worst. He did not remember their perfume, their jokes, the colour of their dresses. He remembered the absence. The constant, quiet comparison that was unfair to everyone involved. He had convinced himself he could compartmentalise, that he could behave normally and eventually feel normal.
But hollow things do not fill simply because you surround them with noise.
His mum came to sit beside him, close enough that their shoulders brushed. She did not look at him when she spoke. “Whatever it is,” she said gently, “don’t let pride make it worse.”
He swallowed, his jaw tightening for a fraction of a second. “It’s not that.”
She hummed softly, unconvinced but respectful of his refusal. “You’ve always carried too much on your own.”
He did not answer.
Because the truth was he had chosen this weight. Chosen to carry it instead of letting her decide whether it was worth holding together. He had taken control in the name of protection, and now he had to sit inside the consequences of that control.
He had wanted to protect Sena from the world.
And for the first time since that night in Barbados, sitting in a room full of people who loved him without condition, Lewis felt the full, undeniable weight of what he had done, not as strategy, not as sacrifice, but as loss.
Later, when the house settled into the softer quiet of post-dinner calm and he finally retreated to his room, he sat on the edge of the bed with his phone in his hand longer than he meant to. He had already decided he wasn’t going to check. There was nothing to gain from it. No version of scrolling that ended with relief.
He opened Instagram anyway.
Her post was unavoidable.
Snow bright enough to hurt. Mountains stretching out behind her like a painted backdrop. And Sena in the foreground, eyes closed against the sun, chin tilted slightly upward, light catching along the curve of her cheekbone. She looked composed in a way that wasn’t defensive. Not hardened. Just… settled. Like she had found a rhythm that didn’t require him.
His throat tightened before he could stop it.
He zoomed in unconsciously, studying the details, the familiar arch of her brow, the way she held her shoulders when she was relaxed. Winter had always suited her. It sharpened her features, made her look almost untouchable. The second photo struck deeper. She was on the ground, tangled in snow with her friends, boots in the air, hair messy, laughing without restraint. It wasn’t curated. It wasn’t controlled. It was the version of her that had once pressed her face into his neck and thanked him for giving her something she’d loved as a child.
He let his thumb hover, suspended in the space between restraint and self-inflicted injury.
Then he saw it.
Central Cee had commented. Again.
The tone was light. Harmless on the surface. Nothing overt. No claim. No declaration. Just presence.
And she had liked it.
That small red heart hit harder than it had any right to.
Heat flared in his chest, sharp, instinctive, humiliating in its intensity. His fingers curled tighter around the phone as if grounding himself physically might steady the reaction. He had forfeited any authority here. He knew that. He had dismantled whatever unspoken understanding existed between them the moment he decided to orchestrate an ending instead of having a conversation.
Still, the idea of another man inserting himself into her orbit — even subtly, even publicly — scraped against something primal inside him. It wasn’t about status. It wasn’t about ego. It was about proximity. About someone else being allowed to exist in the margins of her life where he had once stood unchallenged.
This is what you wanted, he reminded himself.
You wanted her free from the fallout that follows you. You wanted her detached from your name. You wanted her untouched by the ugliness.
Freedom, it turned out, included other people.
His gaze drifted back to her face on the screen. There was no trace of him there. No shadow. No grief visible enough for strangers to dissect. She looked like someone who had absorbed the impact and decided to keep moving.
A sharp edge of something darker surfaced — not anger at her, not even at that guy — but at the realisation that she was capable of moving forward without waiting for him to circle back.
Possessiveness crept in quietly, dangerous because it felt justified in his own mind. He knew her in ways that no one else did. Knew the parts she didn’t let the world see. The stubborn softness beneath the defiance. The way she shut down when she was hurt instead of exploding. He had been inside those silences. He had been trusted with them.
And now someone else was stepping into frame.
He locked the phone and placed it face down on the bedside table, as if removing it from sight might dull the reaction in his chest.
He lay back fully this time, staring at the ceiling in the dim light, letting the truth settle where he had been avoiding it. He had told himself that stepping away was strength. That distancing himself was care. That if he absorbed the blame and redirected the narrative, she would be safer for it. But watching her exist without him — watching her acknowledge someone else — forced something else into the open:
He hadn’t stopped wanting her.
He had only stripped himself of the right to act like he did.
And that quiet, simmering feeling burned hotter than any public rumour ever could.
He didn’t sleep.
The house had gone quiet hours ago and still he lay awake staring at the ceiling like it might rearrange itself into clarity. The decision wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t crash into him like revelation. It built slowly, heavily, like something rising from deep water, something that had always been there waiting for the moment he stopped pretending he could live without it.
What he was feeling now wasn’t noble. It wasn’t protective.
It was yearning.
Not the soft, sentimental kind. The dangerous kind. The kind that lodged itself in the chest and refused to be reasoned with. The kind that made logic irrelevant and pride feel secondary.
When he’d seen her photo — sunlight cutting across her face, snow bright behind her, eyes closed like she owed no one anything — something inside him had shifted in a way he couldn’t ignore. She looked untouched by him. Just… existing. Whole. That image unsettled him more than anger would have. He could have managed anger. He understood conflict. But this quiet steadiness, this suggestion that she could carry on without him, when even breathing without her hurt scraped at something instinctive.
And then that comment.
It shouldn’t have mattered but it did it mattered too much.
The jealousy hadn’t been explosive. It hadn’t been loud or reactive. It had been colder than that. It had moved through him like a slow, controlled burn, in a way he didn’t have the right to be. He had dismantled whatever they were with deliberate precision. He had stepped away. He had made sure the world believed there was nothing to see.
And now she was responding to someone else.
He turned onto his side, staring into the darkness, jaw tight.
He didn’t want her public. He didn’t want her displayed or claimed or dissected by strangers. That had never been the appeal. What he wanted — what he had always wanted, though he had never said it plainly — was her, just her. The way she softened when she trusted. The way she looked at him when she thought no one else was paying attention. The way she gave fully once she decided to give.
He missed that with an ache that felt almost physical.
And that’s when the thought formed. They didn’t need to define anything. They didn’t need to fix anything publicly. They could slide back into what they had been before. It had worked. It had been contained. He had known exactly where the edges were and how far he could step without falling into something that demanded too much of him. She had been his.
He didn’t want a grand reconciliation. He didn’t want declarations or promises or the vulnerability of saying, I was wrong. He wanted her back in the quiet ways. Back in his bed without cameras. Back in his messages late at night. Back in the space where she reached for him without hesitation.
He wanted the warmth of her devotion again.
And selfishly — deeply selfishly — he wanted it without restructuring his life around it.
The awareness of that should have disgusted him more than it did.
He knew her. That was the part he couldn’t ignore. He knew how she loved. Once she allowed herself in, she didn’t do it halfway. She didn’t ration affection. She didn’t keep contingency plans. When she chose, she chose fully. That had been beautiful. Terrifying. Addictive.
If he went back carefully, just present, familiar — she would respond. Not immediately. Not recklessly. But inevitably. He could feel that certainty settle in him like gravity.
Because if the roles were reversed, he would.
If she showed up at his door with that quiet, unwavering look in her eyes, asking for something undefined but intimate, he wouldn’t be able to refuse her. He wouldn’t demand structure. He would take whatever version she offered.
So why wouldn’t she?
The feeling twisted deeper there, not just for her body or her attention, but for the way she had once looked at him like he was something irreplaceable. The way she had leaned into him without calculation. The way she had trusted him to hold her without asking where it was going.
He missed that trust more than he wanted to admit.
He stood and walked to the window, pushing the curtain aside slightly, staring out into the night sky as if it might cool the heat under his skin.
He closed his eyes briefly, exhaling.
A small, fractured part of him hoped she wouldn’t fold. Hoped she had grown beyond him. Hoped she had built something inside herself strong enough to refuse him if he came back offering only half of himself.
But the larger part — the honest, yearning, selfish part — didn’t believe she would.
And he hated that he was counting on it.
He wasn’t planning to give her more. He was planning to take her back into a space that required less of him than she deserved.
And the ache in his chest wasn’t guilt. It was hunger.
Bahrain was the same, and yet it wasn’t, not really.
The desert still breathed heat even in testing season, the air shimmering faintly above the tarmac, the sand stretching endlessly beyond the circuit like it had always been there, watching, waiting. The garages still smelled of fuel and rubber and hot metal. Engineers still leaned over laptops with the same furrowed brows, mechanics still moved with that precise, economical urgency that never quite left them. On the surface, nothing had changed.
But Sena had.
Last year, she had walked into this paddock like someone stepping back onto ground that had once tried to swallow her whole. Every glance had felt like a question mark. Every on-board lap, a silent trial. She had been the girl who came back from the flames, the one people watched with cautious fascination, half-expecting brilliance, half-expecting disaster. She’d carried that weight quietly, stubbornly, determined to prove she still belonged here without ever asking anyone’s permission to exist.
Now, she stood there as the reigning world champion.
The title sat on her shoulders differently than she’d imagined it would. Not heavier — if anything, it made her lighter — but sharper. Defined. There was no question anymore of whether she deserved the seat, the attention, the space she took up. The paddock didn’t tilt its head at her now. It looked straight at her. Some with admiration. Some with resentment. Some with something closer to wariness. She recognised all of it. She had earned every reaction.
They were calling her the Vixen again.
The nickname had started years ago, long before championships and comebacks and scars the public never quite saw properly. One of the drivers had said it offhandedly at first, a half-joke during a debrief, when she’d managed to pass three cars on worn tyres with a move that shouldn’t have worked but did anyway. “Clever little vixen,” Seb had muttered, equal parts impressed and irritated.
The media had latched onto it instantly.
A vixen, clever, elusive, sharp-toothed when cornered. A creature that survived by wit as much as speed. It didn’t hurt that her last name was Fox; the metaphor practically wrote itself. They liked the way it sounded, liked how easily it slipped into headlines and commentary, liked the faint edge of danger it suggested. A woman who wasn’t just fast, but cunning. Not just talented, but strategic. Not just surviving the grid, hunting on it.
At first, she’d hated it.
It had felt reductive, another way to turn her into something symbolic instead of human. But over time — and especially now — she liked it. Let it become armour rather than a cage. If they wanted to see her as something sharp and untameable, fine. She would give them exactly that.
And then she saw him.
It wasn’t dramatic. There was no slow-motion recognition, no cinematic pause in the noise around them. He was simply there, a few metres away, leaning slightly against the barrier near the Mercedes hospitality unit, sunglasses on, talking to someone she didn’t immediately register.
Lewis.
The first time since the stables. The first time since that night, since Barbados, since the photo, since the message she had sent with hands steadier than she had felt.
Her body reacted before her mind could catch up. A small tightening in her chest. A flicker low in her stomach that she refused to name. She forced her breathing to stay even, her steps to remain measured.
I’m not bothered, she told herself, the words rhythmic, almost rehearsed. We weren’t even anything. I’m not bothered.
They hadn’t had a title. They hadn’t made promises. There had been no public claim, no official beginning to justify an official end. If anything, this was clean. Simple.
He didn’t call, didn’t text, and most importantly he didn’t show up. The facts were easy to hold onto because they didn’t argue back.
Until he saw her.
She knew the exact second it happened because the air shifted. Because his body went still in that particular way she remembered too well. Because even across the distance, she felt the weight of his attention land on her like something physical.
She didn’t look at him immediately. She refused to give him that satisfaction. Instead, she stopped to speak to one of her engineers, nodding at something on a tablet screen, leaning in as if the numbers on it were suddenly the most fascinating thing she had ever encountered.
But eventually, instinct betrayed her.
She glanced up.
And there it was — that look.
It wasn’t casual. It wasn’t polite. It wasn’t the detached, friendly acknowledgement of two drivers who had once been rumoured and nothing more.
It was intent, sharp, predatory.
He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t pretending not to stare. He was just… watching her. Like he was assessing distance. Like he was measuring how far she had moved and how easily he could close it.
Her pulse stumbled.
Sena knew that look. She had felt it on her skin before. In crowded rooms. On dance floors. In quiet spaces where the world had narrowed down to just the two of them and the tension between.
It had always undone her.
And that was what frightened her now, not him, not exactly, but the part of herself that responded to it.
Because that look didn’t feel like indifference. It didn’t feel like regret. It felt like claim.
She straightened unconsciously, chin lifting just slightly, the Vixen mask sliding into place with frightening ease. If he was going to look at her like prey, she would remind him that foxes had teeth.
But even as she held his gaze, she felt something treacherous stir inside her. A pull. Subtle but undeniable. Like the edge of a current beneath still water.
It felt like a trap. Not a brutal one. Not something forced or ugly.
A beautiful one.
The kind you walked into knowing exactly what it was, knowing exactly how it would end, and still convinced yourself you could handle it this time. The kind woven from memory and touch and unfinished sentences. The kind that whispered, just once more.
Her feet almost moved.
It was barely perceptible, a shift of weight, the slightest lean forward. As if some invisible thread between them had tightened, tugging her across the concrete.
He didn’t look away. His eyes darkened, as though he sensed it, that she was closer to stepping into his orbit than she wanted to admit.
Sena’s throat went dry.
She hated that he still had that effect on her. Hated that after everything her body remembered him with a loyalty her pride did not share.
I’m not bothered, she repeated, but it sounded weaker now. Less convincing.
Because if she truly wasn’t bothered, she wouldn’t be aware of the way his gaze traced her from head to toe. Wouldn’t notice the faint tightening of his jaw. Wouldn’t recognise that flicker of something possessive, something almost territorial, in the way he looked at her standing there in McLaren colours, sunlight catching in her hair.
It was dangerous.
It made her want to walk straight toward him.
To stand close enough to smell his cologne beneath the heat. Close enough to see whether his expression would soften or sharpen. Close enough to ask “Why?”
Why didn’t you come? Why didn’t you call? Why did you decide for both of us?
Her body betrayed her again — one step. Just one.
And in that split second, before she could overthink it, she did something she hadn’t done since that night.
She felt small.
Not weak. Not helpless. Just… exposed. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. And then —
“Sena!”
The call cut through everything.
Sharp. Immediate. Real.
She blinked, the spell fracturing like glass dropped onto stone. One of the team members was waving from the garage entrance, urgency clear in his voice. “We need you in the car — run plan’s changed!”
The thread snapped.
She inhaled sharply, almost like surfacing from underwater. For half a second, she looked back at Lewis.
He hadn’t moved.
But something in his expression shifted a flicker of frustration? It was gone too quickly to define.
Sena held his gaze one last beat.
Then she turned away.
Each step back toward the garage felt deliberate, reclaiming ground she had almost surrendered. The noise of the paddock rushed back in, engines firing, radios crackling, voices overlapping. She slipped her helmet back on, letting the world narrow again to visor and breath and the clean logic of speed.
As she lowered herself into the cockpit, she whispered something silent and desperate to whatever god was listening.
Not today. Please, not today.
Because she knew with terrifying clarity that if she had taken three more steps, she would have walked straight into that trap.
And the worst part?
She would have done it willingly.