CON RỒNG — THE DRAGON

CONTENT WARNING: This chapter contains graphic descriptions of physical violence and torture.

Faolan

BUDAPEST — A month ago— 29th October' 2025

The room has no address.

That’s by design.

I picked it myself eight years ago, off a list of eleven, because the drain in the floor was already there when the building went up, and because the nearest occupied unit is a textile warehouse that empties out by six every evening.

It’s twenty past nine.

The man in the chair is called Dmitri Volkov on his contracts and Dima to the three people who actually like him, neither of which matters to me right now.

What matters is that four days ago someone ran an override on the Baku telemetry feed during qualifying, routed it through a relay registered to a logistics firm that doesn’t exist, and that relay traces back, through six more shells, to a server Dmitri has root access on.

I’ve had him here for two hours.

His shirt is sheared open down the middle. I monitor the hard, frantic slamming of his pulse against his collarbone. The skin doesn’t hide the panic; clothing would. His wrists are zip-tied to the chair arms, the plastic already cutting white into the skin from how hard he’s been pulling. There’s a strip of cloth jammed into his mouth, soaked dark.

I crouch in front of him, forearms on my knees, a pair of pliers turning between two fingers.

“I’m going to ask you a very simple question. You can answer truthfully, and we can avoid complications, or you can lie. It’s entirely your decision.”

He shakes his head. Fast. Wet eyes, snot running into the cloth.

I look at the pliers.

I’ve already taken the nail off his right thumb, clean. The whole plate lifted in one motion, the bed underneath glistening and raw under the bulb; the smell of it is still in the room, copper and something sweeter underneath, the smell of a body that’s been opened somewhere it isn’t meant to be.

“You understand I already know the answer.”

Another whimper through the cloth.

I set the pliers down. The sound of metal on concrete is louder than it should be in here.

“I’m not asking because I don’t know. I’m asking because I want to hear you say his name before I finish this.”

His whole body is shaking now, the chair legs scraping in stuttering half-inches against the floor, his good hand white-knuckled around nothing.

I reach out and pull the cloth free, wet and heavy, and drop it on the concrete.

“Renard.”

It comes apart into a sob before he’s even finished the word.

“It was Renard, Renard, I swear to God, please—”

“Thank you.”

I pick up the pliers again.

His eyes go wide enough that the white shows all the way around, and he starts shaking his head, no, no, no, the chair scraping harder now, and I take his ruined right hand in mine, gentle the way you’d hold something you actually cared about, and find the next nail.

He screams into the open air this time.

Nobody comes.

It takes longer than the first one because his hand won’t stay still and I have to pin the wrist flat against the chair arm with my forearm, my whole weight on it, until the trembling stops being a variable. When the second nail comes free, he makes a sound I don’t have a word for, something past screaming, something that uses the whole body instead of just the throat.

I drop the nail on the floor next to the first one. Two small, wet, pale crescents on dark concrete.

“You’re going to live,”

I tell him, because it’s true and because it matters to me that he believes it, that he understands this isn’t about ending him.

“Renard is going to find out I know. That part isn’t optional. What’s optional is how much of you is left functioning when he hears it.”

He’s crying too hard now to form words.

I let him.

I clean the pliers on a cloth I keep for exactly this, fold it, set it back in the case. I straighten his shirt collar, which doesn’t fix anything but feels correct to do. I crouch in front of him one more time so he can see my face when I say the last thing.

“I’m going to need the access credentials. Tonight. And then we’re going to have a longer conversation about whether you keep both hands.”

He nods so fast his head nearly hits the chair back.

I stand. My knees crack once, the only sound in the room besides his breathing. Two streets away, traffic moves, indifferent.

A dog barks twice and stops.

I pick up my coat from where I left it folded over a crate by the door, and I put it on, and I leave him there to think about it.

Séraphelle

SINGAPORE — Present day—14th November’ 2025

Four cities. Four wins.

Baku, Barcelona, Budapest, Singapore.

I’m standing in the cooldown bay still half in my suit, the zipper caught somewhere between my shoulder blades, sweat going cold under the fireproof layer faster than I can get it off. The air smells like brake dust and hot rubber and the particular staleness of my own helmet, which I haven’t taken off yet, tucked under one arm.

My phone is already buzzing when I dig it out of the bag.

“I saw the times,”

Luca said from the earpiece. He didn’t wait for me to explain. He just delivered the metric like an administrative entry.

“Don’t start.”

“I’m not starting anything. I’m saying it’s done. You’re in. I bought champagne three weeks ago out of either confidence or denial; I genuinely don’t know which, and now I get to find out.”

I let out a short, clean laugh, the first time my face has done that all day.

“Bring it to the flight.”

“You’re not flying out tonight.”

“I might be.”

A pause. I can hear him shifting on the other end, the specific rustle of him reaching for his notebook even from another country.

“Why?”

“Someone wants a word. Sent his second to fetch me off the cooldown bay like I’m a parcel.”

“What team?”

“Don’t know yet—”

A man steps into the mouth of the bay before I can finish the sentence. Dark suit, no paddock credential visible anywhere on him, the kind of stillness that makes the two marshals nearby go quiet without either of them deciding to.

“Séraphelle Moreau.”

Not a question.

“Luca, I have to go.”

“Send me the address first.”

“I will. Love you, bye.”

I hang up before he can argue.

He doesn’t introduce himself right away. Up close, he’s tall enough that I have to tip my chin slightly to hold his eyes. Dark hair cut close, a scar through one eyebrow that’s old enough to have gone silver-pink against his skin. His suit fits like it was made for him this week, not pulled off a rack.

“Aleksei,”

He states, after a measured beat when I don’t look away.

“My employer would like a word. There’s an office two streets from here.”

“I just drove four hundred kilometers in a fire suit. I’d like a shower.”

“He doesn’t wait well.”

“Then today’s going to be educational for him.”

I text Luca the cross street before the lift doors even shut.

Séraphelle: Going in. Call you after.

He sends back a thumbs up; then, a few seconds later:

Luca: The second you’re out, Séraphelle, I mean it.

The building has no signage.

The lobby is marble, cold even in the heat outside, a single security guard behind a desk who doesn’t look up as Aleksei walks me past him toward the lift.

The office, when the doors open onto it, is the kind of room someone built specifically to make you feel smaller in it. Floor-to-ceiling glass on the far wall, the city laid out flat and orange in the last hour of daylight, the glass itself so clean it looks like there’s nothing between the room and the drop.

A desk, black lacquer, bare except for a closed laptop and a single pen laid exactly parallel to its edge. Two chairs in front of it. One chair behind, and over the back of that one a coat, pale gold, almost camel, completely wrong against everything else in the room, which is all black stone and grey glass and chrome.

A man stands at the window with his back to me, hands in his pockets, not turning even when the lift doors chime shut behind us.

“You wanted a word,”

I say, crossing my arms.

“Make it fast. I’m already cutting it close for my flight.”

He let the silence stretch, anchoring his boots to the floorboards before his shoulders slowly pivoted. His eyes remained locked on mine, dragging across the room like a heavy anchor, until his entire body faced me.

He possessed the dark, brooding looks of someone born for stormy weather, but it was his eyes that arrested the room. They were a precise, pale green, stunningly clear and completely unmuted by grey or hazel. Under a messy fall of dark hair, they were initially a jarring sight, though that contrast quickly settled into something fiercely captivating. His jaw was locked, sculpted by years of deliberate, quiet restraint.

He did not smile; his lips remained a straight, unyielding line that gave absolutely nothing away.

“Your telemetry,”

He says, no greeting attached to it.

“Budapest, Baku, Barcelona, Singapore. Four circuits, four different car configurations. Your correction inputs sit inside a window no driver on record has ever produced.”

“Is that an accusation?”

“An observation.”

“It sounded like an accusation.”

“The pattern matches active yaw correction software,”

He states, his tone flat, unhurried, like he’s reading the numbers off a printout in his head.

“Predictive braking assist.”

I let out a dry, sharp breath.

“The kind of system that gets a team disqualified for three seasons.”

“Pull the chassis apart, then.”

I counter, stepping closer to the black lacquer desk.

“You won’t find anything.”

“We will. Or we won’t, which is a worse problem for me than it is for you.”

“Not my problem.”

“It’s about to be.”

Still no inflection at all.

“Either you’re running an illegal assist and lying to my face in my own building, or every correction across four circuits is genuinely yours, unassisted, which is a far more interesting conversation than the one I walked in here expecting to have.”

“Flattering. I still need that flight.”

“Sit.”

“I don’t take orders from men who haven’t given me their names.”

A small silence. Aleksei, by the doors, shifts his weight against the frame.

“Faolan,”

The man says, eventually, as if the word costs him something.

“Zaytsev.”

I don’t know yet what that name is supposed to do to me. I pull out the chair across from him; the alternative one, deliberately ignoring the seat he had gestured toward, and sit down anyway, leaning my forearms against the edge of his clean desk.

“Fine,”

I say, my voice dropping the defensive edge and turning cold.

“Pull the data up. I’ll walk you through every correction, lap by lap, and you can explain how a piece of pre-programmed software predicted a sudden, localized gust off the Baku harbor wall that wasn’t in any meteorological forecast that morning.”

He doesn’t answer right away.

“You raced once,”

I continue, leaning back, watching his eyes. I don’t walk into high-tier rooms without doing the reading first.

“Twelve years ago. Then you stopped.”

His eyes didn’t shift or dart away; the light behind them simply went out, like a lamp being unplugged in an empty room.

“That’s not what this meeting is about.”

“No. But you’d rather talk about my telemetry than your own retirement, and I find that interesting too.”

Aleksei makes a small sound by the door; a low, choked friction that he doesn’t try very hard to hide. It is an almost-laugh, the sound of an insider catching a breach in a code he thought was airtight.

Faolan’s eyes flick to him once, a brief, silent warning, before returning to me.

Something in his face recalculates.

“Pull up a chair,”

He says again, his voice dropping an octave, quieter.

He sits down slowly, his hands precise as he reaches for a porcelain pot on a side tray and begins to pour two cups of tea. The white steam rises between us, catching the flat orange light from the floor-to-ceiling glass.

“I’d like to hear about Singapore,”

He prompts, looking straight through the steam into my face.

I look down at the dark lacquer between us. I dig into my pocket, pull out my official primary driver registration card, and drop it flat onto the wood right next to his parallel pen. The plastic clicks against the surface, definitive and loud in the quiet room.

I stand up, leaving the tea untouched, completely unbothered by the silence he is trying to use to hold me.

“Read the card.”

I say, turning back toward the lift doors before he can offer another parameter.

“I have a flight to catch, Zaytsev. If you want to talk about Singapore, you can buy a paddock pass for Monaco.”

The lift doors slide open with a soft chime. I step inside and press the ground floor button, watching his green eyes hold my profile through the closing gap, the pale camel coat still hanging over the empty chair behind him.

I have no idea, yet, what I’ve just set in motion.