VIPER || Oscar Piastri

Chapter 121

[POV: Narrator]

By the time day three hit, Andreanna Saunterre was done being patient.

She'd spent forty-eight hours nodding through meetings, getting poked and prodded by trainers, and listening to engineers talk about "optimising parameters" like she was a rookie. If one more person told her they'd get her on a bike soon, only to then immediately pivot to another hour-long safety briefing or insist she do yet another round of reaction drills, she was going to throw someone's clipboard through the nearest wall.

"Just let me on the damn thing!"

...is what she said — nay, yelled — that morning when a mechanic started listing off adjustments they'd made without actually telling her when she could ride. Fabio had to explain that she wasn't trying to scare anyone, even though she was standing there, arms folded, helmet in hand, vibrating with the kind of pent-up energy that said she was about ten seconds from hot-wiring the bike herself.

That was when they told her they had to "Run through a few more things first."

And she'd responded with: "Okay, okay, yeah... before or after I do a lap?"

When she finally did get the all-clear, after sitting through the final round of telemetry checks and tolerating one last hydration reminder from the physio, she was practically giddy with excitement. Gear on, gloves tightened, boots clipped, she could feel her pulse in her fingertips. It was nice; The garage smelled like warm oil and brake dust, and the mechanics she knew from before still called her 'Miss Boss.' She was starting to remember why, too. Because when she would bark instructions over the garage noise, adjusted things without asking permission, and didn't even hesitate to correct a setting mid-sentence, everyone seemed to just go with it.

Fabio leaned on the pit wall, watching her and grinning like he was watching a kid on Christmas morning.

"I know," she said when someone explained the brake configuration. Then, two seconds later, when someone else tried to warn her about the same thing, "I know!"

And then she just went.

Before she was told to.

No dramatic countdown, no official nod from anyone in charge — just one twist of the throttle and she was finally, finally on a bike again. The first straight made her grin so hard her cheeks ached under the helmet, and by the second lap, she was laughing out loud.

Pure, unfiltered happiness — the kind she hadn't felt in months — shot through her veins. Every turn, every gear change, every flick of the bike felt like muscle memory waking back up.

All the noise of the last few days — the whispered rumours, the sideways glances, her peculiar run-in with Charles — fell away with every turn. The knot of tension she'd been carrying since she walked back through the facility doors loosened lap by lap, until she couldn't even remember why she'd been so worried to come back.

Even the year she'd spent away, all the justifications and second-guessing that had kept her up at night, felt ridiculous now.

She couldn't remember why she'd left at all.

Right now there was only the bike, the track, and her.

For the rest of the session she didn't think about being the second driver, or have to prove herself, or anything beyond the next corner.

It was simple again.

It was hers again.

*

I lifted the takeaway bag onto the desk and flicked the TV on before I even took my jacket off.

Fabio had talked the team into letting me leave early — a miracle, if I've ever experienced one — so I'd made it back to the hotel before dark for the first time since I got here. My order was already waiting at reception, still warm, which felt like some kind of luxury upgrade after three days of eating whatever was shoved into my hands between meetings.