Chapter 163

Grace's POV:

"Maverick!" His name tore from my throat in a scream of pure terror.

My body was already moving even though I knew, knew I'd never reach him in time, never be able to do anything but watch as Jessica's car closed the distance with horrifying speed.

But Maverick had been watching me.

Through the windshield, I saw the exact moment his expression shifted—that smile he'd been wearing freezing on his face.

He kicked in before conscious thought could catch up.

I saw the Bugatti lurch forward, tires shrieking against asphalt as he accelerated hard, and Jessica's sedan missed his door by inches, the impact she'd been aiming for reduced to a glancing blow against his rear quarter panel that sent both cars into a violent spin.

Maverick recovered first, his hands steady on the wheel as he brought the Bugatti under control and then, impossibly, shifted into reverse, the supercar's engine roaring as he deliberately rammed into Jessica's sedan, crumpling her rear bumper.

Relief flooded through me for perhaps half a second—he's okay, he's safe, he's—

Then a white van came from nowhere.

I barely had time to process its existence before it was bearing down on me, the driver's face obscured behind tinted windows, the vehicle's bulk making Jessica's sedan look like a toy by comparison.

My legs locked up, some primal part of my brain recognizing the futility of running, the absolute certainty that I couldn't possibly move fast enough to escape the tons of metal hurtling toward my fragile body.

This is it, I thought with strange clarity, watching my death approach in slow motion. This is how I die.

But then the Bugatti was there, Maverick's car inserting itself between me and oblivion with a precision that defied belief, the passenger side taking the van's impact at a perfect perpendicular angle that sent the larger vehicle spinning away, its trajectory disrupted just enough to miss me by a margin measured in inches rather than feet.

The world exploded into noise and motion.

Metal shrieked against metal, glass shattered into a million glittering fragments.

Maverick's car flipped.

In the chaos, I caught a glimpse of Jessica's sedan—dented and smoking but still functional—peeling away from the scene with a screech of tires.

I watched, frozen in horror, as the Bugatti rolled end over end like a child's toy, tumbling across the pavement in a cascade of sparks and screaming metal. It hit a concrete barrier with a sound like the world ending, the impact crumpling the driver's side into an unrecognizable mass of twisted carbon fiber and shattered glass, and then everything went still.

The silence that followed was worse than the noise had been.

"Maverick!" I was running before conscious thought caught up with my body, my legs carrying me toward the wreckage. "Maverick, please—"

Blood. There was so much blood, painting the shattered windshield in abstract patterns, pooling on the crumpled hood, dripping steadily onto the pavement from somewhere I couldn't see.

I could make out his form through the destruction—slumped against the ruined driver's seat, his head tilted at an angle that made my stomach lurch with terror, crimson staining his face and neck and the white shirt he'd been wearing when he'd kissed me goodbye this morning.

"No, no, no—" The word became a mantra, a desperate denial of reality as I reached the wreckage and tried to find some way in, some way to reach him through the twisted metal and shattered glass.

My hands scrabbled uselessly against the passenger door, which had been compressed into something barely recognizable as a door at all, and distantly I registered the pain of cuts opening across my palms, glass embedding itself in my skin.

"Maverick, please—" My voice cracked, tears streaming down my face. "Please don't leave me, please, I just got you back, please—"

My fingers found his neck, searching desperately for a pulse, and for one terrible moment I felt nothing, nothing, just cooling skin and the sticky wetness of blood.

Then—there. Faint and thready and far too slow, but there. A heartbeat. Proof of life.

"Help!" I screamed, my voice raw and desperate as I turned toward the gathering crowd, toward the people who had emerged from buildings and stopped their cars to stare at the carnage. "Someone call an ambulance! Please!"

But even as the words left my mouth, even as I turned back to Maverick's broken body and pressed my hand more firmly against his neck as if I could somehow hold his pulse steady through sheer force of will, something inside my mind cracked.

It started as a whisper—a ghost of sensation.

"You're going to be fine," a younger Maverick's voice echoed in my head, his hands gentle as they cradled my face in the aftermath of some long-ago crisis. "I promise, Grace. I'll always protect you."

The memory hit like a physical blow, and suddenly there were more, flooding through the cracks in whatever wall had been holding them back:

The first time I'd seen him at the ice rink, that jolt of recognition that had felt like destiny even though we'd never met before.

Maverick stepping in when a man cornered me at the club, his presence transforming from stranger to savior in a single breath.

That ridiculous three-month dating agreement we'd signed, a contract that was supposed to be purely transactional but had become something neither of us could control.

Moving into his home when I had nowhere else to go, the way he'd made space for me in his life as if I'd always belonged there.

Our first real sex had shattered every boundary we'd tried to maintain.

The moment after his championship victory when he'd pulled me onto the ice in front of thousands of screaming fans, dropped to one knee with that ring box in his trembling hands, his eyes blazing with such fierce certainty as he asked me to marry him.

And that last night before he left for Europe—God, that last night—when I'd clung to him desperately, neither of us willing to let go, making love over and over again as if we could somehow fuck our way through the grief, as if exhausting our bodies would somehow make the separation easier to bear.

He was mine. He had always been mine, from that first moment our eyes had met, and I had been his just as completely, just as irrevocably.

And now he was dying in front of me, his blood warm and sticky on my hands, his heartbeat growing fainter with every passing second.

"Maverick!" His name tore from my throat in a sob that felt like it was being ripped from somewhere deep inside my chest, grief and terror and love so overwhelming it threatened to shatter me into a million pieces. "Please don't leave me, please, I love you, I've always loved you, please—"

Sirens wailed in the distance, growing steadily louder, and I clung to that sound like a lifeline, like proof that help was coming, that this wasn't the end, that I'd have the chance to tell Maverick everything I'd just remembered, everything I'd been too scared to fully feel even after Dr. Thorne had given me back my past.

The ambulance screeched to a halt beside the wreckage, paramedics swarming the scene with practiced efficiency, and I felt hands on my shoulders, someone trying to pull me away, to get me clear so they could do their work.

I let them pull me away, my hands falling uselessly to my sides as the paramedics descended on Maverick with equipment I didn't recognize, their movements swift and sure as they worked to keep him alive.

Someone wrapped a blanket around my shoulders—when had I started shaking?—and guided me toward a second ambulance, but I couldn't stop staring at Maverick's broken form, at the blood that seemed to be everywhere, at the terrible stillness of his body.