ACROSS THE FINISH LINE [Complete & Revised]

Chapter 15: No Margin for Error

The morning after her keynote in Austin, Elena Reyes woke to the glow of her tablet blinking like a warning light.

236 unread messages.

Some were congratulatory. Others curious. A few were outright venomous.

She didn't open a single one.

Instead, she sat on the windowsill with her knees drawn up, sipping bitter hotel coffee out of a paper cup, watching Luca sleep in the tangled sheets behind her. One arm flung over his eyes like he was shielding himself from the entire universe. His chest rose and fell in the kind of rhythm she used to chart in data curves—smooth, predictable, comforting.

Peace.

It still felt foreign. Fragile, like glass stretched too thin. But it was there. And more than that—it was hers.

For the first time, she wasn't rushing to a meeting, a strategy session, or a pit wall. She wasn't writing code until her fingers ached or running simulation loops at midnight.

But her pulse still raced.

Because even though she'd walked away from FalconTech, she wasn't done.

She was just starting.

Modena – Reyes Innovation Lab (In Progress)

The lab still smelled like plaster, primer, and promise.

High ceilings stretched overhead like the inside of an aircraft hangar. Natural light spilled in through skylights, catching on freshly installed glass walls and steel support beams. Workbenches lined the edges of the space, scattered with tools, screens, and the early bones of machines not yet alive.

The front door had already been installed, its glass pane bearing a name in brushed steel:

REYES | Performance + Innovation

The words still looked surreal.

Elena walked alongside Jasmin, her best engineer and closest ally, who held up a tablet and scrolled through incoming applications.

"You have no idea how many women applied overnight," Jasmin said, her tone a mixture of awe and exhaustion. "We've got submissions from MIT, Cape Town, Melbourne, Tokyo... even a girl who just turned nineteen from Brazil who rebuilt her uncle's drag bike from scraps."

Elena paused. "That used to be me."

"No," Jasmin said with a grin. "You didn't have a drag bike. You had a disassembled wind tunnel and a grudge."

Elena laughed.

They stopped in the center of what would become the lab's simulator chamber. The foundation was already poured. The walls were being reinforced. In a few months, it would house a neural-feedback driving pod with real-time adaptive physics modeling.

"This used to be someone else's dream," Elena said softly. "Falcon. My father's expectations. Jean-Luc's needs. I've always been building for someone else's idea of success."

"And now?" Jasmin asked.

Elena ran a hand over the edge of a steel frame. "Now it's mine."

Jasmin tilted her head. "And Luca?"

Elena didn't respond immediately.

But her expression softened—one of understanding, not dependence.

"He's not the dream," she said. "He's the choice I made after I finally learned how to dream again."

Ferrari HQ – Team Meeting