The announcement poured fresh fuel on a fire that had been burning for weeks.
The quarter-billion-dollar figure, the one the press had circled since the leak, was no longer a rumor anyone could argue with. F1 had stood up in front of the world and as good as confirmed it.
Lucas Knight had taken that money from the sport, and now it was simply a fact.
People had a great deal to say about it.
Plenty of them found nothing strange in the number at all. The man was one of the most famous faces on the planet, and you only had to look at his record in Hollywood to do the math. Films of his cleared a billion dollars at the box office on the regular. Set against that, a single season's deal hardly looked outrageous.
"I cannot wait for this F1 season now that Lucas is tied to it. What on earth have they cooked up with him?"
"This is exactly it, this is why it matters. People who never gave racing a second look are suddenly paying attention."
"Look, I'm not even a Lucas fan. But the guy actually drove an F2, and a detuned F1 on top of it. That's more than most actors would dare. Respect where it's due."
Not everyone was nodding along.
To a good number of people, Lucas Knight or not, a quarter of a billion dollars was an obscene amount of money to hand a single human being.
"I genuinely don't understand this. How does an actor, a Hollywood actor, command a number like that?"
"I won't see money like that in my entire life, and this man pulls it down for one season. One."
"The people at the very top are wired differently. That's the only explanation."
What none of the doubters could see was the part Stefano had kept to himself. The whole point of the deal was eyes. Attention. F1 wanted the world looking at it, and on that single measure Lucas had already earned every cent before he'd turned a wheel for them.
Because whatever side of it people landed on, they were all doing the same thing. Talking about Formula 1. Arguing over it, defending it, mocking it, anticipating it. A sport that half of them had never followed was suddenly the thing everyone had an opinion on.
Ticket pages slowed under the traffic. Pre-season coverage that normally went unwatched started pulling real numbers. Names that had never followed a race were marking the calendar for the opener, waiting to see what the sport had built around its new ambassador.
The money was loud. The interest it bought was louder. And the season hadn't even started.
---
The world outside was loud about F1 right now. Lucas could feel it every time he opened his phone, the headlines, the noise, the whole sport bracing for him.
He wasn't paying much of it any mind. There'd be time enough to be the Global Ambassador once the season started and the calendar came for him again. For now he was home, and home was where he wanted to be.
The thing that had taken up the most room in that home, though, went back months, to around the time he'd come home from the F1 movie production.
He'd been gone the better part of two and a half months on that shoot, and somewhere in that stretch his daughter had quietly decided what she wanted to be.
Daciana wanted to be an actress.
She'd settled on it while he was away, and Lucas hadn't found out until he was back. It took him a day or two to catch on, and after that there was no missing it.
She brought it up at breakfast, in the car, at night when she was meant to be asleep, padding out of her room to tell him one more thing she'd thought of about it.
He had a guess where it came from, and it wasn't a hard one.
The girl had been living with two actors for a while now. She'd watched her mother get ready for things and her father come and go from sets, and a kid that close to it was going to get curious sooner or later.
When he floated that to her once, half teasing, she wasn't having it.
"It's not 'cause of you," she told him, dead serious, arms crossed. "I like it. Me. By myself."
He raised his hands and let her have it.
The real start of it was simpler than any of his guessing, though.
It had been Jennifer. One afternoon she'd sat Daciana down and talked to her about acting. What it actually was. What it felt like to step into someone else for a while, to be sad when they were sad and brave when they were brave, then set them down again and go back to being yourself.
Daciana had hung on every word, and something in it got its hooks in her and never let go.
So he and Jennifer talked it over, the way they did everything, and landed where they always landed with their kids. They'd help.
However far she wanted to take it, they'd be behind her.
That didn't mean rushing her, though.
If there was one thing the two of them knew better than almost anyone, it was the industry they were about to let her dip a toe into, and they weren't about to drop a small child into the deep end of it.
They wanted her coming at it slow. So instead of an on-camera part, they put Neil on the hunt for voice work.
It was the right way to do it.
Voice acting would let her find out if she actually loved the work, without any of the things that made the rest of it hard.
No set full of strangers, no long days under the lights, no cameras on her face, no photo of their daughter turning up online by morning.
That last part mattered most.
They'd spent years keeping the girls out of the public eye, and a recording booth kept that wall standing.
Just her, a microphone, and a script.
And it would tell them something true. If she loved it in there, with no fame waiting at the end of it, then they'd know it was real, and the bigger roles could come later. When she was ready.
The search took a while. Neil worked it through the holidays and into the new year, and it wasn't until now, with the season only days from its start, that he finally called with something.
He'd found her a role, and not a small one either.
The lead. A girl named Heidi, in an animated film called Heidi: Rescue of the Lynx.
Jennifer didn't wait. She was across the room and down at Daciana's level before Lucas had finished taking it in, smiling. "Guess what I just heard. You excited for this, baby?"
It took the girl about half a second, and then she went off like a firework. "Yay!" Both arms shot up and she came off the floor with them. "Daciana's finally gonna start her career!"
Jennifer laughed and swept her in. "Your whole career? Already? Look at you, big shot." She rocked her side to side while Daciana beamed, too happy to hold still.
The two of them were lost in it, and that was why Lucas's eye went to the other side of the room, to the one person not making a sound.
Daria. Standing a little apart, watching her sister, her mouth pressed into a small line.
Lucas went over and down on one knee, level with her. "Hey. Ria. What's wrong? You're not happy for your sister?"
She shook her head fast, like she didn't want him getting the wrong idea. "N-no, it's not that. I am, I promise." Her eyes dropped. The rest came out small. "It's just... I want to be an actress too."
And there it was.
Lucas understood the whole of it at once. Of course she did.
Daria was no different from her sister. The same want lived in her too, the same pull toward what her parents did. She'd just held it in and watched it come true for someone else.
The hard part was that he couldn't do a thing about it yet. Daria's adoption still hadn't gone through. In the eyes of the law she wasn't his daughter, not while her case was still snarled up in everything Eckstein had dragged them through, and until that was settled he couldn't sign anything in her name or set up a role the way he had for Daciana.
Not because he didn't want to. Because the paperwork said he couldn't.
So he gave her the one thing he could.
He smoothed his hand over her hair. "Sweetheart, listen. Soon, okay? Soon you can be anything you want to be. Anything. You've got my word." His voice came down gentle. "But right now I just want you to be a kid. That part matters more than you'll know for a long time."
He meant it. This little girl had already been through more than any child should, every piece of it with Eckstein's name on it.
Roles could wait. Careers could wait. Before any of that, all he wanted was for her to get to be a child a while longer.
---
Time flew by, and the start of the F1 season crept closer. In what little time was left before it, Lucas and Jennifer worked with Daciana on her part, coaching her through Heidi line by line.
It didn't take long. Within a few days the girl was ready to audition for the role.
Because that was the catch. Neil had pulled strings to get her this far, but strings only opened the door.
They didn't walk you through it. Daciana still had to prove herself to the producers, and the producers weren't about to hand a lead to a child just because her father was Lucas Knight. Adopted daughter of the most famous man alive or not, she had to earn it the same as anyone. If she couldn't do the work, the name wouldn't save her.
The timing lined up. Neil was due to fly out to Bahrain with Lucas in a few days for the season, and he'd come by the house ahead of it. While he was there, he ended up sitting in on Daciana recording her audition tape, the girl set up in the home booth with the kind of professional gear most studios would envy.
He wasn't expecting much going in. She was a little kid doing her first read. He figured he'd smile, say something kind, and get on with his day.
Then she started, and he stopped figuring anything at all.
The girl wasn't just reading the lines. She was feeling them. Real emotion behind every word, her face and her hands moving along with it, as if there were a camera on her and she was acting straight into it.
Neil sat up in his chair.
"Hey. Hey." He twisted around toward Lucas, half out of his seat. "She's not bad. She's not bad at all, Lucas. What have you been feeding this kid?" His eyes went back to the glass. "How long's she been practicing for this?"
Nobody got a chance to answer before he was off again.
"There's nothing flat about how she's saying it. And she's got the whole body moving with it, the gestures, the works. That's high-level stuff. That's the kind of thing I only ever see out of people who've been doing this for years."
Lucas and Jennifer traded a look, both of them quietly flattered.
"That'd be me you want to thank," Jennifer said, lifting her chin a touch. "I'm the one who's been teaching her."
Neil chuckled. "Oh? Not Lucas?"
"When does he ever have the time?" She cut a look at her husband, all affection under the jab. "The man's married to his work. Total workaholic."
Lucas put his hands up, giving it away without a fight. "What can I say. She's serious about this, and she actually listens to Jennifer. More than she listens to me, clearly."
Neil laughed, then nodded back toward the booth, the read still rolling behind the glass. "Joke about it all you want. The kid's got it. Genuine talent." He tapped a knuckle on the desk. "And I've been in this business a long time. I'm telling you right now, this little girl is going to be a superstar. Same as the two of you."
Lucas and Jennifer looked over at him. They'd known him long enough to feel exactly where this was rolling.
Neil grinned, and there it was, the fangs out. "So. What would you say to me managing her?"
Lucas rolled his eyes. "Neil. We don't even know if she'll stick with this. She's a kid. A year from now she could decide she wants to be an astronaut."
"He's right," Jennifer said. "Whatever she decides on, it's her call. We're not pushing her into anything."
"Hoho." Neil raised both hands, unbothered. "I hear you, I do. But look at her. You can't fake that. Look how much she's putting into it, her very first character, and she's pouring her whole heart out onto the floor."
They turned back to the monitor. Inside the booth, Daciana was lit up, lost in it, having the time of her little life.
"And here's the thing." Neil leaned in, the timing too good for him to leave it alone. "There's an open audition running right now for a massive Disney project. Live-action. Lilo and Stitch." He spread his hands like he was laying out treasure on the table. "For the lead girl. Lucas, a shot like that for a kid her age is once in a lifetime. You don't get handed those twice."
Lucas and Jennifer exchanged a glance, a longer one this time.
"Let's see how she handles the voice work first," Lucas said.
Jennifer nodded along with him. "Yes. We don't want to throw her out in front of the whole world this early."
Neil could read it clear as day on both of them. The worry sat right there on their faces. They didn't want their daughter's childhood swallowed whole by fame, didn't want her life turned into something she couldn't live in peace the moment the cameras found her. It was a fair thing to be scared of. Any parent would be.
"Alright," Neil said, easy about it. "I understand."
And he did understand. He just didn't let it stop him.
The first quiet moment he got, he put the word out to his contacts at Disney anyway. Lucas Knight's daughter, Daciana, was available to read for the lead in their Lilo and Stitch. He didn't have to oversell it. A studio that wanted to stay on good terms with a man like Lucas would take a tip like that and run, and Neil knew it down to his bones.
He looked back through the glass at the girl, still going, still grinning between takes.
'I hope she lands the Disney one too. She'd kill it, no question about it.' The thought sat warm in him as he watched. 'Doesn't matter one bit that she isn't Lucas's blood, or Jennifer's. The passion's right there in front of me. That's the one thing nobody can teach.'
---
Before long, Lucas and Neil were on a plane to Bahrain.
What met them at the airport was the usual. A crowd, and a big one. It spilled out past the terminal and choked the roads around it until the traffic simply stopped moving, horns and all.
Word that Lucas Knight had landed ran through the place like a current, and the place lost its mind over it.
It got to the point where people wouldn't even stay in their cars.
Drivers caught in the jam threw their doors open and climbed out, phones already up, craning over the crush of bodies just to catch a glimpse of him. A few left their vehicles sitting right where they'd stopped.
The road turned into a parking lot, and nobody seemed to mind.
His security folded in around him and Neil and moved them through it, quick and practiced, and after a long stretch of waving and smiling and inching forward a foot at a time, they finally broke clear of the worst of it.
"Every single time," Neil muttered, tugging his jacket straight once they were out the other side. "I don't know why I still expect anything different."
Lucas just grinned at him and said nothing.
From there it was straight into the work, and Bahrain hadn't only turned out its fans for him. The people who ran the place had rolled out a welcome of their own.
They were received at the Bahrain International Circuit by Sheikh Salman bin Isa Al Khalifa, the man at the head of it, and he could not have been warmer about it. He took Lucas's hand in both of his, a wide smile already in place, plainly delighted to have him there.
"Mr. Knight. Welcome to Bahrain." His English came easy, his manner easier still. "We have been looking forward to this a great deal more than you know. The whole circuit has, believe me." He turned the same warmth on Neil without missing a beat. "And Mr. Lamb. A genuine pleasure. You are both very welcome here, truly."
"The pleasure's ours," Lucas said. "I've heard nothing but good things about this place. Looks like every one of them was true."
"Then we will simply have to make sure the rest of your stay matches it."
Stefano was there too, drifting into the group with the ease of a man on familiar ground, and between him and the Sheikh the whole reception never once felt like business.
The circuit's people, the dignitaries who'd come out to greet the sport's new ambassador, all of them treated Lucas and Neil less like visitors on a schedule and more like old friends who'd finally arrived. The race had always carried the weight of the country's royal patronage behind it, and that care showed in how they were received.
Even by the standard Lucas was long used to, it was a generous welcome. The season was nearly here, and Bahrain had clearly decided to make the most of having him in it.