Chapter 8: Sebast's flirts with a female journalist, and Alma overhears him agreeing to a dinner with her. Alma is heartbroken but keeps her emotions in check, maintaining her professional facade.
The office was a bastion of controlled chaos. Sebastian’s sanctum. Sunlight streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, glinting off the polished chrome of a scale-model car and illuminating the wall of trophies—a gleaming testament to cold ambition. The air hummed with the distant, insect-like whine of engines from the practice session below. Alma stood by his desk, tablet in hand, a statue of efficiency. The scent of his expensive shower gel, still on her own skin, felt like a taunt.
Sebastian was a vortex of energy, pacing behind the desk, phone clamped to his ear. “No, Markus, we run the soft compound again. I don’t care what the data suggests. I want to see the degradation myself.” He listened, his eyes narrowed at the track below. “Tell him it’s not a request.”
He hung up and didn’t look at her. “The revised Parker-Hicks contract. Now.”
She placed the document in front of him, her fingers steady. “Clause seven is highlighted. Their legal is pushing back on the non-compete duration.”
“They’ll swallow it,” he said, scrawling his signature with a violent slash. His demeanor was all sharp edges, a complete reversion to the man who commanded pit walls and boardrooms. The man who had washed her hair under a cascade of hot water just hours ago was gone, sealed away behind a wall of impatience. “Get Carvalho back on the line. His evasiveness is wasting my time.”
Alma moved to the intercom. “Lina, patch Mr. Carvalho through to Mr. Roth’s line, please.” Her voice was calm, neutral. Inside, a familiar, hollow ache was expanding. This was the script. She knew her lines. But the subtext today was a scream.
The door to the office swung open without a knock. A woman walked in, and the energy in the room shifted. Elara Vance. Journalism’s rising star, known for her incisive pieces and a magnetism that often blurred the lines between access and intimacy. She was all tailored blazer and confident smile, her gaze sweeping the room before landing on Sebastian.
“Sebastian. You’re a hard man to pin down,” she said, her voice smooth.
Sebastian’s posture changed infinitesimally. The tension in his shoulders softened; a calculated, charming smile touched his lips. It was a mask Alma knew well, one he used on sponsors and track officials. Seeing it deployed now felt like a physical blow.
“Elara. I always have time for the press,” he said, the irony in his voice a warm invitation. He gestured to a chair. “Alma, some coffee for our guest.”
It was a dismissal. A servant’s task. Alma felt the sting of it, sharp and precise. “Of course.” She turned, her heels silent on the plush carpet.
She didn’t leave immediately. She busied herself at the sideboard with the espresso machine, her back to them, a piece of the furniture. The rich grind of beans filled the brief silence.
“I enjoyed your piece on aerodynamic turbulence,” Sebastian was saying, his tone intimate, conversational. “You have a knack for simplifying the complex without dumbing it down.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Elara laughed. “But I’m actually here about the human element. The pressure in the paddock. How you keep a team of sixty-plus individuals from fracturing under the weight of expectation.”
“It’s about trust. And competence. Having the right people in the right places.” His voice dropped, became confiding. “You can’t strategize for every variable, but you can eliminate the weak links.”
Alma’s hand trembled slightly as she placed the cup on a saucer. The weak links. Is that what last night was? An elimination of tension? A variable managed?
She brought the coffee over, setting it before Elara without meeting either of their eyes. As she turned to leave, Sebastian spoke again, not to her, but his words hooked into her.
“Alma, reschedule my seven PM with Fujimoto. Move it to tomorrow.”
She paused. “Sir, the call with the Japanese shareholders is critical. You said—”
“Move it,” he cut across her, his voice losing its warm tenor, turning flinty. The contrast was brutal. To Elara, he was open, engaging. To her, he was an inconvenience to be dispatched. “And find the Geffen file. I need it in the next ten minutes.”
“Yes, Mr. Roth.”
She walked out, the door whispering shut behind her. She made it three steps into the outer office before she stopped, paralysed. The Geffen file was in her hand. She’d prepared it at 6 AM, while he slept. He knew that.
Lina, the receptionist, gave her a sympathetic glance. Alma ignored it, walking stiffly to her own, smaller desk. She sat, her spine rigid. The sounds from his office were muffled, but the low rumble of his laugh, a genuine one, slithered through the gap under the door.
She couldn’t breathe. The memory of the shower glass, cool against her cheek, fused with the image of his charming smile directed at a stranger. It stays here, he’d said. He wasn’t just hiding it. He was erasing it.
Five minutes later, her intercom buzzed. Lina’s voice was hesitant. “Alma, Mr. Roth asked me to pull up his personal calendar for the next two weeks.”
A cold dread settled in Alma’s stomach. “I can manage that, Lina.”
“He said… he told me to do it.”
Alma closed her eyes. This was a new line. He was cutting her out of a layer of his life, a layer that had been hers exclusively for six years. She heard the murmur from his office again, followed by another laugh from Elara.
The door opened. Elara emerged, a satisfied smile on her face. “Thanks, Lina!” she called, then her eyes found Alma. They were assessing, shrewd. “You must be the famous Alma. The glue that holds it all together. He’s lucky to have you.”
The condescension was velvet-coated. Alma felt raw, exposed. She nodded, a tight, professional jerk of her chin. “Safe travels, Ms. Vance.”
Sebastian appeared in his doorway, leaning against the frame. He looked relaxed, a state Alma rarely saw in the office. “Elara’s joining me for dinner next Thursday. After the Italian GP press junket. Alma, you’ll book something. Somewhere quiet. Discreet.”
The words hung in the air, each one a precise, surgical cut. Dinner. Quiet. Discreet. The same adjectives that should have described them, secreted away in his penthouse.
Alma looked directly at him. She let nothing show. No flicker of pain, no hardening of the eyes. She was marble. “Of course. Any cuisine preference?”
“You choose,” he said, his gaze chillingly impersonal. “You’re good at that.”
He disappeared back into his office, closing the door. The finality of the click was deafening.
Alma looked down at her hands. They were perfectly still. She opened the booking app on her computer, her vision blurring for a second before she blinked it clear. She selected a restaurant they used for high-stakes sponsor meetings—elegant, private, expensive. She made the reservation for two.
Her finger hovered over the screen. Then, with a tap as quiet as a heartbeat, she added a note to the reservation: Table in the back garden gazebo. Mr. Roth values privacy.
She sent the confirmation to his inbox and to Lina, for the calendar.
The rest of the afternoon was a masterclass in dissociation. She coordinated logistics, fielded calls, smoothed over tempers. Every interaction was flawless. When Sebastian barked an order, she responded instantly. When he criticized a report, she accepted the rebuke and noted the amendments. She was a perfect mirror, reflecting only professional utility.
At 6 PM, he left for a sponsor dinner without a word. The office emptied.
Alma sat in the gathering dusk, the track below now silent and dark. The only light came from the gleaming trophies and the glow of her screen. On the wall, the single worn photograph stood out: a younger her and a younger Sebastian, drenched in champagne, laughing after their first win together. His arm was around her shoulders, his head thrown back in pure, unguarded joy.
She stared at the image until the faces blurred. Then she stood, smoothed her skirt, and packed her bag with methodical precision. She didn’t look back as she turned off the lights. The echo of his laugh with Elara seemed to linger in the dark.
She walked out, her heels clicking a steady, indifferent rhythm on the polished concrete floor. The hollow ache inside had solidified into something else. Something cold, and sharp, and very, very quiet.
The silence in her apartment that night was a physical weight. She poured a glass of wine but didn’t drink it, just watched the liquid catch the city’s light. The memory of his hands washing her in the shower felt like a dream, a cruel, vivid fiction her mind had conjured. He had been tender. That was the poison in it. A quick, frantic fuck against the kitchen island she could have compartmentalized. But he had turned her face towards him afterwards. He had looked at her.
The next morning, the machinery of the race weekend swallowed everything. Sebastian was a general at war, and the paddock was his chaotic kingdom. Alma was his lieutenant, flawlessly executing orders. But the commands had a new, brittle edge.
“The weather data from last night is incomplete,” he snapped, throwing a tablet onto her desk during a chaotic pre-practice briefing. The device skidded, nearly hitting the floor. “I needed the full probabilistic models, not a summary. This is basic, Alma.”
She had requested the full dataset. The meteorology team had failed to deliver it. She took a measured breath. “I’ll get the raw files now. The delay was on their end.”
“I don’t care whose end it was,” he said, not looking up from his own screen. His voice was low, meant only for her, but it carried a sting. “It’s your job to make sure my end has what it needs. Fix it.”
He walked away towards the engineering huddle, leaving a vacuum of stunned silence among the nearby data analysts. Alma felt their sideways glances like pinpricks. She straightened her spine, tapped her earpiece, and connected to the weather office, her voice calm and absolute as she demanded the files.
Later, he rejected the lunch she’d arranged, a catered spread from the place he always preferred. “Too heavy. I can’t think with that in my gut. You should know that by now.” He ate a protein bar from a sponsor box instead, standing up, constantly in motion, while the untouched food was cleared away. The waste felt like a message.
Markus, the chief engineer, found her by the coffee machine after the second practice session. His kind, weathered face was etched with concern. “Everything alright, Alma? You and Seb seem… out of sync today.”
She handed him his coffee, black, two sugars, just as he liked it. Her smile was a practiced, placid thing. “It’s just the new aero package. The data isn’t correlating. You know how he gets when the numbers fight him.”
Markus accepted the cup, his eyes not leaving hers. He’d known them both for years. “He gets sharp. But he’s usually not sharp with you. That’s your barometer. If he’s snapping at you, the pressure’s in the red zone.” He took a sip. “You holding up?”
“I’m fine,” she said, the lie smooth and automatic. “It’s just stress. It’ll pass after quali.”
She walked away before he could probe further. The concern was almost worse than the criticism. It made the dysfunction visible, something for others to notice and dissect. She felt exposed.
Back at her temporary desk in the hospitality unit, her personal phone buzzed with a suppressed notification. An email. The sender was the managing director of Titan Racing, a midfield team with ambitious new backers. The subject line was simple: Opportunity.
Her thumb hovered over the screen. She got these every few months. The F1 paddock was a small world; her competence was a poorly kept secret. She always opened them, scanned the generous terms with a detached professional curiosity, and then deleted them. It was a ritual that reinforced her choice, her loyalty.
This time, she opened it. The numbers were even better than last season’s offer. The title would be “Director of Operations.” A real seat at the table, not just outside the door. She imagined walking into a new garage, a new office, where her worth wasn’t a fluctuating currency dependent on one man’s volatile whims.
Sebastian’s laugh boomed from across the suite. He was with the sponsors, clapping a man on the back, his charm dial turned to maximum. The sound was warm, inviting, a world away from the clipped venom directed at her. He’d held her face in the shower. He’d whispered “look at me” with a raw ache that had mirrored her own.
He’d made it mean something. That was the unforgivable part.
Her finger trembled, just slightly, above the screen. The delete button glowed. She exhaled, a slow, controlled release of the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. She pressed the power button instead, plunging the screen to black, the offer still trapped inside, unseen but present.
She didn’t delete it. She placed the phone face down on the desk, a silent, secret rebellion. For six years, her future had been a single, narrow, high-speed track with him. Now, for the first time, she saw a fork in the road, shrouded in mist but undeniably there. The thought didn’t bring peace. It was terrifying. But it was hers.
But it was hers. The thought, once admitted, hummed with a dangerous current. It made the suite feel both more claustrophobic and more expansive, as if the walls had subtly reconfigured themselves when she wasn’t looking. She pressed her cool palms against her cheeks, the ghost of his touch from the shower now just a maddening echo under her skin.
Qualifying was a disaster. Their lead driver, Leon, clipped a curb and shattered a suspension arm in Q2, condemning him to a fifteenth-place start. The debrief was a pressure cooker. Sebastian’s voice was a controlled, icy blade, dissecting every telemetry trace, every assumed risk. “Amateur hour,” he concluded, silencing the room. “We are not paying for amateur hour.”
He stalked out, the engineering team dispersing with slumped shoulders. Alma gathered the scattered biometric reports, her movements automatic. The team’s failure was her atmosphere, a fog she breathed daily, but today it felt heavier, particulate. She carried the files back to his office in the hospitality unit, the one with the view of the now-empty track.
He was already there, standing at the window, his back to her. The setting sun threw his silhouette into sharp relief. The silence was different from the morning’s busy tension. It was dense, volatile. A half-empty glass of amber scotch sat on the desk beside an open laptop, its screen showing a violently red spreadsheet.
“The Parker-Hicks deal,” he said, not turning. His voice was quiet, which was worse. “It’s dead. Their board just walked. Thirty million in sponsorship. Gone.”
Alma placed the files on the desk. She had warned him about their liquidity issues three weeks ago, had flagged the board’s reluctance. “I’m sorry. Their financials were always a house of cards.”
He whirled. The quiet was gone, incinerated. “Their financials were a problem to be solved! Not an obituary!” He slammed a hand on the desk, making the glass tremble. “Did you follow up with their CFO after the last call? Did you press him?”
“I relayed your revised terms. He said he’d take them to the board. I scheduled the follow-up for Monday, as you directed.” Her words were calm, facts in a storm.
“Monday? And you didn’t think to hound him yesterday? Today? While their board was convening?” He picked up the scotch glass, his knuckles white. This wasn’t about the deal. It was about the qualifying failure, the journalist, the entire universe refusing his will. She was just the only lightning rod present.
“It was your directive to wait,” she repeated, her own temper beginning a low, fraying burn. “To not appear desperate.”
“Do not quote my directives back to me like a fucking robot!” The words exploded from him. His face was a mask of frustrated rage, his eyes seeing the collapsed deal, the wrecked car, a world of incompetence. He gestured violently, the glass still in his hand. “You should have known! You should have anticipated this!”
He threw the glass. It wasn’t aimed at her. It was aimed at the wall of trophies, a primal release of fury. A roaring, wordless rejection of the day.
But she had moved. A single, instinctive step towards the door, to give the storm a wider berth.
The heavy crystal tumbler missed the trophies. It struck the wall a foot to her left and exploded.
The sound was catastrophic. A shotgun blast of shattering glass. A thousand lethal diamonds filled the air. She felt the impact of the spray against her temple, her cheek, the curve of her ear. A hot, sharp sting, then another, then a bloom of wet heat.
She stumbled back, her heel catching the edge of the rug. Her hand flew to her face. It came away streaked with shocking, vivid red.
The sudden silence was absolute. The raw fury on his face froze, then shattered into something else. He stared at the wall, at the dripping scotch and glittering shards. He looked at his empty hand. His gaze, bleary with rage, finally tracked to her.
He saw the blood.
It was a trickle from a cut above her eyebrow, finding the groove of her temple. A finer, beading line along her jaw where a sliver had caught her. A scarlet thread from her earlobe.
He inhaled, a ragged, torn sound. “Alma—”
She was staring at him. Not with anger, or tears, or accusation. Her eyes were wide, uncomprehending. She looked at him as if he were a stranger who had just stepped out of a dark alley, a sudden and inexplicable eruption of violence in a familiar space. There was no recognition in her gaze, only a blank, deep shock.
He took a step forward, his hand coming up, his face pale. “Christ, I didn’t—let me see—”
Her reaction was instantaneous. She flinched back, stumbling again, her shoes crunching on glass. The movement was pure, unthinking reflex. It wasn’t a calculated withdrawal. It was the visceral recoil of someone who sees a raised hand and expects another blow. The fear in that motion was more terrifying than the blood.
He stopped as if he’d hit a wall. His outstretched hand hung in the air between them. Apologies died in his throat, rendered meaningless by the bright, terrible evidence on her skin and the animal fright in her eyes. The man who had washed her hair, who had whispered praise into her ear, was nowhere in this room.
The only sound was the drip of scotch from the wall and the faint, settling tinkle of glass. The coppery scent of blood mixed with the sharp, peaty smell of the alcohol. Alma’s breath hitched, a tiny, wounded sound in the vast quiet.
He tried again to step forward but she shook her head and stumbled further back, her back hitting the door to his office. Her eyes never left his, wide with a terror that had no memory of the shower, or the kitchen, or six years of implicit trust. She blindly grabbed the doorknob, fumbling behind her, and stumbled out into the brightly lit hospitality suite, never turning her back on him, as if he might hurt her again.
He’s frozen.
The empty space where she’d stood seemed to vibrate. He stared at the smeared blood on his floor, a single red droplet already soaking into the pale cream carpet. His hand, the one that had thrown the glass, slowly curled into a fist. The rage was gone, siphoned away, leaving a cavernous hollow filled only with the echo of that shattering sound and the image of her flinch.
Out in the suite, the world had stopped. A junior engineer holding a packet of sensors stood statue-still. Lina, at her desk, had her hand clamped over her mouth. All eyes were on Alma, clutching the doorframe for balance, the cuts on her face glistening under the clinical lights.
“Alma—” Lina started, half-rising.
Alma didn’t seem to hear. She pushed off from the doorframe, walking with stiff, mechanical precision towards the exit that led to the paddock. Her posture was unnaturally straight, a marionette with its strings cut. She left a trail of silent shock in her wake.
Markus emerged from the engineering room, a datasheet in his hand. He took in the scene: the open office door, the frozen principal inside, the stunned staff, the bloody, retreating form of Alma. His weathered face hardened. He didn’t go to Sebastian. He turned and followed Alma.
The paddock night air was cool, a slap after the sterile, recycled atmosphere inside. It smelled of grease, high-octane fuel, and distant rain. Alma walked, directionless, past the gleaming haulers, her heels clicking a frantic, erratic rhythm on the tarmac. The blood tickled as it dripped down her jaw. She swiped at it with the back of her hand, smearing it.
“Alma. Stop.” Markus’s voice came from behind her, calm but firm. He caught up, falling into step beside her. He didn’t touch her. “Let me see.”
“I’m fine,” she said, the words automatic, hollow. She kept walking.
“You’re not fine. You’re bleeding on a two-thousand-pound blouse.” He steered her gently by the elbow towards the medical center, a small, nondescript trailer. “Come on. It’s quiet. Just get it cleaned up.”
She allowed herself to be led, the fight gone, replaced by a buzzing numbness. Inside, the fluorescent lights were brutal. The team medic, a pragmatic woman named Anya, didn’t ask questions. She sat Alma on a paper-covered bed and got to work with antiseptic wipes.
“Superficial,” Anya murmured, dabbing at Alma’s temple. “The one by your ear is the deepest. Might need a steri-strip. Hold still.”
The sting of the antiseptic was a clean, clarifying pain. Markus leaned against the counter, arms crossed, watching the door. “Do I want to know?” he asked, his voice low.
Alma closed her eyes. She saw the glass leaving his hand, a perfect, arcing betrayal. She heard her own gasp, felt the impossible sting. “The Parker-Hicks deal collapsed,” she said, her voice detached. “He threw a glass. It missed the wall.”
Markus let out a long, slow breath. “Jesus.” He was silent for a moment, absorbing the unthinkable. Sebastian was volatile, cruel with words, a pressurized system always near its limit. But this was a line, physical and real, that had never been crossed. “Did he—was he aiming at you?”
“I don’t know.” The truth of it was worse. It meant the line was so blurred, even he might not know where it was. The memory of the shower door, cool and solid against her palms, flashed behind her eyelids. A different kind of pressure.
Anya applied a small adhesive strip to her earlobe. “All done. No concussion, but you’re in shock. You should rest.”
“I can’t,” Alma said, standing. The world tilted slightly, then righted itself. The buzzing numbness was receding, replaced by a cold, crystalline clarity. She looked at her reflection in the metal cabinet door: a pale face, a neat white bandage above her brow, a smaller one on her jaw. A woman marked.
“Alma,” Markus said, stopping her as she moved for the door. “What are you going to do?”
She looked at him, really looked at him, and he saw the change. The quiet ambition, the secret yearning, it was no longer secret. It was etched in the set of her mouth, the new distance in her eyes. “My job,” she said. But the words meant something else now.
She walked back through the paddock, a path she’d walked a thousand times. The stares were different now. Whispers trailed her like smoke. She didn’t go to Sebastian’s office. She went to her own smaller one, next to his, and closed the door.
She sat. The chaos of the day was a dull roar outside.
A heavy knock landed on her door, making her jump. It wasn’t his rapid-fire tap. It was blunt, forceful.
“Alma.” His voice was there, on the other side of the wood. It was stripped raw, stripped of all its calculated charm and cutting authority. It just sounded hollow.
She stared at the grain of the door. She said nothing.
“Alma. Open the door. Please.” The ‘please’ was fractured, a word he almost never used.
She watched the handle. It didn’t turn. He could have entered. He owned the space. But he didn’t. He just stood there, a presence radiating desperation and shame through the reinforced polymer.
She waited. She let the silence stretch, let him feel the weight of the door between