Chapter 9: Bleeding and pleading
The first tear was a surprise. A hot, singular breach that traced the line of her cheekbone and fell, splashing silently onto the back of her clenched hand. Then another. They weren’t sobs. They were a silent, relentless leak, a pressure valve failing deep within the machinery of her composure. She cried for the shattered glass, for the sting on her skin. She cried for the email, for the terrifying freedom of it. But mostly, she cried for the man in the shower, the one who had looked at her like she was a revelation, and who had now become the man on the other side of the door, capable of such blind, terrifying violence. The two images wouldn’t reconcile. They cracked her open.
A heavy knock landed on her door, solid and jarring.
“Alma.”
His voice was there, stripped of all its layers. It was just his voice, raw and bare.
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. A strangled hiccup of air caught in her throat, and she pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, as if to physically shove the tears back in. The photograph on her desk—the two of them, champagne-drenched and laughing—was a blurred rectangle of lies.
“Alma. Open the door. Please.”
The ‘please’ was a wrecked thing. It undid something in the silence. She heard the faint rustle of his suit jacket against the doorframe, the unsteady shift of his weight. He was leaning against it.
“I’m sorry.” The words were muffled by the wood. “God, Alma, I’m so sorry. I didn’t… I never meant to hurt you. You have to believe that. It was the wall. I was aiming for the goddamn wall.”
She cried harder, silently, her shoulders shaking. The salt stung the cut near her eye.
“It was the deal, and the car, and this whole fucking day…” His voice cracked. He was explaining, justifying, and hearing how hollow it sounded even as he said it. “I lost my temper. I’ve never… I would never aim at you. You know that. Don’t you know that?”
She didn’t know anything anymore. The memory of her own flinch, the pure animal recoil, played on a loop. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to hold the pieces together.
“Talk to me. Please. Just say something. Yell at me. Scream. Anything.” His palm slapped against the door, not in anger, but in frustration. A dull, flat thud. “Tell me you’re okay. Let me see that you’re okay.”
She heard the desperate need in his voice, the same need that had driven him to seek solace in her the night before. It was a bottomless pit, and she was falling into it. She swallowed back another wave of tears, choking on them.
The silence stretched, thin and lethal. He was listening. She could feel him listening with his whole being, trying to parse the quiet from her side.
And then he heard it.
It was the smallest of sounds. A hitched, wet intake of breath she couldn’t suppress. A tiny, broken exhalation.
He went perfectly still on the other side of the door.
All the frantic energy, the explanations, the begging, drained away. The realization was a physical blow, a sucker punch that stole the air from his lungs.
She was crying.
Alma Rossi, who had faced down furious engineers and crying sponsors and his own blackest moods without a flicker, was in there, crying. Quietly, desperately, alone. Because of him.
The sound of it—not the violence of sobs, but the awful, contained silence of it—gutted him. It was worse than the blood. The blood was an accident, a horrific mistake. These tears were a consequence. They were the map of the damage he’d done, and it was a territory vaster and more desolate than he could bear.
His forehead thumped gently against the door. All the words left him. "I'm sorry" was now an insult, a pathetic currency that couldn't purchase a single second of her undone pain. He just stood there, his eyes closed, sentenced to the sound of her quiet, shattered weeping, unable to reach her, powerless to take any of it back.
The silence between them was no longer empty; it was thick with the raw, audible evidence of her pain. He couldn't stand it. The sound of her trying to stifle her own tears was worse than any scream. His hand found the doorknob. He turned it.
The door opened on a scene that stopped his heart. She was curled in her desk chair, turned away from the windows and the distracting glow of the paddock. Her shoulders were hunched, one hand pressed over her mouth, the other wrapped tight around her stomach. Every few seconds a violent, silent shudder would wrack her frame, followed by that terrible, hitching gasp she couldn’t fully contain.
He broke.
All the air left his lungs. The strategic mind that commanded a hundred people was blank white noise. He took two steps into the room and the door swung shut behind him with a soft click. He crossed the space, his expensive shoes silent on the carpet, and then he was simply there, sinking to his knees before her chair. He didn't ask. He just reached for her, his hands sliding around her back, gathering her into his arms as he pulled her gently from the chair and against his chest.
"My brave, beautiful girl," he whispered into her hair, his voice shredded. "What have I done?"
For a second, she was rigid in his arms, all tense muscle and held breath. Then her hands came up, flat against his chest, and she shoved. It was a weak, uncoordinated push, all the force sapped by grief. He released her instantly, his arms falling away, giving her the space she demanded.
She didn't retreat. She stared at him, her eyes swimming, her face a mess of tears and streaked makeup and that stark white bandage. A raw, broken sound escaped her. Then she crumpled forward, her forehead hitting his shoulder, and the dam burst. Great, heaving sobs shook her, hot tears soaking into his shirt collar.
"Alma, God, I'm sorry," he murmured, his own eyes burning. He wrapped his arms around her again, holding her tight as she cried, one hand cradling the back of her head. He could feel the delicate structure of her skull under his palm. "I'm so sorry. I didn't see you. I would never... I swear to you, I would never."
He kept talking, low and desperate, apologies and endearments tumbling out in a rough stream. He kissed her hair, the crown of her head, the bandage on her temple, as if he could kiss the hurt away. His other hand rubbed slow circles on her back, trying to soothe the tremors that ran through her. "Shhh, it's alright. I've got you. I'm here." The words felt inadequate, but they were all he had.
The words felt inadequate, but they were all he had. He held her, letting the storm of her tears rage against him. His own breathing grew ragged in time with her sobs, a shared rhythm of devastation. The sterile office air held the scent of her perfume, of his cologne, and now, the sharp, clean smell of antiseptic from her wounds.
His apologies died in his throat. They were useless coins. He felt her tears soak through his shirt, a hot brand against his skin. He tightened his embrace, one hand still curled around the back of her head, his fingers tangling in the dark silk of her hair. He pulled back just enough to see her face.
Her eyes were closed, lashes spiked and wet. Tears tracked gleaming paths through the pale dusting of freckles across her cheeks, catching the light from the paddock outside. They dripped from her jaw, from the delicate line of her chin. He watched one tear trace the curve of her cheekbone, following a path towards the corner of her mouth.
He bent his head. He kissed it away. His lips touched the wet, salt-bitter skin, capturing the tear. He felt her flinch, a tiny tremor. He didn’t stop. He kissed the next tear, where it gathered at the outer edge of her eye. His mouth was soft, reverent, a mute apology pressed into her skin. He kissed the damp trail leading to her temple, avoiding the white bandage, his lips brushing the pulse point there.
It was a silent, desperate liturgy. Each kiss was a plea for absolution he knew he didn’t deserve. He tasted salt and the faint, floral hint of her moisturizer. He kissed the hollow beneath her eye, then the high arch of her cheek. His movements were slow, deliberate, achingly tender. A direct, physical contradiction to the violent arc of the glass.
Alma went still. The sobs subsided into shaky breaths. She didn’t open her eyes. She seemed to be holding herself in a state of suspension, unsure whether this was another form of shattering. His thumb brushed away a fresh tear before it could fall, and he kissed the place it had been.
"Sebastian," she whispered, his name a fractured thing.
He pulled back just enough to look at her. His own vision was blurred. Her face was inches from his, ravaged and beautiful. He cupped her jaw, his thumb stroking her undamaged cheek. "I'm here," he said, his voice rough. "I'm not going anywhere."
He kissed her again, not on the mouth, but on the closed lid of each eye. A blessing. A sealing. A promise he had no right to make. He rested his forehead against hers, their breath mingling. The world outside—the paddock, the race, the thirty million dollars—ceased to exist. There was only this small, ruined space, the warmth of her skin under his lips, and the devastating silence after the storm.
Her hands, which had been limp at her sides, came up. They didn’t push him away. They didn’t pull him closer. They simply settled on his chest, fingers curling slightly into the wrinkled fabric of his shirt. A neutral territory. An acceptance of the comfort, if not the man offering it.
He stayed there, kneeling, forehead to forehead, for a long time. Until her breathing evened out. Until the tension in her shoulders began, incrementally, to melt. He didn’t speak. The memory of the shower—her back against the tiles, his hands in her hair—flooded him with a shame so profound it felt like drowning. He had been given a fragile, secret thing, and he had treated its container with careless brutality.
Finally, she opened her eyes. They were red-rimmed, exhausted, but clear. She looked at him, and the naked anguish in her gaze was a mirror to his own.
She looked at him, and the naked anguish in her gaze was a mirror to his own. The silence stretched, taut and humming, filled only with the distant generator-thrum of the paddock. His thumbs still traced her cheekbones, a fragile connection.
She pulled her head back, breaking the contact. Her hands slid from his chest.
“Why?” The word scraped out of her, quiet and terrible.
He blinked, his brow furrowing. “The glass, I told you, I just—”
“Not the glass.” She shook her head, a sharp, minuscule movement. The tears were done. Something harder had taken their place. “This past week. Why did you treat me like shit?”
He went very still on his knees. His hands fell to his sides.
“You were cruel,” she continued, her voice gaining a thin, sharp edge. “You were dismissive. You had me book a dinner for you and that journalist.” She said the word ‘journalist’ like it was a clinical term for something venomous. “You snapped at me over coffee, over lunch, over data you knew I’d already sourced.”
He opened his mouth, but no sound came. His eyes darted, searching for a script, a strategy. There wasn’t one.
“I could have handled it if it was just sex,” she said, and the raw frankness of it landed like a slap. “That would have been a transaction. A messy one, but clean in its way. I’ve calibrated for messy.” She took a shuddering breath, her composure a cracked facade. “But you said it was more. You looked at me in that shower and you made it mean something. And then on Monday, I was an inconvenience. By Thursday, I was booking your date.”
He stared at her, kneeling on the office carpet like a supplicant. The truth, jagged and ugly, climbed up his throat. He didn’t try to sweeten it.
“I was a bastard,” he said, the words sandpaper-rough. “A complete and utter bastard.”
He looked down at his hands, the hands that had touched her with tenderness and had then thrown the glass. He turned them over as if seeing them for the first time.
“I was terrified.”
The admission hung in the air, stark and simple. Alma’s eyes narrowed slightly, but she didn’t speak. She was waiting, her posture still braced for another deflection.
“That night… it wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t just a fuck.” He ran a hand through his hair, pulling at it. “It meant something. It meant everything. And when I woke up, I looked at you and I felt… cornered. By my own fucking self.”
He finally looked back at her, his blue eyes stripped of all guile, showing only a stark, panicked honesty. “I rely on you for everything. My whole world runs because you’re there. And then I… I wanted you. Not just your competence. You. It was too much. The one thing I can’t control, the one thing that could actually bring it all down, is you walking away. So I tried to make you. I tried to push you so far that you’d leave first. Make it easier. Make it my choice.”
He let out a shattered laugh. “The dinner with Elara? A test. A fucking cruel, stupid test. I wanted to see if you’d flinch. I wanted to prove to myself that you were just an employee after all. That I hadn’t really given you the power to ruin me.”
Alma’s face was impassive, but a muscle feathered in her jaw. She absorbed each word, each confession, like a bullet.
“I regret it,” he whispered, the force gone from his voice. “I regret all of it. The way I spoke to you. The dismissal. Using someone else to hurt you. And today… God, today.” His gaze flicked to the bandage on her temple and he physically winced. “There is no excuse. None. But that’s the truth. I was terrified of how much you mean to me, so I tried to destroy it before it could destroy me.”
He was empty. The confession had scooped him out. He had nothing left to offer but his bare, ruined self, kneeling on the floor of her office.
Alma watched him for a long moment. The anger, the hurt, the betrayal—they were all still there, a churning storm behind her eyes. But a new understanding settled over them, a cold, clear clarity.
Slowly, she shifted. She didn’t get up. Instead, she slid from the chair to join him on the carpet, her legs folding beneath her. The barrier of the furniture was gone. They were eye to eye, level on the floor.
She reached out. Her fingers, cool and delicate, touched his cheek. It wasn’t a caress. It was an assessment, a verification of his reality. He leaned into the touch, his eyes closing, a tremor running through him.
“Okay,” she said, her voice quiet but firm.
His eyes flew open.
“Okay, you were terrified. Okay, you were a bastard.” She let her hand drop. “That’s the truth. Now what?”
He shook his head, lost. “I don’t know. Tell me what to do. I’ll do anything.”
“I’m willing to forgive you,” she said, and the words were a concession, not a gift. “But not today. And not just because you’re sorry on the floor. You don’t get to confess and be absolved. That’s too easy.”
She took a deep breath, steeling herself. “You need to prove you want to make real changes. In how you handle pressure. In how you talk to me. In how you see me. Not just when you’re scared, or after you’ve broken something. All the time.”
“How?” The word was a plea.
“You start by cancelling the dinner with Elara Vance. Yourself. You tell her you were using her to provoke your assistant, and that you’re a shit. And you handle the fallout.” Alma’s tone was clinical. “You get a therapist. Not a ‘sports psychologist’ to optimize performance. Someone to talk to about why your only response to feeling something is to break it.”
He blinked, stunned by the specificity, by the sheer magnitude of the demand. It meant vulnerability. It meant exposing flaws to the outside world. It was everything he’d spent a career avoiding.
“And us?” he asked, his voice barely audible.
“There is no ‘us’ right now,” she said, and the finality in it hurt more than the flying glass. “There’s you, and there’s me, and there’s my job. You are my principal. I am your assistant. Those lines are drawn in steel until you can demonstrate, consistently, that you know where they are. What happened in the penthouse… that’s gone. It stays in the past.”
He felt the loss like a amputation. He nodded, a jerky, accepting motion. The price was astronomical. It was everything he had.
“Do you understand?” she pressed.
“Yes.”
“Do you agree?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
She studied him, looking for the lie, the strategic calculus. She saw only a deep, weary desperation. Her own resolve softened, just a fraction. The fight left her shoulders.
She leaned forward, closing the small distance between them on the carpet. She didn’t kiss him. She simply rested her forehead against his collarbone, her body swaying slightly with exhaustion. It was a white flag. A temporary surrender to the sheer fatigue of the war.
He froze for a second, then his arms came up around her. Gently, so gently, he cradled her against him. He shifted, settling back against the side of her desk, pulling her fully into his lap. She didn’t resist. She let him arrange her, her head finding the hollow of his shoulder, her legs curling beside him.
He held her. He just held her. One hand stroked her hair, careful of the bandage. The other was a solid anchor across her back. They sat that way on the floor, two broken pieces in the dim office light, the silent trophies their only witnesses.
Her breath softened against his neck. The tension slowly bled from her limbs, leaving her heavy against him. He pressed his lips to her hair, a silent oath.
“I’ll prove it,” he whispered into the quiet dark. “However long it takes.”
Alma didn’t answer. She just shifted her hand, her fingers slowly curling into the fabric of his shirt, holding on.
For now, it was enough.
For now, it was enough.
He held her until the sky outside the floor-to-ceiling windows bled from deep dusk into an electric paddock-night, the world reduced to the steady rhythm of her breath and the dull ache in his knees from the hard floor. The first movement was hers. A slight stiffening in her shoulders, the subtle reintegration of her professional armor. She disentangled herself from his lap, the cool office air rushing in to replace the warmth of his body. She didn’t look at him as she rose, her movements deliberate, brushing invisible creases from her skirt.
“You should go,” she said, her voice hoarse but steady. She walked to her desk, placing her palms flat on the cool glass surface, her back to him. A silhouette against the glittering paddock. “Tomorrow starts early. There’s still a race to salvage.”
He pushed himself up, his joints protesting. He felt emptied, scraped clean. He wanted to touch her again, to seal the fragile truce with something physical. He didn’t. He shoved his hands into his trouser pockets, the gesture awkward, boyish.
“Alma,” he started.
“Don’t.” She cut him off, still facing away. “Just do the things you said you would do. That’s all I want to hear from you for a while.”
He nodded, though she couldn’t see it. He left, pulling the door shut behind him with a soft, definitive click. The sound echoed in the quiet corridor.
The hospitality suite was empty, cleaned, and locked down for the night. His own office waited, the dark shape of the shattered glass patch on the wall just visible in the ambient glow from the track. He didn’t go in. He stood in the silent darkness, his phone a cold, heavy rectangle in his hand. He leaned against the cool wall, head back, and dialed.
It rang four times before she picked up.
“Sebastian! This is a surprise. Finalizing Thursday?” Elara Vance’s voice was smooth, curious, tinged with a familiar professional flirtation.
He closed his eyes. “Elara. About Thursday.”
“Yes?” Her tone sharpened, sensing a shift.
“It’s cancelled.” He forced the words out, blunt and unadorned.
A beat of silence. “Cancelled.I see. Sponsor conflict? Something more pressing?”
He could lie. He was excellent at lying. He could invent a crisis, a shareholder emergency, something that would preserve her ego and his own reputation. The old script was right there.
“No,” he said, his voice flat. “There’s no conflict. I used the idea of that dinner to hurt someone who is important to me. It was a shitty, manipulative thing to do. You were a prop. I’m sorry for that.”
The silence on the other end was profound. He could almost hear her recalibrating, the journalist reassessing the man. “I… wasn’t expecting that level of honesty.”
“I’m not asking for your understanding,” he said, pushing off the wall. He started walking, the empty suite feeling cavernous. “Just wanted you to hear it from me. The dinner is off, and the reason is that I behaved badly. That’s it.”
She let out a short, humorless laugh. “Well. Consider me an unwilling participant in your personal drama. I’ll make a note for my profile. ‘Sebastian Roth: ruthless on track, emotionally chaotic off it.’”
“That’s fair,” he said, and meant it. He ended the call.
The hollow feeling remained. Cancelling a date was nothing. A transaction reversed. It didn’t touch the real work, the rot inside him he’d confessed to on Alma’s floor. He scrolled through his contacts, his thumb hovering. He bypassed the number for the sports psychologist the team kept on retainer. He found another, buried and unused, for a discreet clinic in Zurich recommended years ago by a retired driver who’d cracked under less.He tapped it.
A professional, detached voice answered. He stated his name, his needs. He used phrases like “emotional regulation” and “stress response,” his voice clinical. He booked an initial consultation for the Tuesday after the race, a two-hour block. He gave his personal credit card details, not the team’s. When he hung up, a cold sweat had broken out on the back of his neck. It felt like admitting a terminal weakness.
He texted the confirmation details to Alma. No message, just the automated calendar entry forwarded: Dr. K. Vogel. Tues 14:00. Zürich. CONFIRMED.
He stared at his sent message for a full minute. Then he turned and finally entered his office. He flicked on the lights. The shattered patch on the wall gleamed, a spiderweb of impact with a dark, sticky centre where the scotch had dried. A single, tiny crystal shard winked from the carpet near Alma’s usual spot. He knelt and picked it up. It was sharp, perfectly shaped, could have cut her throat.
He closed his fist around it, feeling the bite in his palm. He didn’t open his hand.