Fire Beneath the Ice

POV Aitana

The silence inside the boardroom was deafening. Every gaze in the room, my uncle Magnus’s eyes burning with venom, the cold calculating stare of the lawyers, and Sebastian’s searing, overwhelming intensity, was fixed entirely upon me, waiting for me to break beneath the weight of their scrutiny.

I could hear my own pulse hammering loud in my ears. Working side by side with Sebastian Belmonte was the equivalent of walking barefoot across a minefield. Every single day spent near him exponentially raised the risk that he would discover Selene. Yet if I stepped back now and turned my back on the inheritance, I would be handing my daughter’s future over to the vultures who bore my own bloodline.

I curled my hands into tight fists beneath the table, my nails digging sharp half-moons into the soft flesh of my palms.

“I will sign the contract,” I said, holding Sebastian’s gaze with every scrap of strength I could summon. “But I demand clauses guaranteeing full operational independence. I will not take direct orders from the Belmonte side regarding the internal management of the Food Industry Group.”

A flicker of something barely visible sparked deep within Sebastian’s dark eyes. It was not mockery; it was the quiet acknowledgment of a prize that refused to surrender.

“Granted,” he answered without hesitation, making a sharp, brief signal to his counsel. “Draft the amendments immediately. Everyone else may leave. Miss Ferrer and I will discuss the executive transition details in private.”

My uncles stood up grumbling, casting me looks of barely contained fury before storming out. Attorney Morales gave my shoulder a supportive, reassuring squeeze before stepping out and pulling the heavy double doors shut behind him.

The sharp click of the lock echoed through the room like the fall of an axe. Suddenly, we were utterly alone.

It felt as though the very air had been sucked from the space. I remained standing beside my chair, holding myself rigid, while Sebastian circled the glass table with slow, predatory strides. He shrugged off his suit jacket and draped it over a chair back, then deliberately loosened his tie with a slowness that set every nerve in my body on edge. His scent washed over me, that intoxicating, familiar blend of cedarwood, leather, and warm spice, unchanged after six long years, flooding my senses and dragging back the ghost of that passionate night we had shared in the hotel suite.

“Six years, Aitana,” he spoke, his voice low and deep, sending a violent shiver tearing straight down to the base of my spine. “Six years spent wondering if you were alive, if you had simply returned to your family, or if everything we shared had been nothing more than a phantom in my bed.”

“There is nothing to discuss regarding the past, Mr. Belmonte,” I replied, keeping my voice as steady as I could force it to be, retreating one step for every step he advanced toward me. “From this moment onward, our relationship is strictly professional.”

“Mr. Belmonte?” he repeated, a bitter, knowing smile touching his lips as he closed the distance between us in two swift strides.

Before I could so much as breathe, he caught my wrist in a grip firm as steel, and guided me gently yet with undeniable force until my back pressed against the floor-to-ceiling glass window. The chill of the pane seeped through my suit, yet the heat radiating from Sebastian’s body, standing mere inches from mine, threatened to consume me entirely.

“Do not call me that when you know exactly how my skin feels against yours,” he whispered, leaning in until his breath brushed the line of my jaw, setting every inch of my skin alight. “Why did you run, Aitana? Why did you flee that morning as though you had committed an unforgivable sin?”

“Let me go!” I cried, twisting in an effort to break free, yet his body pressed close against mine left me nowhere to pull away. That chemistry between us remained as fierce and undeniable as ever, as dangerous and searing as it had been from the very first moment. “You know exactly why I left. I found your card. I learned exactly who you were.”

“And what in heaven’s name did it matter who I was?!” he burst out, and for the first time that polished, ice-cold corporate mask shattered completely, revealing raw fury and such bitter, aching pain that it stole the breath straight from my chest. “That night there were no Belmontes and no Ferrers! There was only you and me! I searched for weeks! I sent my people tracing every hotel, every airport, every road, and you vanished as though the earth had swallowed you whole!”

My heart gave a painful, stuttering lurch. He had searched for me?

“Our families have hated one another for generations, Sebastian,” I managed, my voice reduced to a fragile thread, feeling my strength slipping away even as his gaze dropped to my lips and lingered there, hungry. “Your grandfather and mine would have destroyed anyone foolish enough to stand in the way of their war. There was never any future for us. There could never have been.”

“You decided that entirely on your own,” he stated, his voice steady and absolute as he crowded me in, leaving nowhere to retreat. His free hand rose to cup my cheek, his long fingers brushing my skin with a restrained, aching tenderness and possession that made me instinctively close my eyes. “I told myself with time, this obsession would fade. But now you are here, standing right before me and I realize I have not gone a single day in all these years without wanting you.”

In that breathless, suspended moment, Sebastian’s mobile phone, resting upon the boardroom table, began ringing insistently, shattering the spell. The name “Adela Serrano” glowed bright upon the screen.

I seized the distraction to pull free of his hold and step quickly back, straightening my jacket with trembling hands.

“Your fiancée is looking for you,” I said, the words tasting sharp and bitter, doing my utmost to keep my tone even and unaffected. “You should not keep her waiting.”

Sebastian did not even glance at the phone. He turned, picked it up, pressed the power button without the faintest flicker of hesitation, and set it face down upon the table with utter indifference.

“Adela is not my fiancée,” he declared, his tone turning glacial and final. “That marriage is a business arrangement my family has pushed forward, one which I have no intention of signing. She means absolutely nothing to me, Aitana. And I would ask you not to use her name as a convenient excuse to put distance between us.”

I swallowed hard. There was no room for doubt in his voice. Sebastian felt nothing at all for Adela Serrano — and that truth only made my situation far more dangerous. A man willing to cast aside an alliance forced upon him by his own family, simply to keep control of his own life, was a man capable of absolutely anything.

“My private life is none of your concern, Sebastian,” I replied, stepping toward the door to reclaim some measure of control. “I will return and sign the transition documents tomorrow morning. Let us keep this strictly a business arrangement. For the sake of the company.”

My hand had barely closed around the door handle when his voice stopped me cold before I could turn it.

“You may try hiding behind business formalities for as long as you like, Aitana,” he said from the center of the room, his deep voice carrying a quiet, unsettling promise. “But you will be working in this building, under my roof, every single day. And this time, I am not going to let you run away.”

I walked out of the boardroom with my legs barely able to hold me, my heart hammering wildly against my ribs as though trying to break free. The air in the hallway felt bitterly cold compared to the fire that had burned so bright inside that room.

I rode the elevator down to the main lobby, desperate to step outside into the open air and breathe freely once more. Sebastian had not changed; his command, his will, and his obsession were more overwhelming now than they had ever been. And the way he looked at me told me with terrifying clarity, Selene’s secret now hung by a thread so thin it might snap at any moment.

I pulled out my phone and dialed the number of Selene’s caregiver.

“Hello? Marta, is everything quite all right?” I asked, my voice still unsteady.

“Everything is perfectly fine, Miss Aitana,” the woman replied warmly. “Selene has finished her lunch and is playing happily with her toys. She has been asking about you constantly, though. Wants to know when the two of you will go out for a walk together.”

I drew a long, steadying breath, the overwhelming love I held for my daughter anchoring me back to reality.

“I will be there in twenty minutes, Marta. Please have her ready. Tomorrow I must attend to several legal formalities, but I will not leave her alone.”

I ended the call and stepped out through the glass entrance doors of the skyscraper. Glancing upward, toward the dark windows of that top-floor office where Sebastian had cornered me only minutes before, I understood with absolute certainty: the battle had only just begun. To stand firm against him day after day, all while guarding the secret of my daughter, would prove to be the hardest thing I had ever been forced to endure.