Chapter Three: A Stranger with Ashes on His Hands

ELARA

Days didn’t pass. They bled.

Sleep wasn’t sleep. Not really. It was darkness soaked in static, smeared with foggy flashes of memory and pain. My body never found rest. My mind never truly woke. I drifted between numbness and nightmares, lost in a loop of silent torment.

Nurses came and went. They whispered in gentle tones, as though afraid I’d shatter from the sound. They adjusted wires and drips, fluffed pillows, checked vitals. Their kindness was clinical. Routine. A part of the job.

And Damien Rhys?

He stayed.

Not like a savior. Not like a friend. He didn’t offer flowers or empty promises. He didn’t talk just to fill the silence. He simply sat. By the window. In the chair beside me. Watching. Waiting. Always there, as though he was guarding something sacred.

He didn’t treat me like I was fragile.

He treated me like I was unfinished.

My vocal cords were still healing or that’s what they told me. But the silence wasn’t only physical. It felt deeper, older. Like grief had clawed its way down my throat and built a nest. I hadn’t spoken since I woke up. Maybe I couldn’t. Maybe I didn’t want to.

Because what words could survive what I’d been through?

Milo.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him.

His curls bouncing in the wind. His tiny feet slapping against cold marble. His laughter echoing across the terrace. The scream. Sharp. Pure. Then the silence after.

The sea was cruel. It had taken everything.

I woke every time in a tangle of sweat and wires, my chest heaving from a scream that never left my throat. My hands trembled constantly now. My body ached in places I hadn’t known could hurt. The bruises were fading, but the pain wasn’t.

---

I was allowed to sit up now.

The nurses called it progress.

The bandages around my arms and chest had been changed. The tight wrappings on my face loosened slightly. Still, no one spoke of the mirror in the corner of the room turned to face the wall like a sin too ugly to acknowledge.

No one needed to.

The scars on my arms were enough to tell me the rest.

I didn't need a mirror to know that I had changed.

---

“Your strength is terrifying.”

His voice broke the silence one afternoon.

Damien sat near the window, his back straight, fingers tapping quickly against a sleek black tablet. He didn’t look at me as he spoke, and yet every word felt like it had been carved for me.

I tilted my head toward him slowly. A question. A challenge. Not that he could see it through the bandages, but I wanted him to feel it.

“You survived the sea,” he said. “The fall. The betrayal. The kind of pain that breaks people long before it kills them.”

He finally looked at me.

“But you’re still here. That matters.”

I didn’t nod. I didn’t flinch. But something in me stirred.

He stood and placed the tablet next to my untouched tray of food. Not pushing it toward me. Not explaining. Just placing it there, quiet and purposeful.

And then he left.

The door clicked shut behind him.

I stared at the screen.

For a while, I didn’t move.

Then slowly, with fingers that trembled and a heart that pounded, I reached for it.

The tablet came alive beneath my touch.

Images. Files. Documents.

The villa. The cliffs. News reports. Legal papers. Financial statements. Photos of Ethan Cade my husband. Sienna Blake.

Airline tickets. Security footage. A forged signature on a document transferring millions from a trust account—my trust. The one I hadn’t even known existed.

My name was on everything.

The betrayal had started long before the push. Long before the wine. Long before Amalfi.

Damien Rhys knew everything.

Why?

Why would a stranger not only save my life, but investigate the ones who tried to end it? Why dig up a past that wasn’t his to carry?

Unless… he wasn’t just some stranger.

---

That night, I dreamed of fire.

It wasn’t frightening. It was cleansing.

Flames devoured the villa. Ethan’s screams echoed through the halls. Sienna ran, but the fire chased her like justice on wings.

And I stood in the center of the inferno, untouched. Silent. Whole.

---

When I woke, Damien was there again.

Not in the chair. Not by the window. Standing. Waiting.

I reached for the notebook the nurses had given me. I flipped to a blank page and wrote in slow, shaky letters:

Why?

He read it. His expression didn’t change.

Then he pulled a chair to my bedside and sat down.

“I saw him push you,” he said, voice low. “I was hiking along the ridge. I saw you. I saw him. I saw her. I saw the boy.”

At the mention of Milo, I flinched. My fingers tightened around the pen.

“I’m sorry,” he added, more gently now. “I... I tried to get down the cliff as fast as I could. I called emergency services. But by the time I reached the shore, there was only you.”

The words cracked something open inside me.

He continued. “I know what it feels like to be treated badly by the ones you love. Far too well.” His smile was bitter, humorless. “They thought they buried you. But I make it my business to dig up what others try to hide.”

He paused.

“You could say it’s my way of healing.”

I studied him. Really studied him.

There were no lies in his voice. No theatrics in his posture. Just something raw. Lived-in. Haunted.

He had his own ghosts.

“They stole something from you,” he went on. “But they also made a mistake.”

I arched a brow slowly.

Not that he could see it.

He leaned closer, eyes gleaming.

“They let you live.”