CHAPTER 24

Damien's POV

I stepped in front of Sophia before Marcus finished his sentence.

"You're not getting anywhere near her," I said.

Marcus smiled. The smile he used to wear in boardrooms before he became a punchline. "Damien Black. Defending what's mine again."

"She was never yours," I said. "And tonight you're about to find out exactly how far away from yours she actually is."

Behind Marcus, six men were spreading out across the street with the controlled efficiency of people who did this professionally. Not security guards. The same kind of people Zane had warned us about weeks ago, when mercenaries had tried to grab Sophia from a spa.

Marcus had hired the real thing this time.

I felt Sophia's hand close around my arm.

"The laptop is inside," she said quietly. Just for me. "Mei is with it. I need to get back to her."

"You're not going back in there," I said.

"Damien—"

"Margaret Park has been selling information to every side of this for fifteen years," I said. "I don't know what room is safe right now. I need you behind me and I need a plan that isn't just you walking toward the most dangerous man on this street."

Marcus's voice carried across the distance between us.

"I'll make this simple," he said. "The laptop has evidence that implicates my mother. I want it destroyed. Sophia comes with me to ensure good faith. Nobody else needs to get hurt tonight."

"You drained her bank account and threw her out in the rain," I said. "You don't get to talk about good faith."

"This isn't about her," Marcus said. "It never was. It's about my mother facing a fraud and murder investigation that ends everything we've built." His composure cracked slightly. "I am not letting that happen because some dead woman's daughter found the wrong file."

Something in me went very still and very quiet.

"Say that again," I said.

Marcus blinked. He hadn't expected the shift in my voice.

"I said," he started.

"No," I said. "Say the part about her mother again. I want to remember exactly how you said it."

Marcus looked at his men. Looked at the house. Looked at the math of the situation, six armed professionals against one furious man standing in a doorway, and decided the math was still in his favor.

"Take the laptop," he said to his team. "And get the girl."

They moved.

I heard the door behind me open wider. Sophia's voice, low and urgent, talking to someone inside.

"Mei get down. Now."

I didn't have time to see what was happening behind me because the first man reached the porch steps and I put him through the railing before he registered I had moved.

Years of controlled fury, finally with somewhere useful to go.

The street exploded into motion.

Headlights from a second direction. Tires screeching. I recognised the sound of Zane's car before I saw it, sliding sideways into the street to block the second SUV, and Dominic was out of the passenger seat with a speed that told me my brother had been waiting his whole life for a reason to move like that.

"Get her inside," Dominic shouted at me.

I grabbed the man I had already put down by his collar and used him as leverage to put a second one into the porch railing before turning to find Sophia in the doorway, laptop pressed to her chest, Mei behind her with a fireplace poker held like she had used one before.

"Inside," I said.

We went inside.

The chaos in the street continued behind us, shouting, the specific sound of Zane doing something to a car engine that made it stop working permanently, Dominic's voice cutting through everything with the authority he had spent twenty years building.

Diana was standing in the middle of the living room, completely still, watching the street through the window with an expression I couldn't read.

Richard had moved to stand beside her.

Mrs. Park was gone.

"Where is she," I said.

"She left the moment the cars arrived," Diana said. Her voice was tight. "She'll be selling whatever she knows to whoever pays fastest within the hour."

"Including us," Sophia said.

"Including everyone," Diana said.

I looked at my mother.

Twenty one years of silence and now we were standing in the same room while gunfire might break out on the street outside and I had exactly enough time for one question.

"You said staying meant dying," I said. "For us. That's why you left."

Diana looked at me.

"Yes," she said.

"Was it true," I said. "Or was it a story you told yourself to make leaving easier."

Diana's face did something I had never seen it do.

It broke. Just slightly. Just enough.

"I have asked myself that question every single day for twenty one years," she said. "I still don't have an answer I can live with."

Outside, the sound of the street fighting shifted suddenly. Quieter. Then a single gunshot.

Sophia's hand found mine.

We both turned toward the door at the same moment, and I felt something cold settle into my chest because the silence that followed the shot was worse than the noise had been.

"Dominic," I said.

I was moving before I finished saying his name.

I hit the porch and the scene in front of me took a second to resolve. Three of Marcus's men down. Zane standing over one with his jaw set and blood on his knuckles that wasn't his. Remy's car had arrived at some point, doors open, Elijah crouched behind it.

And Dominic on the ground.

Not moving.

Marcus stood ten feet away with a gun in his hand and an expression on his face that had finally, completely, lost whatever composure he had been clinging to all night.

"I told you," he said, his voice shaking. "I told you to give me the laptop."

I looked at my brother on the ground.

I looked at the blood spreading slowly across the pavement beneath him.

And something in me that had been holding itself together through twenty one years of abandonment and four years of betrayal and ten days of falling in love finally let go completely.

I walked toward Marcus Vale with absolutely no plan beyond making sure he never raised that gun again.