Gone Beyond Her Reach

Thunder cracked across the night, and Damon Westbrook's world blew apart.

He stood frozen behind the half-open balcony door. His hands and feet had gone ice-cold, and his ears rang.

She planned it herself?

The nightmare that had destroyed his life wasn't an accident?

Eleanor Carrington had arranged the whole thing herself, just to help Marcus Keane finish his research?

Marcus's voice drifted in through the glass, light and careless.

"The next phase of treatment is going to be hard. It's the core of the entire study. Will Damon cooperate?"

Eleanor answered evenly, "Don't worry. He does whatever I tell him now."

"And if he ever finds out it was you..."

Eleanor took the cigarette from his fingers and drew on it deeply.

"By then, all anyone will see is how you cured a man with severe PTSD. No one's going to dig into what happened to him. It'll be over for good."

Ha.

A laugh escaped Damon before he could stop it.

Three full months of endless hard labor, beatings, and confinement. Every escape attempt had bought him crueler punishment.

The wounds on his body could heal. The humiliation seared into him never would.

And the person he trusted most—the woman who had sworn she would never marry anyone but him—had traded the trauma he would carry for the rest of his life for Marcus's bright future.

The night wind outside was bitter, but he no longer felt the cold.

More than half a year of trust and dependence had turned into a grotesque joke.

Every day he had clawed his way through, desperate to stay alive, had been nothing more than data for Marcus to observe.

Damon closed his eyes. A single tear slid from the corner of his eye.

If he hadn't heard it with his own ears, he never would have believed Eleanor could lie to him like this.

Seven years ago, the Westbrook family went bankrupt.

Overnight, Damon went from a rich man's son to a broke student working his way through college just to finish his degree.

The Carringtons kicked him while he was down and seized the chance to call off the engagement.

It was Eleanor who knelt before her father and threatened to end her own life if he broke it off. That was the only reason the engagement survived.

When she came to find Damon afterward, she still bore the welts where her father's cane had come down on her.

Damon swallowed his heartbreak and tried to end things.

"Eleanor, with my family the way it is now, I'm not good enough for you."

But she clutched his hand, her eyes red.

"To me, you're the best person in the whole world. I'm the one who's afraid I'm not good enough for you."

That night, they held each other close and gave themselves to one another completely.

Seven years had passed. The girl who refused to give in even when her father beat her had long since grown up.

And the purest love they'd shared had faded right along with her girlhood.

When Damon opened his eyes again, the fear that had coiled around him for countless days and nights was suddenly gone.

He slowly raised his gaze.

A cure?

He didn't need one.

His illness couldn't be cured.

And he no longer wanted it to be.

In the darkness, he slowly curled his fingers into a fist.

They had destroyed his life with their own hands and turned his suffering into fame and fortune.

Then he would drag them down to hell with him.