LOGINEmily sat on the edge of the couch, her back straight, one hand pressed firmly against her shoulder where the fabric of her top had torn. The room felt too still after everything that had just happened, as though the air itself was waiting for someone to say something that would make sense of it.Her eyes moved between the two men seated opposite her.First Damien.Then Zane.Then back again.Neither of them looked away.She let out a short breath, one that sounded closer to disbelief than anything else, and shook her head slightly as if that alone might reset the moment.“Is this some kind of joke?” she asked, her voice controlled but edged with something sharper underneath. “Because if it is, I don’t see what’s funny about it.”Neither of them answered immediately.Emily leaned forward just a little, her fingers tightening against the torn fabric at her shoulder as she held Damien’s gaze.“If this is some kind of strange initiation to your family,” she continued, “or whatever you th
Zane’s gaze stayed on Emily long after she greeted him.He did not respond, not because he meant to ignore her, but because something in him had already narrowed its focus. He was trying to find it—the familiarity, the instinct, the quiet pull he had always been told would exist between blood that had once been bound together.He found nothing.He searched again, more deliberately this time, letting his senses reach further, brushing past what was visible, trying to feel what could not be seen. There was no recognition, no echo, no trace of the girl he had spent years trying to find.It didn’t make sense.He could sense power in others. He always had. It was never something he needed to think about. It simply existed, present and unmistakable.But with her….There was nothing.His thoughts tightened around that absence as Damien’s voice continued somewhere in the background, speaking to her, explaining something Zane did not fully hear. The words reached him, but they did not settle.
Emily had been pacing for so long that the room no longer felt like a space she was moving through, but something she was trapped inside.Her steps were quiet against the floor, measured, controlled, but there was nothing calm about the way her thoughts moved. They circled back to the same place again and again, tightening each time, refusing to settle into anything she could ignore.Damien knew.The certainty had come slowly at first, forming from fragments—the way he had looked at her, the way his attention had shifted, the silence that had followed where there should have been ease. Now it sat fully in her chest, no longer something she could dismiss.Her hands stilled briefly at her sides before she resumed pacing, the movement the only thing keeping the pressure inside her from building too sharply. If he knew, then everything else would follow. The questions. The connections. The truth she had spent so long keeping hidden.Her cover was gone.The realization didn’t come with pan
Zane pushed the door open with more force than necessary, his voice arriving before he fully stepped inside.“Seriously, what was so important that you had to drag me back for this?”He walked in, keys still in his hand, the energy around him restless and unbothered in the way it usually was. “I had just gotten there,” he continued, his tone carrying the frustration he hadn’t bothered to hide. “It was supposed to be a full weekend. My friends are already complaining, and I haven’t even….”His words slowed as he moved further into the cabin.His eyes landed on Damien.“Oh,” he said, a small shift in his expression as recognition settled in. “You came yourself.”He let out a short breath, shaking his head as he stepped further into the room. “Let me guess,” he added, glancing between the two of them. “You told him I took your jet without asking, didn’t you? You’ve been complaining about it since ….”“Zane.”Their father’s voice cut through the moment, steady and firm in a way that didn’
By the time Damien returned to the cabin, the light outside had begun to soften into evening.The quiet of the woods settled around him as he stepped inside, the familiar warmth of the space meeting him almost immediately. The scent reached him before anything else—rich, earthy, and comforting in a way that pulled at something deeper than hunger. His father stood near the table, setting down a pot as though he had been expecting him to return at that exact moment.“You took your time,” his father said without turning.Damien closed the door behind him and stepped further inside, the tension in his body easing just slightly at the normalcy of it all.“I needed it,” he replied.His father glanced at him then, his eyes taking him in briefly before he nodded toward the table. “Sit,” he said. “Before it gets cold.”Damien didn’t argue.He moved to the table and sat down, the chair scraping softly against the floor as he reached for the food without waiting for anything else. The hunger hit
Emily had been staring at her phone for longer than she realized.The screen dimmed and lit again under her touch, her thumb hovering just above it as if the answer she needed was waiting beneath her skin, refusing to settle into something she could act on. Damien’s name sat at the top of her contacts. Knox’s was just below it. The space between them felt heavier than it should have, as though choosing one meant stepping away from the other in a way she couldn’t undo.She opened Damien’s contact first.Her fingers moved before she could fully think it through.About this morning…The words appeared on the screen, simple and direct, but they sat there without weight, without direction. She stared at them for a moment, then erased them.Her thumb hovered again.This time, her thoughts moved faster, sharper.About the tattoo…She stopped almost immediately, her chest tightening as something instinctive pushed back against the words. Slowly, she deleted them again, leaving the screen blan
The smoke came first.It curled through the doorway like a living thing, thick and gray, swallowing the edges of the small cottage. Emily sat on the floor beside the little girl in the flowery dress, watching her play.The girl’s laughter filled the room, bright and careless. Toys were scattered ac
The road leading into the forest was narrow and almost invisible beneath the thick shadows of the trees. Damien slowed the car as the headlights cut through the darkness, illuminating patches of gravel and fallen leaves scattered across the path. The city lights had disappeared miles behind him, re
Emily sat on the edge of her bed, still wearing the same clothes she had worn to the lunch meeting earlier that afternoon. The evening had already settled over Damien’s estate, and the quiet inside the house felt almost unnatural after the events of the day. From somewhere outside, she could hear t
The taxi ride through the city was quiet.Streetlights passed over the windshield one after another, throwing brief flashes of pale light across Emily’s face as the car moved through the nearly empty roads. The driver didn’t ask questions, and Emily was grateful for that. She leaned her head lightl







