Old Wounds

Chapter 15

Damian's POV

The phone rang at 11 PM.

I was in my office, fumbling through numbers that commanded my attention more than the figures in front of me-figures that I’d paid little mind to as the memory of Lena’s face in the library earlier consumed my every thought, her eyes on mine as she posed a question I wasn’t ready to answer.

Why didn't you say no?

I'd been wrestling with that very question for weeks now.

The phone buzzed on my desk, and I saw that familiar ache in my chest when I recognized that number. The number that I never had and never could bring myself to delete from my phone-the one I never stopped bracing myself for.

I picked it up.

"Damian." The voice was older, more gravelly than before, but the weight it carried-the power it commanded-had remained intact. It always did.

"Marcus."

A beat of silence-a beat that he deployed with practiced precision, as a normal man might deploy a word. Marcus Hale had built an entire career on silences that induced discomfort in others, enough that they’d hasten to fill them. I'd learned long ago that this was a mistake to never repeat.

"I'm hearing you've had a busy few weeks," he finally said.

I leaned back in my chair. "And where did you hear that?"

"I hear everything, son. You know that."

I did know that. It was part of the reason Marcus had been so indispensable back then; it was part of the reason why he was such a constant fixture, a foundation beneath the foundation of all that I’d created. He was part of me in ways I could no longer escape-part of the very structure that I had built.

"Victor's been stirring up trouble. I’ve handled it."

"Have you?" His voice dripped with barely concealed amusement. "Because it appears to be just starting from where I'm standing."

I remained silent.

"He's been sniffing around, Damian. Talking to my people. Asking questions about where certain assets came from. Asking who helped you acquire them." He let another silence hang in the air before continuing.

And there it was.

Marcus wasn't calling about Victor; he was calling about himself. He was calling about the possibility of Victor uncovering something that might reflect back on him. Everything I had built had to begin somewhere, and Marcus Hale's fingerprints were all over that beginning. He had been my way in; I’d had the ambition but not the access, and fifteen years ago he’d simply opened a door for me. A door I’d stepped through without fully realizing the immense price of entry.

The price had become perfectly clear over time.

"Victor won't find anything linking back to you."

"Can you promise that?"

"I can control it."

"You've been controlling a great deal lately." His tone shifted slightly-still measured, but there was a raw, primal undercurrent now, the same cold, absolute thing that Marcus had always hidden just beneath his polite façade. "Including a certain girl, I'm told."

My hand clenched around the phone.

"That's none of your concern," I said.

"Everything that transpires on this estate is my concern," he replied evenly. "You know the terms, Damian. You always have. I looked after you when you were nobody. Now, I expect you to look after me."

"I will."

"See that you do." A pause. "And Damian, be careful with distractions. They have a tendency of becoming liabilities."

The line went dead.

I gently placed the phone back on the desk, the numbers on the paper before me suddenly rendered meaningless.

Marcus Hale. Fifteen years of managing him, like a shadow that I'd learned to stay just a step ahead of.

And now, he knew about Lena.

I didn't know how-Sophia, one of my men, or simply the ubiquitous reach of his network; it didn't matter. He knew, and he had explicitly called her a distraction.

I got up and walked over to the window.

The grounds were dark and quiet below, the guard on his usual rounds, a red ember of his cigarette burning a path through the blackness.

Lena's light was on.

That second-story window, a soft yellow rectangle against the overwhelming dark. She was awake-she was often awake late, I'd realized, though she never spoke of it.

I thought about her in the library today. The unflinching directness of her question, the steady gaze she’d met mine with while she waited for an answer. Others always looked away, but she simply waited, as though the world held all the patience it needed for me to take my time.

Why didn't you say no?

Because when her uncle had finally laid out his terms in that room, something had shifted, something I couldn't explain then, something I still struggled to define now. I’d looked at the photograph-he’d pulled it out of his pocket as a supposed incentive-and I’d felt a seismic tremor deep in my chest.

I’d turned down proposals like this before-dozens of them.

This one, I had not.

And Marcus Hale, the man who knew the price of every choice I’d ever made, was watching.

Lena’s light flickered out.

The grounds were plunged into complete darkness.

I stood there at the window for a long time, contemplating the peculiar, knotty shape of the mess I was in-a mess that wasn’t Victor, wasn’t Marcus, but was undeniably the quiet, complex trouble of a girl in my library who’d asked a question I couldn’t neatly answer.

The kind of trouble, I was beginning to suspect, that couldn’t be contained with control alone.

And somewhere beyond the boundaries of the estate, Marcus Hale watched.

Waited to see what I would do next.