Chapter 2

Damien wolfe

The first thing I heard was wood breaking, a satisfying sound that surprised me because for a second I didn’t realize it was me making it.

The desk split under my hands with a violence that felt satisfying in the moment, the grain snapping like an animal caught and the top collapsing into a scatter of paper and pens. A mug slid off the edge and hit the floor, the ceramic cracking sharp and final. Ethan stood by the door the way he always did when I lost it still, careful to look invisible because he’d learned that motionlessness sometimes protected men from what came next.

“Say it again,” I told him, voice low and too steady.

He swallowed and said it, the words pushed out like they were moving through mud. “We checked all the girls. None matched Elma’s record. We pulled prints, cross-checked files, ran databases…”

“Check them again,” I ordered, and it wasn’t a question.

He opened his mouth to answer and closed it when the chair launched across the room. It slammed into the plaster with enough force to leave a dent, chips of paint raining down. My office looked ransacked, as if somebody had torn through it to remove the quiet. From forty floors up the city lay beneath us, indifferent and sprawling, a place that pretended not to belong to men who carried other people’s loss in their bones.

Ethan cleared his throat, the sound thin in the mess of the room. “We think she was in the crossfire. The building collapsed before extraction. If she was there…”

“She wasn’t,” I cut in, each word a stone dropped into a still pool.

“Damien…”

“She wasn’t!” The sentence tore out of me before the thought could be censored. My fist smashed the remaining desktop until the wood splintered under my knuckles and a vein stood out in my arm as if it wanted to escape.

I inhaled and the breath did nothing. Ten years had become a weight I carried in my ribs leads that went nowhere, raids that closed like doors, names that dissolved into ash. Everyone told me the same thing over and over until the words stopped meaning anything. I was supposed to accept that she died in the rubble while I was barely feet away, and the idea lodged in me like bone.

Ethan moved forward the way you approach something dangerous and necessary at once. “You’ve done everything you can. Maybe it’s time to let go.”

Those words hit harder than the gunfire from the night before. For a moment I only stared at him, the confession of tired man to tired man hanging there between us and tasting like defeat. A bottle on the desk answered then my hand found it and I didn’t aim at him, but I threw it close enough to remind him how anger sounds when it breaks glass. Whiskey spilled down the wall, dark and fast.

He didn’t flinch. “That wasn’t going to bring her back.”

I barked a laugh without humor. “Neither was giving up.”

“You were running on fumes, Damien. You hadn’t slept. You were seeing ghosts in every corner.”

“I built this empire on ghosts,” I snapped, the words more raw than I intended. “Don’t tell me when to stop.”

He let out a slow breath, the kind that comes when someone has nothing left to parry with. “You think I liked saying it? I was there too. I saw those cages. I heard what they did to those girls. But Elma…” He closed his eyes for a second and shook his head. “If she was in that building”

“She wasn’t,” I said again, quieter now, the voice a razor. “Don’t ever finish that sentence in my presence.”

For a second the room seemed to hold itself together because no one knew how to move first. Ethan broke the tension with an exhausted sigh. “You can’t keep chasing this. You’ll burn through everyone trying to help you.”

I walked toward him and he didn’t look away he met me like a man who’d chosen a stance and would not back down from it. Up close he smelled of smoke and the small trace of someone who had been near chaos himself.

“Then I’ll chase it alone,” I said. The sentence was simple and absolute.

He opened his mouth as if to argue, then took one look at my face and shut it. He nodded once, and left the room. His reflection flicked in the floor-to-ceiling glass for a moment before the door closed and his shape disappeared.

When the door clicked shut the quiet returned in a way that made the broken furniture and spilled drink louder. I pressed both hands against the wall until the knuckles whitened and the drywall gave, tiny bits of dust clinging to my palms. Pain flared along my wrist . It was dull, solid, a thing I could count and understand. Elma as a child used to trace the veins in my hands and say they looked like rivers on a map she said she’d follow them someday to find out where I kept all my anger. I told her then it was not a place for anyone. She laughed, said storms didn’t scare her.

I dug my fingers into the studs until the sting steadied the rest of me. The laptop on the desk still showed Ethan’s report, her name absent from every line. My jaw tightened until my teeth clicked. No Elma. No trace. No answer. The same conclusion repeated until it had the rhythm of a verdict.

I picked up the phone and called Christian. “Pull satellite feeds from the compound,” I said when he answered. “I want everything before the blast, during, after. Every camera angle you can find.”

He hesitated with the kind of caution men adopt when they know what a question costs. “You really think…”

“Just do it,” I snapped, and I hung up before he could finish the sentence he’d been careful enough not to say.

“She was out there,” I said aloud because the room needed a liar or a believer and I chose believer. The words sounded thin even to me, but they were the only thing I had to throw against the dark.

I sank into the chair, elbows on my knees, head heavy between my hands. The tang of whiskey clung to me, the sort that doesn’t wash away with decisions. Every time my eyes closed the warehouse came back with its heat and metal and the faces of the girls who’d made it out. And every time, Elma’s face surfaced too less a person and more a hunger, sharp and precise, refusing to be fed by anything I’d already done.

Maybe she was a ghost. Maybe I’d created her in the hollow left by every failure, a map of guilt I traced so often I began to believe its lines. For a long moment I couldn’t tell what was memory and what was the mind making sense of absence.

But one thought kept its shape steady as a fact if Elma was alive somewhere, I would destroy whatever stood between me and the place she waited. I would burn the world down to get her back.

The door opened again. Mara stood there for a beat, quiet and composed in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with knowing where to start. She didn’t react to the wreckage at first she only looked at my bleeding hand and then at the ruined desk as if cataloguing damage.

“Sir,” she said, voice even.

“What now?” I asked, voice rough.

“The girl you brought home,” she answered.

My head snapped up. “What about her?”

“She is awake.”