Chapter 7

Damien Wolfe

Some nights the city looks like a wound that forgot how to heal.

You stand high enough, and all the lights blur together until it’s just one slow pulse, the heartbeat of something sick that won’t die.

I kept my hand on the glass, smoke curling from the cigarette between my fingers, watching the traffic crawl below like veins lit by fire. The penthouse was silent except for the hum of the air system and the faint tick of ice melting in a half-finished drink.

I should have felt calm here. I built this place for that reason glass, steel, quiet. No sound from the street, no footsteps that weren’t mine. Still, the silence never stayed clean. It carried ghosts.

My father’s voice was the loudest of them.

He was a drunk who treated anger like a second language, fluent and precise. You never saw it coming until the glass hit the wall or the belt left a stripe across your back. I used to count the seconds between his breaths when he was angry, learning the rhythm, finding the moment when I could run.

My mother didn’t run. She stayed because leaving would’ve meant admitting we were already broken. She died when I was sixteen, a stroke in the kitchen. The neighbors called it grief I called it relief.

I stopped going home after that. Slept wherever I could garages, friends’ couches, alleys when it was warm enough. The streets taught faster than school ever could. You learn what hunger feels like in your bones, how to trade fear for instinct. You stop waiting for anyone to save you.

By eighteen, I’d built my first deal stolen cars, flipped them clean, sold them to a man who paid in cash and questions I never answered. By twenty, I was working numbers, laundering for people with worse tempers than my father but better suits. Every dollar I made felt like distance. Every scar felt like proof I’d earned the right to breathe.

I thought that would be enough. It never is.

The smoke burned down to the filter. I crushed it out and poured another drink, the burn of whiskey cutting the fog in my head for a second. Outside, thunder rolled somewhere over the city low, heavy, familiar.

Elma would have been twenty-one now.

She was my aunt’s husband’s kid, but we grew up in the same street, same summers, same bruises from climbing fences we weren’t supposed to. She followed me everywhere, small and stubborn, always asking questions. I used to walk her home after school because the boys at the corner shop liked to tease her, and I couldn’t stand the way she’d pretend not to care.

The night she disappeared, I was supposed to meet her. I was seventeen. She’d called, voice shaking, said she saw faces that made her uncomfortable. I told her to wait, that I’d come by after I finished a job. By the time I got there, the house was dark and empty.

They said she ran away. I knew better.

The cops didn’t look far. Nobody does when it’s girls from families like ours. I searched for a year hospitals, shelters, back alleys. Found nothing. Then work swallowed me whole, and it became easier to bury her name under new ones.

But I never stopped looking. Not really. Every girl we pulled out of a ring, I looked for her face. After a while, I stopped remembering what she looked like, just the sound of her laugh, high and quick, always a little nervous. Sometimes I hear it in dreams. Sometimes I wake up thinking she’s in the next room.

I tipped back the glass and let the burn sit in my throat until my eyes watered.

Maybe that’s why I brought the other one here the quiet girl with the bandaged hand and the eyes that look like they’ve seen too much. Maybe part of me thought saving her would make up for the one I couldn’t.

She reminded me of the kind of fight Elma never had the chance to learn. And maybe that’s what I hate most about her.

I set the glass down too hard. It cracked against the counter but didn’t break.

The reflection in the window looked like a stranger. The tailored shirt, the clean cut, the control none of it hid the truth. Under the skin, I was still the same boy who hid under a table counting the seconds between his father’s breaths.

I thought money and power would bury that version of me. They didn’t. They just gave him sharper tools.

I lit another cigarette, drew deep until my chest ached, then exhaled toward the glass. The smoke spread thin and vanished, like everything else I ever tried to hold on to.

People call me ruthless. They don’t understand that ruthlessness isn’t a choice it’s what’s left when mercy keeps getting you killed.

Elma was the last person I tried to protect because I wanted to, because I had to. When she was taken, something in me went quiet. I built the rest of my life on that silence.

Now there’s this new girl Aria. Broken in different ways, maybe, but alive. Ungrateful, reckless, stubborn as hell. She looks at me like I’m another cage, and maybe she’s right. I don’t even know what I’m saving her from anymore.

I stared down at the street again. Somewhere out there, men were still dying under my orders. Somewhere else, others were running because of me. It all came down to the same truth: I was good at surviving and terrible at stopping.

The drink burned again on the way down. I poured another before I could think about it.

I used to think control meant peace that if I could keep the world small enough and predictable enough, the noise would finally stop. But peace doesn’t come for men like me. We trade it for power and pretend it’s the same thing.

I leaned my forehead against the cold glass. Below, the city lights stretched in every direction, endless, uncaring.

Elma’s face was a blur now soft edges, dark eyes, the sound of her humming when she thought no one was listening. I used to hum it back to her sometimes, the same tune. I tried now, under my breath, but the melody slipped away before it reached the air.

I closed my eyes.

Maybe she’s dead. Maybe she’s not. Hope’s a slow poison you swallow it enough times, and you stop feeling the burn.

But until I see a body, I’ll keep looking. Because I have to. Because I promised.

And until I find her, I’ll protect whoever the hell fate throws in my path, even if she spits in my face for it.

Even if she looks at me like I’m the monster who built her cage.

The smoke had gone out between my fingers. I didn’t bother lighting another.

I wasn’t saving anyone. I was just trying to rewrite the one story I never got to finish.

But I’ll be damned if I said protection was the only reason I was keeping her