All Chapters of Scarred Roses, Burning Vengeance: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

DAMIAN BLACKWOOD My father had raised me to be a man, but I was still human.Day by day, I realised with pain in my heart that Eleanor had a grip on me that I could not break. It was like being entangled in a spider's web; the more I fought, the more I became entrapped.And then I thought.Father had been smitten by Vanilla Black. He never loved anyone else after her—not even Mother. It was a slow realisation that if my mother had lived, she would most likely have been miserable because of him. He even killed her brother because of her.Maybe if I let go and hurt myself in the process, I would become immune to love.Yes. I would let go, I decided.**I made the decision to let go of my hardheartedness on the same day my grandfather passed away. It was a gradual process over three days, as I observed him take slow breaths. I had seen enough men die, the majority of them at my hands. But seeing my grandfather lying there with bandages around his head was something else.I did not care

DAMIAN BLACKWOOD The days after his death passed in a blur. The only clear thing to me in all that time was Eleanor, who I started to see even more frequently as we were thrown together by our shared love for my grandfather. I was not always in the house, but whenever I visited, I continued to be drawn towards her by how affected she was by his death, so much so that she had practically become a wreck.Once, she had admitted to me that she could not stop thinking about how fast it had happened. He was going up the stairs to sleep in one moment, had crashed down in another, was in the hospital before she could blink, and now he was dead. She called it the fastest three days she had ever lived through, and I thought it was no lie. To me, it seemed as though all of it had happened in three hours, not three days.It was the day that made it a week after his death that caused me to go to the house. I had come to expect to see Eleanor's angelic face and to be as struck by it as the first

DAMIAN BLACKWOOD I moved even closer to her, and her breath paused.There was a flicker of surprise in her eyes, before that disappeared and something warmer followed it, a thing that filled my chest with a sensation I thought strange. She didn’t move away now, but stood so close to me that the whole house suddenly felt smaller, and the space between us seemed to pull us even closer together, drawing us nearer to each other.I looked at her and caught a loose strand of hair across her eye. It was like a crack on some beautiful wall, or a random scribble across a painting by some unskilled artist who impeded the original work. She also turned to say something to me, and caught me staring at her.“Damian…” she began…Her voice faded off so that her lips hung open, and I found myself insanely wanting to kiss her. Something in my gut held me back, and I only lifted a curled finger and brushed that strand of hair from her face. Her skin was warm against the skin of my own fingers, and I l

DAMIAN BLACKWOOD I wasn't thinking about a lot then, but I thought she was perfect.Picture perfect, heavenly perfect. The most perfect that any form of perfect could aspire to be. She was warm and soft and oozing with life from beneath me, with her legs tightening around my waist and pulling me even closer to her.“Damian… oh Damian…” she moaned, and her voice was comparable to the sweetest of sounds. It was breathless and desperate, the harmony of the most sonorous choirs and the songs of the sweetest birds. It was the sole reason why I didn’t need to be told twice, and drew back until I was almost all the way out of her before pushing back into her with a force that slammed both our bodies and made her cry out in pleasure, her body bouncing about in the bed. The sound of her pleasure drove me to near madness, and I continued to a rhythm that was a dance for the both of us—slowing down until it was gentle for the first steps before becoming more deliberate. Her hips rose to meet m

ELEANOR SINCLAIR Six months later, Damian and I were married.The six months after that? Blissful heaven.Within a year I had gone from Eleanor Sinclair to Eleanor Blackwood, from Miss to Mrs, from unmarried to happily married, from poor to rich. I could swear that I now had all I could have ever dreamed of, but as everything turned positive for me, it went the other way around for Damian.I continued to live in Grandfather's house and as the housemaid, taking care of the place. At times, Damian would come to me there and the other times, I would go to him. Whatever it was, we spent all our nights together. It was our one rule—never going to bed without one of us seeing the other. I kept to this rule of ours faithfully, and so did he. Until the night my husband came to me and felt eerily like the old Damian Blackwood.The grumpy, unfeeling Damian. His face was turned up in a scowl that only lessened when he saw me, and I thought I could wipe it off completely. So I attended to my ma