All Chapters of Own You.: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Damian should have walked away.He should have let Sebastian lead him to the car, should have driven back to the apartment, should have crawled into bed and slept for twelve hours. That would have been the smart thing. The safe thing. The thing that protected what was left of his sanity.But something made him stop at the elevator."I forgot my phone," Damian said. His voice was hoarse, still thick from crying.Sebastian's hand was on the small of his back. "I'll get it.""No. I need—" Damian didn't know what he needed. To see his father one more time? To make sure the old man was real? To prove to himself that he had actually said the words out loud? "Just wait here. Two minutes."Sebastian's jaw tightened. "Damian—""Two minutes."Damian turned and walked back down the hallway. His footsteps were quiet on the linoleum. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Room 412 was still half open. The same gray light spilled through the gap.He reached for the door handle.And stopped.A voic

The sun was out.Damian noticed it first when he opened his eyes—actual sunlight, golden and warm, streaming through the gap in Sebastian's curtains. Not the gray overcast of the past weeks. Not the fluorescent buzz of hospital lights. Just sun. Ordinary, beautiful, forget-your-troubles-for-a-minute sun.Sebastian was still asleep beside him, one arm thrown over Damian's waist, his face pressed into the pillow. His hair was a disaster. His mouth was slightly open. He looked nothing like the Reaper and everything like a man who had finally stopped running.Damian lay there for a long moment, watching Sebastian breathe. The apartment was quiet. No phones buzzing with news alerts. No reporters camped outside. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of traffic.The suspension had been lifted yesterday. The league had issued a terse statement—"after review of new evidence, the indefinite suspension of Damian Volkov and Sebastian Montgomery has been rescinded"—and just like t

The hospital room smelled of antiseptic and stale coffee. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting a cold, bluish glow over everything. Machines beeped in a steady, mechanical rhythm—heart monitor, oxygen levels, the soft whoosh of the IV drip. Damian had long since stopped noticing any of it. All he could focus on was the man lying motionless in the narrow bed.Sebastian.Eight hours. That was how long Damian had been sitting in the same plastic chair, one hand wrapped around Sebastian’s limp fingers, the other occasionally brushing damp strands of hair from his forehead. He hadn’t eaten. He hadn’t slept. Nurses had come and gone, offering him water, food, even a cot in the family lounge. He refused every single thing. The only place he belonged right now was right here, holding on to the only thing that mattered.Sebastian’s face was pale, bruised along the left cheekbone where the impact had caught him. A thin oxygen tube rested under his nose, and a bandage covered the stitches

The numbers didn't stop climbing.Damian stared at his phone screen, watching the "no" votes tick upward in real time—twenty-five thousand, thirty thousand, forty thousand. The "yes" counter was still stuck at zero. The vote wasn't supposed to go live for another six hours, but someone had already found a way to cheat.Sebastian stood beside him, looking over his shoulder. His breath was warm on Damian's neck. His left arm was still in the sling, but his right hand was balled into a fist."This isn't happening by accident," Sebastian said."No shit.""Someone wrote a bot. Or paid for one. Thousands of votes in minutes—that's not organic."Damian scrolled through the comments section. Most of them were gibberish—random letters, repeated phrases, the hallmarks of automated accounts. But every few scrolls, he saw a real person, a real fan, posting things like "Why are they banning them?" and "Let them play."The bots were drowning out the real voices."We need to find out who's behind th

The security camera's red light blinked at the end of the hallway. Damian stared at it for a long moment, his hand still on the door handle of room 412. His father was watching. His father was always watching."We're not paying him," Damian said.Sebastian looked up from where he was still kneeling on the floor. "Then what are we doing?"Damian turned away from the camera. He walked back to Sebastian, pulled him to his feet, and spoke low enough that no hidden microphone could pick up the words."We're going to make him confess. On tape. And then we're going to delete every copy of that video he has."Sebastian's eyes widened. "How?"Damian pulled out his phone. The screen was dark, but the voice recorder app was just a swipe away. "You distract him. I'll record.""And the laptop?""He has a laptop. Somewhere in that room. Carla mentioned it in the texts. He's been using it to store the footage."Sebastian's jaw tightened. "You want me to delete it.""I want you to accidentally spill