Chapter 5

Chapter 5

While the doctor worked on Vivienne, Damien leaned against the railing outside.

He lit a cigarette and chain-smoked, one after another.

None of it put out the burning in his chest.

He never smoked this much.

After Adeline told him she hated the smell of secondhand smoke, he'd quit on the spot, and he'd never once lit up in front of her.

Adeline. Adeline again.

The moment he realized what he was doing, he crushed the cigarette out against the back of his own hand, trying to use the pain to keep his head straight.

But when he caught sight of the burn scar she'd left on his chest hours earlier, he lost control of himself. His fist slammed into the wall.

His knuckles split open.

And out of nowhere, he thought of the last thing Arthur had said to him.

"Wiped out the family that saved him..."

He repeated it under his breath, without meaning to.

The moment the words left him, he let out a cold, bitter laugh at himself.

The Harringtons had always been cunning. Arthur's words meant nothing. He had just wanted to leave Damien haunted.

He would not give him the satisfaction.

Damien shut his eyes and tipped his head back. He didn't notice someone had come up beside him.

"Boss. We finished sifting through the wreckage. No sign of Miss Harrington. We did find a tunnel under the rubble. And this."

The man handed him a small, soot-blackened bottle.

Painkillers.

The strongest formulation prescribed.

Damien read the fine print. His brow jerked.

For ten years he had thrown himself in front of every bullet for her. He had never let her be hurt.

Why was she carrying something like this?

He didn't have time to think it through. Vivienne was screaming again from inside the room.

He pushed open the door and a mirror came flying straight past him, shattering against the frame.

Vivienne was covering her face, coming apart. "My face. What's happened to my face—"

She was smashing anything she could reach.

The moment she saw Damien she flung herself into his arms. "Damien, sweetheart, my face is ruined. This is that bitch's fault. You have to find her. Even her corpse—don't let her off!"

"She made me look like this. She killed our child. She can't walk away from this."

Damien held her without a word.

At the mention of the child, his fingers twitched.

A long time later, he answered her in a voice that barely sounded like his own.

"I will find her."

Fifteen years ago, Ravenport had been carved into four territories, each run by one of the Founding Families.

At the last family summit, the Blackwood delegation had been ambushed on the road. The acting head of the Blackwoods was tortured to death. Nothing of him was ever recovered.

When the news reached the old patriarch, he collapsed from the shock and did not rise again.

Before the Blackwoods could investigate, the family's private physician found traces of poison in the old man's evening brandy.

That rainy night, men poured into the Blackwood estate and killed everything that moved.

With his dying strength the old patriarch hid the last of the Blackwood blood in the cellar tunnel.

"Damien. You are all the Blackwoods have left. Live. Grandfather will be proud of you."

That night, over a hundred Blackwoods died. Not one survived.

On his last breath, the old man turned his head toward where Damien was hiding and tried to speak.

"Harrington."

Five-year-old Damien, crouched in the tunnel, watched through the gap as his grandfather's body was cut apart.

The men were laughing. Then they set the Blackwood estate on fire and left it to burn.

Damien clawed his way out of the tunnel.

He had nowhere to go. A trafficker picked him up halfway down the road, and he was sold into an underground fighting pit.

For years, Damien was the smallest boy in the pit. He was also the meanest and the least afraid to die.

He waited. He waited until he was ten, and then one day men in Harrington colors came to the pit.

They said the Harringtons were choosing a personal bodyguard for their young heiress.

Every boy there fought like his life depended on it. For most of them, it did. Damien was no different.

Three of his ribs were broken in that match.

The weight of his slaughtered family was the only thing keeping him standing.

Half-dead, he finally got his look at the girl they all called Miss Harrington.

He couldn't remember, later, what he had actually said.

Only that he had groveled at her feet like a dog.

"Damien. I hate you."

He looked up, and the face in front of him was Adeline's. Her eyes were streaming blood.

"Adeline!"