Chapter 6

He jerked upright in bed, breath ragged.

Cold sweat had soaked through his shirt.

Outside, a storm was howling. Damien sat there staring at the window.

The file his men had pulled together lay on the nightstand.

He'd always told himself that Adeline had given up on him that day. He hadn't known she had led the rescue herself. He hadn't known what it had cost her.

The tendons in her wrist, severed. She would never hold a gun again.

Even the miscarriage—that had been a side effect of the medication she had been quietly taking for years.

A woman that proud. How much pain had she been in? And she had never let him know. Not a word.

The destruction of his family, and ten years of quiet moments with Adeline, flashed through his head in fragments.

He pressed his hands to his skull. His head felt like it was splitting open.

When the pain got bad enough, Damien started beating his head against the wall.

He was having an episode again.

For years he had been drenched in blood. People in their circles said he was a devil with no equal.

None of them knew that the nightmare of his childhood had never let him go. He had been diagnosed with PTSD since he was small.

After he came into the Harrington house, he had questioned, more than once, whether the story he'd been told was real.

Because the old man Harrington was a man of honor. And the way he looked at Damien—it had always felt real.

And then he had failed that mission. And then he had met Vivienne.

The Whitmores, her family, had been a satellite house of the Blackwoods. After the Blackwood massacre, they, too, had been hunted down to the last.

Vivienne had told him to his face that the men behind the Blackwood slaughter were Harringtons.

She had even produced proof—a family crest medallion she kept hidden on her.

"My father tore this off one of them as he was dying."

Damien had torn open his own collar.

The brand on his chest—a raw, vicious thing the young Adeline had pressed into him herself.

The pattern was identical to the medallion Vivienne held.

Remembering it made his head feel like it was about to burst.

He slammed his forehead into the wall again and again.

He didn't look up until the blood from the cuts had run down into his eyes, and when he did, his face was wet.

"Adeline. What right do you have to hate me?"

"You owe me. You don't get to hate me."

With the Harringtons destroyed, the Founding Families were down to two. The Sterlings and the Ashfords.

Damien took the men he had spent years quietly cultivating, joined them with what remained of the old Blackwood loyalists, and stepped into the void the Harringtons had left.

At first, a few challenged him. After they saw how fast he moved when crossed, no one else volunteered.

A month passed.

"Boss. We've got a lead on Miss Harrington. The trail goes cold at the coast—she was pulled out by the Sterlings."

When the man said the name, there was a flicker of real fear in his eyes.

The Sterlings had always been formidable. In recent years they had expanded aggressively. Their reach now stretched from Ravenport all the way up the coast to Ashbury.

Damien rubbed his thumb across the pad of his finger, his eyes darkening.

"Sebastian Sterling."

He ground the name out between his teeth.

He knew the name well. Sebastian had once been the man who was nearly Adeline's husband.

Sebastian Sterling was the finest heir the Sterlings had produced in three generations.

At thirteen he had taken over the family's sixteen shipping terminals.

At eighteen he was worth over a billion.

By his early twenties he had built a commercial empire in Ashbury with his own two hands.

But the prince of the Sterlings had been strange since he was a child. A closed book. Impossible to read.

"Boss. We just got settled. Picking a fight with the Sterlings right now is suicide. You have to think this through."

Damien didn't hear him. He was already boarding the helicopter for Ashbury.

The whole flight his mind was a wreck.

He knew exactly what the smart move was. But the moment anything involving Adeline came up, he couldn't control himself.

He thought about it and laughed bitterly at himself. He slapped himself, hard.

Damien, he thought. After all these years playing her dog, you really did develop a taste for it.

The wheels had barely touched down when his private phone started ringing.

"Damien, save me—"

The anonymous video showed Vivienne strung up by her wrists in a high open space. Her face, still healing, had been sliced open again. Someone had carved two words into her skin.

WORTHLESS SLUT.