Aria couldn’t breathe inside her room.
Not with the collar pulsing faintly, not with the memory of Damian’s trembling hands cleaning blood from her skin, not with the echo of Sabrina’s smile still scraping at her nerves. She paced until the walls felt too close, until the silence felt like hands around her throat.
Finally, barefoot and shaking, she slipped into the hallway.
A cold breeze brushed her skin—wrong for the penthouse floor. She followed it and discovered the balcony door standing half open, curtains fluttering like a warning. Aria’s heart stumbled.
Damian stood outside. Shirtless. Back to her.
The midnight cold clung to his skin, steam rising faintly from his body as if the fury inside him was hotter than the winter wind. His knuckles were bruised and split. His breath came in slow, uneven pulls. The city lights below painted him in shards of gold and shadow, a man built of violence and nightmares.
She hesitated in the doorway.
“Damian…?” Her voice wavered. “Are you—are you okay?”
He laughed.
Not the kind she’d ever heard from him.
A sound scraped from a wound that never healed.
“You don’t get to ask me questions.” He didn’t turn around. “You don’t get to ask me anything.”
Her stomach tightened. “I’m not trying to upset you.”
“You breathe,” he said, voice low and dangerous, “and it upsets me.”
Aria stepped back, hurt crackling through her chest, and turned to leave.
She didn’t make it two steps.
Damian’s hand shot out. He grabbed her arm and yanked her back toward him with such force the air punched from her lungs. She gasped, stumbling into his chest.
He was burning. He was shaking. And he was looking at her as if she were a ghost clawing out of his past.
“Don’t walk away from me,” he said, voice raw.
Aria swallowed. “I thought you didn’t want me here.”
“I don’t,” he snapped. Then he dragged a hand through his hair, jaw clenched, eyes wild. “I don’t. But every time you leave, it feels like—”
He cut himself off, shutting his mouth hard enough that the muscle in his jaw twitched.
The balcony lights cast sharp shadows across his face, turning him into the storm she’d always sensed under his skin. His voice dropped to a rough whisper.
“You don’t understand the damage your father caused.”
Aria froze.
Damian stepped closer, his body towering over hers, heat rolling off him in waves of barely-controlled violence.
“You don’t know what he took from me,” he said. “You don’t know what he made us become. Years stolen. Families shattered. Bodies buried under concrete your father’s money poured.”
Aria trembled. “I’m not him.”
Damian’s expression twisted, pain and fury colliding. “I know.”
He stepped closer. Too close. His breath brushed her cheek. His fingers tightened on her arm.
“And that’s the problem.”
Aria’s lips parted. “I don’t—”
His hand slid slowly—dangerously—up to the back of her neck.
She froze.
His thumb brushed the edge of the collar, right against her pulse. The touch was intimate, possessive, nothing like the brutality she’d grown used to. His fingertips lingered on the sensitive skin beneath the collar, tracing the place where fear lived and where something else—heat, longing, confusion—had started to grow without permission.
The wind howled. Her heart pounded.
They stood like that—caught in a war neither understood, too close to stop, too damaged to move forward.
Damian leaned down.
Their foreheads almost touched.
Almost.
His breath hitched once, just once, as though the nearness hurt him more than any wound Navarro ever carved into his past.
Then he jerked back as if burned.
The moment shattered.
He spun toward the door, grabbed it so hard the frame groaned, and slammed it shut with a force that made the glass tremble in its metal bones.
Aria flinched at the sound.
Inside the penthouse, Damian’s footsteps stormed away.
Outside on the balcony, Aria stood alone—heart racing, skin burning where his thumb had traced her pulse—wondering what was more dangerous:
The man who hated her… or the man who almost didn’t.