Aria didn’t remember when her sobbing stopped. All she knew was the cold floor beneath her cheek and the echo of Victor Navarro’s crimes still screaming inside her skull. The vault seemed to tilt and spin, the images of cages and starved children burned behind her eyelids. Her body finally collapsed under the weight of truth, and she crumpled into exhaustion.
Damian stood over her.
Not close. Not touching.
Just… watching.
His jaw ticked with something sharp and ugly, something that might have been disgust—at her father, at her weakness, at himself for bringing her here. He paced the vault like he was trying to outrun the instinct clawing up his chest. Every step was tight, restless. A man fighting the ghost of a boy who once knelt in chains.
Aria whimpered in her sleep, breath hitching on a nightmare.
Damian froze mid-stride.
No one froze Damian Wolfe. No one stopped him mid-movement. But the sound of her fear did. A low tremor slipped from her throat—fragile, broken, terrified. Damian’s fingers curled into a fist at his side, knuckles bone-white. His throat bobbed once, as if he swallowed something heavy and painful.
He tried to walk away.
He actually reached the steel door. His hand hovered over the keypad.
But he couldn’t do it. Not when she looked like that.
Not when she was falling apart because of sins she never committed.
A snarl tore from his chest—quiet but raw—as he turned back. He hated this. Hated her father. Hated how the past never stayed buried. Hated most of all the instinct inside him that refused to let her drown alone. He dragged a hand through his hair, pacing again, a caged storm in a room built for ghosts.
Aria jolted awake with a small cry.
Damian whipped toward her instantly.
Her eyes were wide and glassy, filled with terror she couldn’t hide fast enough. She pressed herself against the wall, shaking, breath short and frantic. Damian took one step forward on instinct, then stopped himself like he’d run into steel.
“Don’t—don’t leave me,” she gasped, voice cracking. “Please don’t… don’t leave me alone here.”
Damian’s entire body went still.
She reached out blindly, fingers brushing fabric.
His sleeve.
Just the edge of it—but she clung to it like a lifeline.
Damian didn’t breathe.
Every muscle inside him trembled at the contact, his pulse slamming against his ribs. No one touched him. No one dared. Touch meant control, meant vulnerability, meant the kind of memories that rotted him from the inside. He should’ve ripped his arm away. Snapped at her until she recoiled.
But he didn’t.
For a long, suspended minute, Damian stood rigid—caught between every reason to pull away and every instinct telling him not to.
Then, with a growl that sounded like surrender and self-hatred tangled together, he lowered himself beside her. Not gracefully. Not softly. As if gravity dragged him down against his will. He leaned against the same cold wall she was trembling against.
Their shoulders touched.
Barely.
A whisper of warmth.
But Damian felt it like a collision.
Aria blinked up at him, eyes warm with gratitude—gratitude he didn’t deserve, gratitude he didn’t want, gratitude that felt like a knife sliding into the softest part of him. She whispered, voice fragile as glass,
“Thank you…”
Damian’s jaw locked instantly.
His entire face hardened.
Because hearing thanks from her—Victor Navarro’s daughter, the girl he hated, the girl he swore to use and break and never care for—felt like betrayal.
His betrayal. He didn’t respond. He couldn’t.
The words would choke him.
Instead, he stared straight ahead, refusing to look at her, refusing to acknowledge the warmth spreading where her shoulder brushed his. He despised the feeling, despised himself, despised her father for making this moment possible at all.
But he stayed. God help him. He stayed. And for Damian Wolfe… that was more intimate than any kiss, any confession, any touch he’d ever allowed.