Aria should have turned and run. Every instinct in her body screamed to disappear, to hide, to stop letting Damian Wolfe drag pieces of her soul out into the open. But something heavier, something she didn’t understand, pulled her toward his penthouse instead. The door was cracked open. The lights were low. And the sound of a man breaking quietly in the dark drifted through the hall like a ghost.
Inside, Damian sat on the floor beside the shattered interrogation mirror he had brought up with him—shards glittering like frozen stars around him. His elbows rested on his knees, his fingers threaded through his hair. He wasn’t raging. He wasn’t yelling. He wasn’t the monstrous king the Syndicate feared. He was still. Devastatingly still. And Aria realized instantly: this was the version of him no one had ever been allowed to see.
She stepped inside before she could talk herself out of it. The soft click of her heel made Damian’s shoulders tense. His head jerked up, and for a moment, raw terror flashed across his features—terror of being seen like this. “Get out,” he said, voice low, rough, splintered. “I’m not asking.”
Aria didn’t move. She took another step. Damian’s eyes darkened, warning her again, colder this time. “Aria,” he bit out, “I said leave. Now. Before I do something I regret.”
But Aria didn’t leave.
She sank to her knees in front of him slowly, carefully, her hands trembling but determined. She reached for his bloodied knuckles. Damian jerked his hand back instantly like her touch was a blade pressed to his throat. “Don’t,” he whispered—ragged, dangerous. “Don’t touch me.”
But she touched him anyway.
Her fingertips grazed the bruises on his skin—purple, red, split open. Damian sucked in a sharp breath, the sound low and guttural, like something inside him cracked under the weight of the contact. His entire body went rigid. His jaw clenched. His eyes closed for a moment as if the gentleness physically hurt him.
“Why are you doing this?” he whispered, barely managing the words. “Why are you here?”
Aria swallowed hard, her voice barely audible. “Because you’re bleeding.”
Damian let out a broken laugh—dark, humorless. “I’ve been bleeding for years, princess. Where was this concern then?” He opened his eyes, and she saw everything he usually hid—fear, grief, fury, a lifetime of scars carved into a man who never learned how to heal. “You don’t get to fix me,” he growled. “You don’t get to… see me.”
Aria shook her head, her thumb brushing over the deepest cut despite his warning. “I’m not trying to fix you.”
His voice dropped to a lethal whisper. “Then what the hell are you doing?”
She met his gaze—steady, trembling, brave. “I saw the files,” she whispered. “I saw the boy in the cages.”
Damian inhaled sharply, the sound sharp as a blade slicing open old wounds. His eyes flickered—fear, rage, horror all colliding at once. His fingers curled into fists. “Don’t,” he snarled. “Don’t you dare—”
“That boy is still fighting inside you,” she said quietly, her voice cracking but steady. “I saw him today. In that room. In every choice you make. In every nightmare you carry.” Her breath shuddered. “And I don’t know how to hate you for it.”
Damian froze.
Completely froze.
The expression on his face shattered—hate, desire, self-disgust, grief, longing, all fighting for dominance. He looked at her like she had just spoken the one truth he couldn’t bear to hear.
His voice broke when he asked, “Why aren’t you afraid of me anymore?”
Aria’s heart pounded so hard it hurt. She should have been terrified. She should have run. But she didn’t. She leaned forward, just enough that their foreheads almost brushed. “I was,” she whispered. “But now I’m afraid of losing myself more.”
Damian’s breath hitched—a sound she had only ever heard from a man in pain. His hand hovered inches from her cheek, shaking, wanting, refusing. He closed his eyes, battling a storm inside himself, and when he opened them again, the hatred was there—but it was drowning under something far more dangerous.
Something human. Something hungry. Something he had spent his entire life trying to kill.
He whispered her name like it hurt: “Aria…”
The distance between them trembled.
And for the first time, Damian Wolfe didn’t look like the monster she’d been raised to fear.
He looked like the boy her father tried to destroy—and the man trying desperately not to destroy her in return.