Aria tasted dust before she tasted blood.
Her lungs burned as Damian kicked open the penthouse infirmary door with his shoulder, half-carrying, half-dragging her inside. Sirens keened faintly from the lower floors, muffled by marble and steel. Smoke clung to his suit. Bits of plaster dotted his dark hair like ash.
“Bed. Now,” he barked at the medic.
The Wolfe Tower medic—mid-forties, steady hands, eyes used to bullets and broken bones—looked up, blanched at the sight of Damian’s torn shoulder, then at Aria’s shaking frame.
“Sir, you’re bleeding through your—”
Damian’s voice dropped to something low and lethal. “I said, treat her first.”
Aria tried to pull away, fingers slipping against his forearm. “Damian, I’m fine, it just knocked the air out of me, I didn’t—”
His stare hit her like a slap.
It wasn’t just anger. It was terror, raw and exposed, strangling his features into something vicious.
“Don’t.” The word came out jagged. “Don’t say you’re fine.”
The medic swallowed and moved toward them. Damian lifted Aria onto the exam bed like she weighed nothing, his jaw clenched so tight a vein pulsed in his neck. The moment he set her down, he stepped back—but not far. He hovered beside the bed, every line of his body coiled, as if expecting the world to explode again.
The medic snapped on gloves. “Miss Navarro, any dizziness? Nausea? Trouble breathing?”
Aria blinked, the room still tilting from the shockwave. Her ears rang with echoes of the blast—concrete cracking, glass screaming, Damian’s body slamming into hers as he wrapped himself around her like a shield.
“I…” Her voice came out thin. “I can breathe. Just… rattled.”
The medic checked her pupils, shining a light into her eyes. “No obvious concussion. Scrapes on your hands and knees.” He touched her forearm gently. “This might bruise.”
Aria stared at the faint smear of blood on her wrist. His blood or hers? She couldn’t tell.
Behind the medic, Damian’s shoulder hung at an ugly angle, suit jacket torn, white shirt soaked crimson. Every time he shifted his weight, pain flickered across his face like lightning behind clouds. He didn’t complain. He didn’t sit. He just stood there, watching the medic inspect her like she was the one who’d taken the ceiling to the shoulder.
“Sir,” the medic tried again, glancing at Damian’s arm. “You need that reduced immediately. If we don’t—”
“Later,” Damian snapped. His gaze never left Aria. “Finish with her.”
Aria swallowed, guilt knotting in her stomach. “Damian, please. Your shoulder—”
His eyes cut to hers. That look again. Fury wrapped tight around fear.
“Be quiet,” he said softly. Soft only in volume. Not in meaning.
She shut her mouth.
The medic cleaned the small cuts on her skin, dabbed antiseptic that stung more than the wounds themselves, taped gauze where glass had kissed too deep. Aria barely flinched. The ringing in her ears was fading, replaced by the pounding of her own heartbeat and the hard, uneven rhythm of Damian’s breathing beside the bed.
“Any pain in your ribs?” the medic asked. “Where he hit you when he pulled you back?”
Her hand drifted to her side, where the memory of his arm clamped around her waist still throbbed. “Just sore.”
“She’s done,” Damian cut in tightly. “Get out.”
The medic hesitated. “Sir, your shoulder—”
“I said,” Damian growled, “get out.”
The medic backed away, eyes flicking between them. “I’ll be outside if you—”
The door shut before he finished.
Silence fell like a dropped blade.
For a moment, neither of them moved. The hum of the air system, the distant shriek of alarms, the faint thunder of rain against the glass—all of it blurred into background noise around the sharp focus of Damian’s presence.
Then he moved.
In two strides he was in front of her, looming, shadow swallowing the fluorescent light. His hands—bloody, shaking—came up to cup her face, fingers spreading across her cheeks like he needed to prove she was still there.
“What the hell were you thinking?” His voice was low, hoarse, dangerous.
Aria’s breath hitched. His grip was firm but not painful, thumbs resting just beneath her eyes. Heat radiated from his palms, tinged with the copper scent of blood and smoke.
“I— I saw the device,” she whispered. “Under the stairs. I thought—”
“You thought,” he cut in sharply, “you’d stand there and scream at it instead of calling me?”
She flinched, shame and indignation colliding in her chest. “I did call you. I screamed your name.”
His fingers tightened, just for a second.
He stared at her like he was trying to decide whether to strangle her or pull her into his arms. His eyes were wild, pupils blown wide, a haunted storm swirling behind them.
“You should have run,” he snarled. “You should have gotten as far away as possible.”
“And leave everyone else?” she shot back, voice trembling. “Leave you?”
His jaw clenched. A muscle jumped. “Yes,” he forced out.
“Liar,” she whispered.
The word hung between them, fragile and reckless.
Damian’s eyes closed briefly, as if the single syllable had landed like a punch. When he opened them again, something had changed. The rage was still there, but it was frayed at the edges, threads of something raw and unguarded bleeding through.
“You’re the only person,” he said, each word dragged from the deepest part of him, “whose pain I hear above gunfire.”
Aria’s breath stopped.
He’d said it like a confession he wanted to strangle in the air, like the truth had slipped before he could cage it.
Her eyes burned. “Damian…”
“Don’t.” His voice cracked. He swallowed hard, thumbs brushing unconsciously against her skin. “Do you have any idea what it does to me when you scream my name like that?”
Her heart stuttered. “I was scared.”
“I know.” His throat worked. “I heard it.”
He looked at her like she was the bomb. Like she was the thing about to detonate and take him with her.
“You shouldn’t matter this much,” he whispered, more to himself than to her. “Not you. Not Navarro’s girl. Not the last piece of him.”
Something inside her splintered at the name.
“I’m not him,” she said, voice shaking.
His hands softened around her face, the violence bleeding out of his grip. “I know,” he said quietly. “That’s the problem.”
Aria’s eyes blurred. The day, the explosion, the years of being her father’s daughter and Damian’s asset—all of it crashed over her in a single wave. She tried to hold it back. Failed.
Tears spilled over.
The first drop hit his thumb.
Damian went utterly still.
He stared at the wet shine on his glove like it was a foreign substance, like he didn’t know what to do with it. Then, slowly, as if moving through a dream, he took off one glove with his teeth, letting it fall to the floor.
His bare hand—scarred, calloused, built for breaking—rose again.
He brushed his thumb beneath her eye, catching the next tear before it fell.
Gentle.
The contact was so soft it felt wrong on him. Like watching a blade try to be a feather.
Aria sucked in a shaky breath. The simple kindness hurt worse than the explosion. Worse than his cruelty. Because it meant something. Because it sounded like a crack in the walls he’d built around himself.
“I told myself I didn’t care,” he murmured, thumb tracing the path of another tear. “That you were leverage. A message. A punishment with a pulse.”
Her shoulders shook. “And now?”
His gaze dropped to her mouth, then back to her eyes, like he was terrified of what would happen if he let himself look too long.
“Now,” he said, voice low and wrecked, “you’re the only thing I saw when that stairwell lit up.”
Her tears came harder. She hated him. She feared him. She didn’t know how to breathe around him. And yet some fractured, broken part of her believed him.
“Stop crying,” he whispered, thumb trembling against her skin. “I can’t—” He broke off, jaw flexing. “I don’t know what to do when you cry.”
“Maybe,” Aria choked out, “you don’t need to do anything. Just… stop pretending you don’t care.”
His eyes flashed. For a heartbeat, she thought he’d snap, retreat behind the cruelty, activate the collar, say something vicious to put the distance back between them.
He didn’t.
Instead, he leaned forward until their foreheads almost touched, his breath warm against her damp cheeks. His uninjured arm braced on the mattress beside her thigh, caging her in without meaning to.
“I can’t afford to care,” he said, voice barely sound. “Not in this world. Not with what’s coming.”
“You already do,” she whispered.
Silence stretched, thick and suffocating.
His thumb traced one last slow line beneath her eyelashes, wiping away the final tear. His hand lingered there, cupping her face, holding her together when she felt like she might split apart.
Outside the door, chaos still reigned—medics shouting, security barking orders, the tower reeling from the Syndicate’s first open strike.
But inside the infirmary, for one precarious moment, there was only this:
A man who had survived cages learning how to touch gently.
And a girl who had been raised by a monster realizing the devil who stole her was the only one who had ever tried to shield her from the blast.
“Next time,” Damian rasped, finally pulling back a fraction, “you call me before you try to be brave.”
Aria’s lips trembled into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “You heard me anyway.”
His mouth twisted. Almost a smile. Almost.
“I always will,” he said.
And this time, when he stepped away to finally let the medic fix his ruined shoulder, Aria’s chest ached with something far more dangerous than fear.