Damian didn’t slam the office door so much as hurl it shut behind him. The glass shook in its frame. Executives outside went dead quiet. Jaxon stood at the head of the war table, jaw already tight, dossier in hand like a weapon that had turned on him.
“Say it again,” Damian growled, shrugging off his suit jacket, muscles tense under his shirt, eyes feral.
Jaxon didn’t flinch, but his throat moved. “We have a leak in the inner circle. The intel trail ends with one of us. It’s either me, Rina, Cole, or Mendez. No one else is cleared to these routes.”
The screens on the wall flickered with maps, routes, names, red circles where shipments had gone missing, where Navarro loyalists had appeared too fast, too prepared. Aria stood by the far edge of the room, silent, feeling the weight of every red circle like a target painted on her skin.
Victor’s ghosts. Damian’s enemies. Their crosshairs.
Damian planted his hands on the table and leaned forward, veins standing out in his forearms. “Navarro loyalists knew the convoy path to the Brooklyn dock. They knew about the safehouse in Hell’s Kitchen. They knew there was a girl there worth taking.” His gaze cut to Aria for half a second, then snapped back to Jaxon. “Those locations were restricted to inner-circle clearance.”
Jaxon’s jaw flexed. “I know what restricted means. I was there when you wrote the protocols.”
“Which is why you’re at the top of my list,” Damian said softly.
Aria felt the floor tilt. Her fingers tightened around the file she’d been holding, knuckles white. “What?” she breathed before she could stop herself.
Damian ignored her. His eyes locked on Jaxon, cold and lethal. “You were the one who signed off on the Brooklyn route. You were the one whose signature authorized the safehouse staffing. You were the one who knew I moved Aria there after the last attack.”
Jaxon dropped the dossier on the table so hard the papers jumped. “You think I’d sell her out?” he snapped. “You think I’d hand Navarro’s daughter—the girl you nearly started a war over—to his leftovers?”
Damian straightened, the room suddenly too small for the two of them. “I think someone fed them information only you, I, or two others had. And I know for a fact it wasn’t me.”
The implication hung in the air like smoke.
Aria took a hesitant step forward. “Damian—”
“Stay out of this,” he bit out without looking at her, the words sharp enough to make her spine lock.
Jaxon’s laugh was humorless, bitter. “You know what your problem is, Wolfe? You stopped trusting long before she showed up, but now you’ve convinced yourself paranoia is a strategy.”
Damian moved so fast the room blinked. One second he was by the table, the next he had Jaxon by the front of his shirt, slamming him into the glass wall hard enough to send spiderweb fractures through it. Executives outside jerked to attention, eyes wide, but no one dared come in.
“You had access,” Damian snarled, face inches from Jaxon’s. “You vouched for Mendez. You vouched for Cole. You told me, ‘They’d die for you, D.’ Well, someone decided they’d rather get paid for me instead.”
Jaxon grabbed his wrist, eyes burning. “I’ve taken bullets for you,” he snapped. “I’ve bled out on your floors. I’ve buried bodies for you. And now you’re questioning me over her?”
The ‘her’ hit Aria like a slap.
Damian’s grip tightened. “Over intel,” he corrected, voice low. “Don’t make this emotional.”
“It’s already emotional,” Jaxon shot back. “We stopped being clean the second you collared Navarro’s daughter and started killing men for looking at her too long.”
Silence crackled. Aria’s heart slammed against her ribs. Damian’s eyes flicked to her again, just once, just enough for Jaxon to see it.
“There it is,” Jaxon said quietly, bitter victory in his tone. “You’ve gone blind.”
Damian shoved him harder into the glass. “Watch your mouth.”
“No,” Jaxon snapped. “You watch yourself. You think the leak is me? Fine. Check my accounts. Check my calls. Check the chip under my goddamn skin if you want. But don’t pretend this isn’t about her. Because everything has been about her since the night she walked in bleeding and you put your gun to the world instead of her head.”
Aria flinched, her throat closing. She wanted to speak, to say something that would cut through the insanity, but her voice refused to work. The collar at her throat felt heavier, even though it wasn’t active, like a phantom chain dragging her down.
“Get out,” Damian said, voice low, deadly calm.
Jaxon froze. “What?”
“You heard me,” Damian said. “Until I clear this leak, you’re off operations. Off routes. Off my floors. Don’t come near her. Don’t come near my war room. Don’t even breathe the same air as my asset unless I say so.”
The words were a knife. Asset. Not Aria. Asset.
Jaxon’s eyes flared with hurt and fury. He shoved Damian’s hand off his shirt and stepped forward, shoulders squared. “You’re pushing away the only person who’s never betrayed you,” he said, voice rough. “And you’re doing it for the girl wearing Navarro’s face.”
Aria sucked in a sharp breath. She didn’t even realize she’d moved until she was closer to them, fingers trembling at her sides.
Damian’s gaze cut to her like a blade. “Leave,” he told Jaxon, not breaking eye contact with Aria this time. “Now. Before I decide I’m done asking.”
For a second, it looked like Jaxon might fight him. Then something in his expression twisted, hurt giving way to resignation. He looked at Aria, and the disappointment in his eyes made her stomach drop.
“This is what I was afraid of,” he said quietly to her. “You’re going to be the reason he burns everything down. Including himself.”
Her lips parted. “Jaxon, I—”
He shook his head and walked out, slamming the door behind him. The cracked glass shivered again, then settled into a jagged wound across the wall.
The room felt empty and suffocating at the same time.
Damian turned fully toward Aria. The rage he’d aimed at Jaxon now had nowhere to go but her. His chest rose and fell in hard, controlled breaths. His knuckles were white.
“You,” he said softly, dangerously.
Aria backed up until her spine hit the opposite glass panel. She swallowed, palms sweating. “I didn’t mean to listen,” she said, voice quiet but steady. “I was just outside, and I heard my name, and—”
He stalked toward her. “You heard enough?”
Her pulse hammered. “I heard you accuse the only person who’d die for you without question,” she said, surprising herself with the bite in her tone. “I heard you say ‘asset’ like it’s the only word you know for me. I heard Jaxon blame me for you falling apart.”
Damian planted his hands on either side of her head, caging her in, his body heat burning through the inches of air between them. “I didn’t say you made me fall apart,” he growled. “I said you made this mess harder to control.”
“Same thing,” she whispered, her chin tilting up despite the fear making her knees weak. “You think if I disappear, everything goes back to the way it was. Clean. Efficient. Bloody. Simple.”
His jaw clenched. “Nothing has been simple since Navarro put me in a cage as a teenager,” he said, voice rough. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Then why keep me?” Aria shot back, anger finally catching up to her terror. “Why burn cities for me? Why threaten the Syndicate for me? Why accuse your best friend of betrayal instead of looking at the system you built that made betrayal the only currency anyone understands?”
He stared at her like he’d never seen her before. The collar at her throat caught the light, a cruel, pretty circle. His gaze lingered there, then lifted to her eyes. What she saw in his made her breath stutter.
Damage. Fury. Something worse.
“Who do you trust?” he asked suddenly.
She blinked. “What?”
“Who do you trust.” His voice dropped, dangerous and low. “Me? Or them? Me? Or the Syndicate? Me? Or the ghosts whispering in your head about Navarro?”
Her chest tightened. “Damian—”
“Answer me,” he snapped, the words cracking like a whip. His fingers flexed against the glass beside her face, like he was stopping himself from touching her. “Because I’m done having my own circle look at me like I’m losing my mind. I’m done being questioned for the choices I make about you. I’m done wondering if the person I pulled out of a fire is secretly waiting for me to burn.”
His breath hitched at the end, just slightly. Just enough for her to hear the deeper truth: he was afraid. Truly, terrifyingly afraid.
She wanted to say his name gently. She wanted to say she trusted him. That she didn’t. That she couldn’t. That she already did too much. The words tangled in her throat like barbed wire.
“I don’t know anymore,” Aria whispered.
The silence that followed was heavier than any explosion.
Damian’s face went still. Completely, utterly still. His eyes darkened, something fragile and furious cracking deep inside. She watched the shift happen: the man who had held her through nightmares, who had thrown his body over hers when bombs fell, who had kissed her like a prayer—he stepped back, brick by brick, wall by wall, behind the mask of the Devil of Manhattan.
“You don’t know,” he repeated quietly, as if tasting the words and finding poison.
Aria’s eyes burned. “You called me a weakness in front of the board,” she said, voice shaking. “You chained me to a table to prove you weren’t compromised. You told me you’d never let me go, but you also told the entire Syndicate I’m an asset you control. I don’t know which version is real. I don’t know which Damian I’m supposed to trust.”
The confession hurt to say. It hurt more to watch it land.
For a heartbeat, something like pain flashed through his gaze, raw and unguarded. Then it hardened into something colder.
“That cracks something deep in him,” she thought distantly, the phrase almost a detached echo in her mind.
He stepped back from her, putting actual space where there had been only heat and fury before. His hands dropped from the glass. His voice, when he spoke, was quieter than she’d ever heard it.
“Then we have a problem,” Damian murmured. “Because I am the only thing standing between you and a hundred people who don’t care whether you’re alive when they tear Navarro’s legacy apart.”
Her throat worked. “I never asked you to stand there.”
He laughed once—a short, broken sound. “That’s the worst part, Aria. You didn’t have to ask.”
Their eyes locked, both of them breathing too fast, too shallow. Outside the glass wall, the tower moved like a machine—guards walking, phones ringing, orders being carried out—but inside the war room, everything had shifted.
Trust wasn’t broken in one clean snap.
It fractured in a hundred tiny places, leaving them both bleeding on the inside.